In an interview with Vulture, the actor said the first day of makeup took eight hours. He nearly quit and suffered from panic attacks after having to wear painful green contacts, makeup that made him breathe through his mouth the whole time, and a full body suit made of itchy yak hair. But before he walked away, producer Brian Grazer hired the founder of SEAL Team Six to help Carrey suck it up.

“Richard Marcinko was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special-ops people how to endure torture. He gave me a litany of things that I could do when I began to spiral. Like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can. Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm. Eat everything in sight. Changing patterns in the room,” Carrey told Vulture in the interview, which was published on Friday.

“If there’s a TV on when you start to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on. Smoke cigarettes as much as possible. There are pictures of me as the Grinch sitting in a director’s chair with a long cigarette holder. I had to have the holder, because the yak hair would catch on fire if it got too close,” he added.

Carrey said he later learned that Marcinko was the founding officer of SEAL Team Six, the famed special-operations unit. Marcinko passed away at age 81 in December 2021.

Director Ron Howard and Grazer, who were also part of the Vulture interview, recalled Carrey struggling onset because of his Grinch costume.

Howard said the pain he endured was less physical than mental as the makeup was “destroying” Carrey’s skin. It was determined by medical professionals that Carrey couldn’t work in the makeup five days in a row, so he would have a day off or only be off-camera feeding dialogue on Wednesdays, he added.

“Jim started having panic attacks. I would see him lying down on the floor in between setups with a brown paper bag. Literally on the floor. He was miserable,” Howard said.

Carrey even offered to return his entire $20 million paycheck, with interest, Grazer said. But, instead Grazer found Marcinko. 

“I said, ‘Listen, you can quit on Monday, but just spend time with this guy on the weekend,’” Grazer said.

“If you live near a data center that’s being powered by these gas turbines, you simply cannot imagine living there,” she said. You can “hear the noise” in your home, added Schlossberg—who got into the fight a decade ago while trying, unsuccessfully, to stop Facebook from putting a data center next to her property. 

Virginia has long been the biggest data center hub of not just the country but the world, with northern Virginia alone hosting 13% of the globe’s data centers in 2023, according to a government report. And for just as long, residents have been locked into battles over what that footprint means for their communities.

Now, Schlossberg is leading a Virginia nonprofit group, Save Prince William County, to fight against the encroachment of even more data centers to power the AI boom. Data center power demand is expected to rise five-fold over the next decade, Deloitteprojects; reaching 176 gigawatts, the same amount as Australia and the United Kingdom’s entire power grids combined.

AI infrastructure builders, and the tech giants that plan to rely on the future data centers, argue that they’re essential to unlocking AI’s economic benefits. But in some of the states slated to house these projects, many of them politically purple-ish or even red—Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania—voters are revolting, often successfully keeping them out of their neighborhoods. Indeed, in elections held last month, opposition to data centers helped tip elections in Democrats’ favor in Virginia and Republican-leaning Georgia.

“Folks realize they’re getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, an environmental advocacy coalition based in Indiana. “It’s not just something they hear on Fox News or MSNBC anymore. It’s happening in their own backyard.”

Big Tech companies, Olson added, are showing up at local planning commissions and drainage boards asking for “huge giveaways”— tax abatements, zoning variances, special exceptions —”all to build a $3 billion box that creates maybe 30 jobs.”

“So they’re like, what’s in it for us?” Olson asked. 

Upcoming political battles

The first signs of what could be a broader political reckoning are appearing at the county level. In Prince William County—home to the fight over a proposed 2,000-acre “Digital Gateway” development near the Manassas battlefield—data centers have already forced recalls, resignations, and primary defeats of elected officials, Schlossberg said. The issue has become so radioactive that candidates in both parties now treat opposition to data-center expansion as a prerequisite for running, she added.

“It’s never been red versus blue,” Schlossberg said. “It’s people who live here versus people who want to industrialize where we live.”

That county could be a canary in the coalmine for what comes next, as Democrats and Republicans approach critical midterm congressional elections in 2026. Across key swing states, activists say the next wave of AI-driven projects will collide with a public that is far more organized and hostile than it was even two years ago. 

That tension is beginning to creep into politics. In Indiana, legislators publicly tout the state’s new data-center incentives while privately warning counties that the projects are not without tradeoffs. In Virginia, candidates now get asked—at libraries, at farmer’s markets, even at high school football games—whether they would support a temporary moratorium.

Olson said his group has been “buried” in calls from Hoosiers in every corner of the state—red, blue, rural, suburban—asking for help deciphering tax abatements and utility filings. “I’ve worked on energy issues for decades,” he said. “I have never seen anything like the scale of anger over this.”

When voters see those consequences firsthand, Olson said, they stop caring about geopolitical talking points. “You can tell people this is about beating China,” he said. But when their bill goes up, and their kids are sleeping in basements with headphones on because of the noise, they’re not thinking about China. 

At the heart of the backlash is a basic economic question that data-center backers haven’t convincingly answered: Why should the public subsidize infrastructure that serves some of the world’s richest companies?

Indiana’s first filing under its new “80/20” law—touted as a safeguard to make data centers pay most of the costs—still leaves ratepayers actually footing nearly 40% of the bill, Olson said. The organization he runs, Citizens Action Coalition, did an analysis that revealed that Hoosier households paid 17.5% more in utility bills in 2025 than the previous year. In Virginia, residents fear they will ultimately finance the transmission lines and new generation needed to serve hyperscale facilities.

“The public utility model was always a social contract,” Schlossberg said. “The data-center industry blew that up.”

In many ways, the backlash boils down to a trust problem. Residents don’t trust Big Tech, seeing the hyperscalers as being like “robber barons at the turn of the century” but with unprecedented demands for land, water, and power. Olson pointed to NDAs, closed-door negotiations, and local officials dining with tech consultants as signs that decisions are being made over communities’ heads and without local voters’ input. Layered onto that is a broader skepticism of AI itself: Many voters aren’t convinced they should remake their towns for what still feels like an unproven or overhyped technology.

“It’s like the Gilded Age, part two,” Olson said. “Only bigger.”