While some of the celebrity relationships from years past ultimately sound like lucky escapes, others make Us feel a little sad. And the romance between Renée Zellweger and Jim Carrey definitely falls into the second category — way back when, it seemed like these two were really in love and a great, quirky match. So, what went wrong? Let’s find out …
How it Began
Yes, of course it started as a movie set romance, or at least a movie set crush — and in this case, the set was 1999’s Me, Myself & Irene. The movie’s producer Bobby Farrelly told People in 2000 that Carrey, then 37, “flipped for her immediately” but Zellweger, then 30, took a little longer to warm up.
“I liked him, a lot, but you’re not going (to the set) for the love connection,” she told CNN in 2000. “When the picture wrapped, we’d spoken a couple of times on the phone and then all those rumors came out that I was dating him. I was so mad. I said, ‘No, it’s not true.’ And then I went home … and I went, ‘God, I do miss him.’”
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How Long it Lasted
This one was relatively short-lived, lasting just over a year before they split in 2000. Still, that does mean it spanned two millennia.
And buckle up for one of the cutest stories from the romance: Zellweger was about to shoot the first Bridget Jones movie but, ahead of filming, was getting to know her character by going undercover for an internship at a London publishing company. She later revealed at the Cannes Film Festival that her coworkers thought the new girl was really odd for having a framed picture of Carrey on her desk, only clocking who she really was months later.
How it Ended
In December 2000, publicists for both stars — before they could rely on Instagram to do these kinds of announcements for them — confirmed they had split. “As of a couple of weeks ago, Jim Carrey and Renée Zellweger are no longer in a relationship,” stated Zellweger’s office, adding that the pair wanted different things (in fact, rumors swirled that he wanted a wedding, and she didn’t.) Carrey’s rep added, “It’s a private matter.”
What They Said About Each Other
It sounds like these two were a great influence on each other. “I feel like it’s become much more important for me to have a life and have real human relationships and do my own laundry from time to time and do the menial things I lost touch with when I first became a so-called star,” Carrey told Entertainment Weekly in 2000. “And Renée’s taught me a lot of that too. She’s a very connected person. She thinks having a good time is renting a U-Haul and taking furniture to Texas. She’s real in that way and I absolutely love it.”
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Zellweger sounded seriously smitten too. “It was a very unexpected, wonderful thing,” she said in the same interview. “It was just a really natural thing to want to be around each other. And we didn’t see each other for a few months after we finished the picture — or really speak even — and I just noticed his absence significantly.”
What They Say Now
Twenty years after they split, it was clear that Zellweger still took up a lot of space in Carrey’s extremely active brain. He wrote in his book, Memoirs and Misinformation, that the actress was his “last great love” and expanded on this in a 2020 chat with Howard Stern on SiriusXM.
“She definitely was special to me, very special, I think she’s lovely,” he said. When Stern asked if Carrey felt regretful that he had “f***ed that up” and if she had been “the one that got away,” Carrey mused: “I don’t regret, I don’t have those things, but I do appreciate the people that have come through my life for the good that they gave me.”
Key Relationship Takeaways
Both stars have been through an awful lot since their turn of the century romance, with Zellweger now several Bridget Jones movies down and happily settled with presenter Ant Anstead following ill-fated relationships with Bradley Cooper and Jack White, and a brief marriage to country singer Kenny Chesney.
Carrey, meanwhile, dated Jenny McCarthy for five years, as well as tragically losing his on-off girlfriend Cathriona White to suicide in 2015. He’s currently single, and, while his time with Zellweger is now 25 years ago, it’s clear she made a major impression.
