Whether it's her return to her horror roots in Halloween Ends or her buzzy performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once, freedom is what the actor is after.
"DUDE!" a barefoot Jamie Lee Curtis exclaimed among the recycling bins. Only a minute had passed since we met on the sidewalk outside her home but Curtis was already thrusting her hands toward mine, sizing me up as a kindred spirit — or, at the very least, someone she could tell a funny pet-owner story to.
"I'm embarrassed," said the 63-year-old actor "but I'm going to tell you anyway."
Curtis was about to depart on a lengthy trip to promote Halloween Ends, her final film in the long-running horror franchise, while also doing awards-season press for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the indie hit she co-starred in this past March, and the supersized itinerary had her worried: What would all those weeks away mean for her rescue dog, a sweet-natured terrier-poodle named Runi?
If you have ever packed a suitcase and watched your dog's tail droop, you can understand why the day before our interview, Curtis had gone to such great lengths to conceal her upcoming trip.
"It really got crazy," she said. "I needed to pack the big hanging bags, so I put Runi in his crate in my bedroom, I turned on the air conditioning, I turned on Boston — loud — and shut the door so he wouldn't hear the zipping of the suitcases in the other room." She paused for effect: "That's how COMPLETELY obsessed I was!"
Though it runs afoul of New York Times style guidelines, Jamie Lee Curtis has a tendency to express herself in capital letters. A tweet she posted earlier this month commanded, "YOU ARE NOT CONTENT! YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING!" and her captions on Instagram run the gamut from "OH COME ON" (over a heartwarming reunion between Everything Everywhere All at Once actor Ke Huy Quan and his Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom co-star Harrison Ford), "A LIFE OF SERVICE" (over a photo of the departed Queen Elizabeth) and "YUM for my TUM!" (a cheeseburger). In person, Curtis is forceful and passionate in a way that endears, kind of like the human manifestation of Elaine's shove from Seinfeld.
"I can be a really passive communicator, so I admire her," said Daniel Scheinert, who co-directed Everything Everywhere All at Once with Daniel Kwan. "But she hates when Dan says he's still intimidated by her. She's like, 'Why? I'm so nice!' And it's like, 'We know, but you're still Jamie Lee Curtis!' "
Curtis has been a star for 44 years, but she wields that power in a bracing way: Where other actors can be cagey, she is forthright, whether the topic is ageing (she stopped colouring her grey hair years ago), addiction (Curtis speaks openly about a decade-long Vicodin addiction she kicked in 1999), or plastic surgery (after experimenting with Botox and liposuction, she has since decried cosmetic procedures). With her gift for unspooling anecdotes and her ability to forge an immediate, let-me-tell-you-something-real-about-me connection with the person in front of her, she could have been a formidable politician, or at least played one in some Hunger Games spinoff.
As the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis is Hollywood royalty, and since her husband Christopher Guest hails from a British family with peerage, that technically makes her a baroness, though you'd never catch her using the title. (Besides, Guest's other titles — he directed Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show — are much more impressive.)
But underneath the stardom, the lineage and the intensity with which she sometimes speaks, she is a softy at heart, Curtis told me. "My entire skill as an artist is that I have incredible sensory responses," said Curtis, who kept stopping her stories to show off the goose bumps on her forearms. (At one point, she summoned goose bumps just from telling me how often she gets them.) Or, to put it another way: "I feel all the feels, all the time," she said.
By now, she had walked me into her kitchen, a marble palace with pops of colour that included goldenrod pillows in the breakfast nook, a copper lamp hanging above the kitchen table, a vase of slow-to-wake pink tulips, and a framed orange poster that said, "NOTE TO SELF: BE KIND, BE KIND; BE KIND." She had baked a lemon cake for us to nosh on, and though she insisted she wasn't showing off — "I baked because I was hungry" — she took pride in her skills as a homemaker.
"I'm a hausfrau," she said, using her children's ages to calculate that she had lived in this Santa Monica home for 31 years. In a city where the idle rich tend to flip houses like pancakes, that kind of tenure is unusual, though Curtis just shrugged: "I'm married to my first husband, you know what I mean?"
Though her parents divorced when she was just 3, and though her mother was married four times and her father six, their track record has not dimmed Curtis's faith in the sanctity of marriage: The concept of commitment thrills her. At one point, when I told her I was dating someone, Curtis slipped a ring off her finger and gave it to me: "It's that easy. COME ON!"
