Jim_Carrey was perfect in The Truman Show. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000120
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jim-Carrey , https://www.jimcarreyonline.com
As the protagonist Truman eventually discovers that he has been trapped in a giant soundstage all of his life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_simulation_game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show#Development
The Truman Show (1998) | Truman Tests the Limits of His World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s0r7v-muQc Decades before the HBO version of WW, Truman_Burbank (TB) starts to notice that the constructed and orchestrated world around him is running on a series of preset loops.
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/nzyvam/jim_carreys_performance_in_truman_show
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Christof (The TS) Of course Ed H would eventually go onto star in WestWorld. It's unfortunate that Jim+Carrey wasn't in the HBO version of WW as well.
There was no sequel to The_Truman_Show. Perhaps someday, if there ever was something like an HBO version of The TS, the expanded story would show how the protagonist discovers and adapts to the outside world. Then eventually, noticing a series of synchronicity that goes beyond mere coincidence in the "real world". Perhaps even to imply that this world is like someones soundstage.
400 years before the first MATRIX movie in 1999, there was As_You_Like_It.
https://www.williamshakespeare.net/all-the-worlds-a-stage.jsp
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world's_a_stage#Text
https://www.thoughtco.com/all-the-worlds-a-stage-quote-2984636
Neo was awakened and rescued from a VR pod prison and learns to exist in the outside world, as well as existing in the evolving MATRIX. However, with Truman, he eventually escapes from a much larger pod, which is in the form of a giant soundstage. Since there hasn't been a sequel to The TS, there is no expanded story that might have revealed various loops of coincidence and synchronicity in the "real world".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) , https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8423983
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(special_relativity)
https://cms.cern/news/spooky-action-distance-between-heaviest-particles
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/proving-that-quantum-entanglement-is-real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
https://www.reddit.com/r/SimulationTheory
https://news.ok.ubc.ca/2025/10/30/ubco-study-debunks-the-idea-that-the-universe-is-a-computer-simulation While there is a good argument to state that the universe can't be a simulation based upon the current understnding of physics, a larger mystery persists.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1oka5u8/ubco_study_debunks_the_idea_that_the_universe_is/ While it seems impossible to run a full cosmic simulation, an Earth simulation is a different story.
https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-ruled-out-the-universe-being-a-simulation Various Earth simulations focusing on serendipity, coincidence and Synchronicity can reveal a lot of pertinent and peculiar things about this world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimEarth
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1835/simearth-the-living-planet/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobyGames
https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimEarth_-_The_Living_Planet_1990
https://www.reddit.com/r/awakened/comments/1bemsf3/we_100_live_in_a_simulation/
https://thedigitallabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=Jim+Carrey
