Twenty years after they dated, Jim Carrey still has very fond memories of his short-lived romance with Renée Zellweger.
In an interview on The Howard Stern Show on SiriusXM on Tuesday, Stern asked the actor about his semi-fictional book, Memoirs and Misinformation based on his real life, and how sincere he was in writing that Zellweger was “his last great love.”
“She definitely was special to me, very special, I think she’s lovely,” Carrey confirmed. Stern added, “You have poetic license because it’s fiction, but you’re saying, ‘Man, the great love of my life was Renee Zellweger’ and that was quite some time ago, and it was almost like you were saying I shouldn’t have fucked that up. That was the one, whatever happened, the one that got away.”
Carrey replied, “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.” The pair first met when they costarred in the 1999 film Me, Myself & Irene and dated for a year before breaking up in 2000.
According to the film’s director, Bobby Farrelly, Carrey “flipped for her immediately” on set, but Zellweger was slightly more hesitant. She told CNN at the time, “I liked him, a lot, but you’re not going (to the set) for the love connection…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.’”
The actress later told Entertainment Weekly that their relationship “was a very unexpected, wonderful thing.” In the same interview, Carrey noted that Zellweger helped keep him grounded, saying, “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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