Despite multiple safety precautions, Carrey said that he did, in fact, almost drown while filming the scene in a tank. “I was wearing wool clothing—a big wool sweater, wool pants, and shoes—and they had jet engines blowing on me, and they had these giant wave machines that were creating gale-force waves. I don’t know if you can see it in the film, but they’ve got divers under the water, and I’m actually giving the signal of like, ‘I’m in trouble,’ which was a clenched fist. They just saw it as acting. I went under, I had no breath left, and I was drowning. I was under the water at the bottom of the pool, and with the last breath, with the last hint of consciousness, I just spun and made a couple of gigantic strokes toward the back of the storm and came up outside the storm gasping for air and exhausted. I just barely made it to the edge of the wall where the sky is, and hung on the edge of the wall gasping for air, looking back at the storm that was raging still, and it went on for another minute and then slowly shut down. They didn’t know where I was, and then they finally saw me and came over. I almost died. That was the real deal.”
....
“Did I just sign off to this whole thing . . . this whole idea of being the crowd-pleasing guy? Did I just sign out? I think I did, to a certain extent,” he said. Since that moment, “I still have done really interesting stuff and made choices I thought were provocative. But I do it on my own terms . . . It turned into an, ‘I love you, but I can’t be what you want me to be, and I’m going through the door . . . I’m bitter that you used me . . . that I was everybody’s show but my own, and I was the only one that was left out of the joke. But I’m going to live my life now.’”
