Mark Wahlberg and Jim Carrey have been in the same room once. It was 1 December 2004, at Pier 60 on the Hudson, during the 14th Gotham Awards, and two photographers working that evening caught them together. Richard Corkery shot them for the New York Daily News, with Carrey holding the Celebrate New York tribute he had just collected for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One of Corkery’s captions has Wahlberg congratulating him. Evan Agostini photographed the pair again the same night, this time alongside the director David O. Russell.
That is the extent of it. They have never made a film together, or worked on anything else. They are not related, whatever the automated genealogy websites claim, and those sites apply the same distant-cousin template to hundreds of celebrity pairings without sourcing any of it.
What connects the two actors is a marriage, and it came almost ten years after that night in New York.
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What Wahlberg was doing in that room
He had a film in the running. I Heart Huckabees, directed by Russell, was up for best feature and lost to Sideways. Wahlberg played Tommy Corn, a firefighter who had given up on petroleum and would not stop talking about it, still one of the odder entries on his CV.
Carrey was there for the Michel Gondry picture, being handed a tribute for it.
Both men had spent that year working with a difficult director, and both were in the room because of it. One had come out of sketch comedy and the other out of hip hop. That night the same organisation had a nomination for one and an award for the other, which was not how either of them had been treated ten years earlier.
The marriage that connects them
Not long after the Gotham Awards, Carrey began a relationship with Jenny McCarthy. They were together until April 2010.
In August 2014 she married Donnie Wahlberg, Mark’s older brother and a founding member of New Kids on the Block. They reach twelve years next month, and they appeared together on the red carpet at the iHeartRadio Music Awards in March. McCarthy is Carrey’s former partner and Mark Wahlberg’s sister-in-law, and that is the whole of the family link.
Mark did not attend the wedding on 30 August 2014, which the tabloids read at the time as a snub aimed at the bride. The public record points somewhere duller. He posted congratulations that day. Donnie replied thanking Mark and his wife Rhea Durham for a video the family had recorded, and asked that a happy birthday be passed on to “my god daughter Ella”, who is Mark’s eldest daughter. Mark’s representatives told TMZ he had marked Ella’s birthday early because he was due on set on the day itself, 2 September. Six weeks before the wedding, McCarthy had already told Howard Stern the disapproval story was untrue, and described Mark and Rhea, whom she had met that summer, as “very lovely”.
Carrey walked away from the work
The Academy has never nominated Carrey for anything. He won Golden Globes for The Truman Show and Man on the Moon in consecutive years and neither performance got an Oscar nomination. BAFTA nominated him for Eternal Sunshine in early 2005, by which point plenty of people had assumed the Academy would finally follow. It did not. When CBS put the supposed Oscar obsession to him around that time, he said it had never been true.
He told Access Hollywood in 2022 that he was fairly serious about retiring and wanted to spend his time painting. Then he came back for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in 2024 and joked at the London premiere that he had bought a lot of things and needed the money. A few days later he clarified that he had meant he was resting between projects rather than stopping.
His last public appearance before this year was in November 2025, when he inducted Soundgarden into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He had booked the band as musical guest when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 1996.
Paris, and the claim that Carrey was not really there
On 26 February he walked onto the stage at L’Olympia in Paris to collect an Honorary Cรฉsar, the French academy’s career award. Robert Redford, Julia Roberts, David Fincher and Cate Blanchett have all had one.
He accepted in French. He had been working on the speech since the previous summer and had asked the organisers how to pronounce particular words. He spoke about his father, Percy.
Then the photographs went round. Carrey is 64 and had barely appeared in public for years, and viewers who had last seen him in a Sonic film decided the face did not match. A makeup artist called Alexis Stone posted pictures of a hyper-realistic prosthetic mask, and within days the speculation had hardened into a claim that a body double or a clone had accepted the award on his behalf.
Carrey’s publicist confirmed to TMZ that he had been there and had taken the award himself. Gregory Caulier, general delegate of the Cรฉsar Awards, told Variety the visit had been eight months in the planning and called it “a historic moment”. Snopes ran a fact check in March, and CNN covered it as well.
None of it involves Wahlberg. The TikTok clips that put his name next to the clone story are the Paris footage cut together with a lookalike joke that has been going round since about 2011.
Wahlberg never stopped
He is 55 and has not taken a year off. Balls Up came out in April to poor reviews. On 4 September he plays the mob hitman Gregory Scarpa in By Any Means for Paramount, opposite Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and the write-ups of the trailer have settled on the word unrecognisable.
The same word went round about Carrey in February. Nobody meant it kindly then.
Twenty-one years on from Pier 60, Wahlberg is back in cinemas in September. Carrey has nothing announced, which is roughly how he has said he wants it since 2022, though he said that once before and turned up anyway.
