Jim Carrey recently chatted with Entertainment Tonight and opened up about not only his craft, but how he uses it to cope personally. The actor was honored this weekend with the Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy.

“I get to go from playing the nicest person in the world to the smartest person in the world who is completely not the nicest person in the world,” he explained of the job. “So it’s nice, it’s very diverse!”

“It’s unfathomable to me that life somehow ended up in this direction and at this place of, you know, being able to do something — alchemize our pain and turn it into something beautiful and be recognized as well for it is an incredible thing,” he added. “But, you know, right now my job has always been, I thought, to free people from concern and that is part of the job of a comedian, an artist, but it’s also his job to focus on things that are problematic, you know? At times of trouble.”