Both of her daughters' weddings were held in the house's oak-shaded backyard — the most recent in May, when Curtis officiated her daughter Ruby's cosplay-themed nuptials and gamely dressed up as a sorceress from the video game World of Warcraft. After the wedding, Curtis posted pictures of the happy couple to Instagram, alongside a photo of her brandishing the sort of blade that her horror-movie nemesis Michael Myers would eagerly pull from its knife block.
"YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP!" she wrote. "The ONLY thing left over at the end of this entire BEAUTIFUL wedding, after everything was taken away was this f-ing BUTCHER KNIFE they cut the tiramisu wedding cake with!"
Under that, she posted the release date for Halloween Ends and two knife emoji. "I am a weapon of mass promotion," she told me with a grin.
Curtis never meant to be the face of horror. She hates to be scared, doesn't like to watch violent movies, and for all of her strongly held opinions, she tries never to argue. "My husband and I have probably had two or three fights in 38 years," she said. "I like things nice and fragrant and quiet. I like a nice soft dog, you know what I mean?" (Runi, now underfoot, appeared to concur.)
But when a 19-year-old Curtis was cast as the menaced babysitter Laurie Strode in John Carpenter's 1978 classic Halloween, a path was slashed straight through the centre of her career. This was a genre that she would return to again and again, even as she made detours into drama (Forever Young, My Girl), action (True Lies), and comedy (Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, Freaky Friday).
In early films like The Fog and Prom Night, she extended her horror-movie reputation; later, in Ryan Murphy's campy series Scream Queens, she parodied it. Along the way, she reprised Laurie several more times, though her attempt to put a definitive end to the series with 1998's Halloween H20 fell apart due to producer interference. "There was a contractual inability to really end it," said Curtis, who still agreed to star if she could die at the beginning of its 2002 sequel, Halloween: Resurrection, and collect a big payday for her 10-minute cameo.
Curtis thought she was done with Halloween after that, but a good horror franchise never lets its heroine escape that easily. In 2017, after a Rob Zombie-helmed take on Halloween had petered out, director David Gordon Green pitched Curtis on a return to the series that would wipe away every movie made after the 1978 original. This time, Laurie was a hard-drinking, PTSD-stricken survivor who had spent decades preparing for a rematch with the villain that terrorised her so long ago. Curtis agreed to come on board, and the back-to-basics 2018 film broke box-office records for a slasher, grossing over US$255 million worldwide.
That movie was made pure, she said, with no intention of spinning things into a trilogy. But on the eve of its release, Green sat Curtis down and pitched her two sequels that would finally allow Curtis to exit on her own terms. The following entry, Halloween Kills, from last year, is about the town's collective response to Michael Myers and how mob violence can arise from their collective fears. And the third film, Halloween Ends, subverts expectations by playing more like a tragic drama than a slasher movie: Even before her final, inevitable clash with Michael, Laurie has to put in the work to heal her long-held wounds.
Curtis was eager to dive into all that additional context. "I'm sure you saw that meme of me saying the word 'trauma' over and over again," she said, referring to an internet supercut where she repeatedly told journalists that, actually, the new Halloween trilogy was all about "TROWMA," a word she pronounced with theatrical bombast. "But do you want to know where that came from?" Curtis asked. She pointed me toward a Comic-Con appearance she made in 2018, when an audience member said he managed to survive a home invasion by asking himself what Laurie would do in that situation. "I'm here today because of the way that you portrayed Laurie Strode," he told Curtis. "I'm a victor today instead of a victim."
Check her arm. Goose bumps. "I don't like these movies, but it's about something much bigger than me," she said. "And I'm not trying to paint this as higher art than it is, but something happens to people when they watch it, and then I get that from them. It's wacky and really emotional."
This past spring, Curtis read some marketing copy for Halloween Ends that stated, "Horror lets us confront what we can't control," an idea that further resonated for a woman who likes everything to be neat, organised and just-so. "You'll probably see me saying it on national television a couple times," Curtis said. "I'll go off the TROWMA." Still, it doesn't hurt if you can confront horror and control it: When Curtis watched Halloween Ends for the first time in a private theatre at Creative Artists Agency, her seat came with a volume toggle that let her mute the movie when things got too visceral. "It was muted for easily half the movie, if not two-thirds," she said. "I muted it so quickly, it would make your head spin around like The Exorcist."
But amid all that mayhem, she felt a certain kind of peace in the film's bloody resolution. Making the movie had been incredibly emotional, but she decided that everything Laurie had been through, and everything Curtis had endured alongside her, had all been worth it in the end.
"They can go off and make however many Halloween movies they want to make now and create a whole new narrative," Curtis said. "But our four movies can be played as a perfect quad — these three movies and 1978 — and I feel very good about the completion of that."
