Jim Carrey's "We're Nothing" Rant

About

Jim Carrey's "We're Nothing" Rant refers to a viral video of an interview with comedic actor Jim Carrey and E! News. In the video, Carrey refuses to answer interview questions and instead goes on an existential rant, stating that "nothing matters" and that human beings "are nothing."

Origin

On September 9th, 2017, E! News tweeted^[1] a video interview with Jim Carrey at the Harper's Bazaar ICONS event for New York Fashion Week with the caption "Well, you definitely can't say that Jim Carrey gives a boring interview: 'There is no me. There's just things happening.'" In the video, Carrey says of the event, "I wanted to find the most meaningless thing I could come to and join." The post (shown below) received more than 42,000 retweets and 111,000 likes in nine days.

Spread

That night, E! posted the video on their YouTube ^[4] channel, where it received more than 3.5 million views.

The following day, Redditor ^[2] duewhaa posted the video in the subreddit /r/cringe. The post received more than 2,100 points (93% upvoted) and 400 comments in eight days. Additionally, Redditor^[3] p4rim posted the video in the /r/videos subreddit, receiving more than 17,000 points (86% upvoted) and 2,700 comments.

Several news outlets covered the video, including Uproxx,^[5] BuzzFeed]

Following the release of the video, people on Twitter had a mixed reaction to the video (examples below). Some expressed concern for Carrey, saying that his behavior resembled that of someone suffering depression. Others agreed with his points and enjoyed his candor.

On September 11th, during an interview with The Wrap.^[7] Carrey explained what he meant, going deeper into his personal philosophy and beliefs (video below).

"As an actor you play characters, and if you go deep enough into those characters, you realize your own character is pretty thin to begin with. You suddenly have this separation and go, “Who’s Jim Carrey? Oh, he doesn’t exist actually. There’s just a relative manifestation of consciousness appearing, and someone gave him a name, a religion, a nationality, and he clustered those together into something that’s supposed to be a personality, and it doesn’t actually exist. None of that stuff, if you drill down, is real."

Search Interest

External References