"You're going to die," Curtis said as she ushered me into the house next door. "You're going to DIE. You're GOING to die."
It seemed like the set-up for another horror movie, but Curtis had brought me there to bear witness to something even more exciting: a good bargain. In the living room of the house next door, which Curtis bought and turned into the headquarters for her production company, were six showpiece Pollock chairs. If you wanted to buy that many Pollocks from Design Within Reach, where the chair is described as "the epitome of midcentury sophistication," it would run you well over US$18,000 ($32,000), but Curtis managed to snag them all — vintage, from 1972 — for no more than US$250 ($450) a chair.
"How about that?" she said, with the enthusiasm of a quarterback psyching up his teammate. "Come on! Come on! COME ON!"
She had discovered the chairs in the abandoned, cubicle-strewn Countrywide Savings and Loan in Simi Valley where most of Everything Everywhere All at Once was shot in early 2020. Now, more than two years later, the movie has proved to be a windfall in many other ways: Not only is it the highest-grossing film ever distributed by the studio A24, it is considered an Oscar contender across the board, with buzz that extends to Curtis's showy supporting performance.
In Everything Everywhere, Curtis plays the by-the-book IRS inspector Deirdre, who is auditing our heroine Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) just as this everyday woman learns she is the last hope of a multiverse in crisis. Deirdre is the pitiless lord of her bureaucratic domain, but Curtis looked at this lonely character with sympathy. "When people want love and don't get love, it hardens you," Curtis said. "I know a lot of women who go home alone, and it breaks my heart — I know how soft they are, I know how much they long for connection and affection and contact with another human being."
It would have been easy to keep Deirdre as a cartoonish antagonist for the entirety of the film, but later in Everything Everywhere, when Deirdre and Evelyn sit outside the latter's laundromat, they share an unexpected, humanising moment of commiseration. (We even catch a glimpse of a universe where the two women are paired romantically, though it comes with a notable caveat: They must caress each other with floppy hot-dog fingers.) The lesson of the movie is that no one is just one thing — neither put-upon Evelyn nor obstinate Deirdre — and if you caught any of them in another context, or even another universe, you might realise that all those different "one things" they initially appeared to be can actually add up to everything.
Curtis had a lot of input into Deirdre's distinctive look, which includes red rectangular eyeglasses, a mustard turtleneck and a potbelly that many assumed to be a prosthetic but is actually the actor's own. Showcasing that figure onscreen was the natural result of her let-it-all-hang-out mantra.
"I said I would like to not be sucking my stomach in for the entire movie, because I'm a 64-year-old woman," Curtis told me, slapping her belly with panache. "All I'm interested in is freedom as a performer, and I don't get that opportunity very often. But the times I've been able to be free, I'm on fire."
And after her recent successes, a new sort of freedom has presented itself. Curtis has always struggled to balance her aspirations as an actor with the guilt she feels when she is away from her family. Even the months she spent shooting True Lies, which gave the actor one of her signature roles, still weighs on Curtis because her oldest daughter was then so young. "Obviously I had a lot of help, but I left, and it remains a real problem for me," she said.
For years afterward, she made commercials for the likes of T-Mobile, L'eggs and Hitachi to stay employed and in Los Angeles. Hertz Rent-a-Car advertisements with O.J. Simpson? Sure! Six years of Activia ads, selling a probiotic yogurt that helps you poop? Why not! Some people may have scoffed, but it kept Curtis where she wanted to be. Now, though, her considerations have changed.
"Both my kids are grown and out — they both have their own lives, they're both married," she said. "And I have kind of looked at Chris and said, 'Okay, I'm going to go now. I'm going to do my work.' "
That work has so far encompassed a production company, Comet Pictures, which is developing a movie about the 2018 Paradise, California, fire and a series based on Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels; a charity organisation, My Hand in Yours, which sells crafted items and donates its proceeds to Children's Hospital Los Angeles; and a full slate of movie projects that has taken her far outside her comfort zone, including Knives Out, which filmed in Boston, the new Halloween movies, which were shot in Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia; and the upcoming sci-fi film Borderlands, a Budapest-set production co-starring Cate Blanchett.
"I'm now in this beautiful new wave of my work, which is transformative," Curtis said.
Just don't tell Runi. On my way out, I made the mistake of saying "I'll miss you" to the dog, as his owner must have countless times before. "Don't even!" Curtis said, wholly sensitive to the stakes of the situation. "He's gonna cry."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Ryan Pfluger
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
