Jamie Lee Curtis: ‘Women are mad as hell’
HOLLYWOOD royalty Jamie Lee Curtis has seen it all during her career, and as she tells Stellar, she’s optimistic about a post #metoo future.
Stellar
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IT has been nearly four decades since Jamie Lee Curtis landed on Australian shores to a welcome she has long since chosen — or at least tried — to forget.
In 1980, at the height of her run as the cinema’s reigning “scream queen” in a stretch of films that kicked off with the horror landmark Halloween two years prior, Curtis was cast to play Pamela, a foolhardy hitchhiker going it alone on the Nullarbor Plain, in the Ozploitation film Road Games.
“I just only recently remembered this,” Curtis tells Stellar.
“I arrived, and there was a kind of chill from the crew, like something was going on. I finally found out when I was sitting there and somebody said, ‘Yeah, there was an actress already doing your part — and they basically fired her to bring you on.’”
Without even realising it, Curtis had become an unwitting pawn in a messy tug of war that involved duelling film commissions, actors’ unions and, yes, competing forces out of Sydney and Melbourne.
Hungry for name-brand American talent, and perhaps suffering from a severe bout of cultural cringe, producers had shuffled Curtis into the production, knocking out actor Lisa Peers in the process.
Today, the 59-year-old actor can only look back on her lone movie-making stint Down Under with the resigned affect of someone who has pretty much seen, heard and done it all.
“We ended up out on the road, travelling between Perth and Adelaide, just a little band of filmmakers,” she says.
“It was a weird vibe. I remember feeling so bad and so sh*tty.”
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Curtis is certain to receive a far warmer welcome when she returns to the country next month to unveil Halloween, the eleventh (and potentially final) entry in the vaunted film series that reignited the slasher genre and made her a star.
In the years since she appeared as teenage babysitter Laurie Strode, famously cowering in a bedroom closet, waving a butcher knife and screaming in terror as sadistic killer Michael Myers stalked her, Curtis has found success across a wide cross-section of films — horror and otherwise; headlined successful television series; launched a side career as a children’s book author and promoted a range of humanitarian causes.
“I’ve been very lucky,” Curtis tells Stellar over the phone from Los Angeles. “I’ve had every version of it — I’ve had things hyped in a big way that have been wildly successful, and I’ve had things hyped in a huge way that were blocked.
I’ve had things that had little to no hype at all that became successful, and all the areas in-between. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody knows anything, which is why you have to go into it with integrity.”
Curtis refers to the industry into which she was born — she is the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh — as “show-off business” and despite her pedigree, she insists upon bringing a hearty sense of egalitarianism to every job.
“Just so you know,” she says, “I insist everyone wears name tags when I work with them, because it’s not fair they know my name and I don’t know theirs.
I am often the number-one person on a movie or a TV show — the person at the top of the call sheet. And I think that carries with it a big responsibility in terms of who I emulate.
If you asked me who I’d most want to be like in this industry? George Clooney. He is a generous man, he is incredibly positive. He is fun to work with and I think that even he pinches himself when he realises he has this life.”
Curtis certainly does. Even now, despite the fact she would have frequented them in her youth, “Every time I drive onto a movie lot, I pinch myself.
I can’t believe I get to do this work. I think I got it from my mother, this understanding how rare it is to be able to do this job.”
Curtis made the first Halloween when she was 19 years old. She was not director John Carpenter’s first choice for the role, but when he learnt she was the daughter of Psycho star Leigh — whose Marion Crane may well be the most famous murder victim in film history — he welcomed the kismet.
Stepping back into the role of Laurie Strode four decades later (the 2018 iteration of Halloween is intended as a direct sequel to the 1978 classic, with audiences asked to disregard every other follow-up and reboot in-between) presented Curtis with something of a dilemma: how to make audiences forget that they are watching, well, Jamie Lee Curtis.
The answer came in the form of an unglamorous wig that leaves her looking like punk icon Patti Smith — or, at the very least, an art class teacher in need of a shower and a hug.
“The first time you see me in the movie,” she tells Stellar, “I don’t look like Jamie Lee Curtis. Because Jamie Lee Curtis now exists in a very big, iconic way. That’s why we put me in a wig.”
When Curtis speaks of herself in the third person, she manages not to sound haughty but rather candid in explaining the influence that comes with an instantly recognisable public profile.
It’s also the main reason that Curtis has never appeared in one of the mockumentary films written and directed by her husband Christopher Guest, who she married in 1984. (The couple have two adopted children: Annie, 31, and Thomas, 22.)
“Most of the people in his movies have become famous — they weren’t famous when they began working with him,” she says. “I am too famous. Plus, I don’t improvise. All of the dialogue in his movies is improvised — it’s a very specific skill and I don’t have it at all.”
It may be one of the few talents she lacks — aside from her work in film and television, Curtis has dabbled in inventing (she holds the patent for a nappy with a pocket that holds wipes), she blogs, tries her hand at photography and is a self-proclaimed queen of organisation.
“I was [Japanese organising consultant] Marie Kondo before Marie Kondo even existed,” Curtis quips. “I have always been compartmentalised — I am prepared.
If you were at my house right now and said, ‘OK, bring me your second grade report card,’ I could go down my stairs, open my file and be back upstairs with it in 25 seconds.”
Her side hustle as a children’s book author, meanwhile, has only blossomed since she first entered the market in 1993.
“Books are just the best thing,” says Curtis. “They are what I think about, they are how I think about the world. They’re music, they’re rhythm.”
Earlier this month, she released her 13th title, Me Myselfie & I: A Cautionary Tale.
“It’s about a mother who gets a cell phone for her birthday from her kids — and she goes crazy taking selfies, so the kids have to shut her down. It’s about our obsession with self-documentation.”
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After Curtis returned home from South Carolina from the set of Halloween earlier this year, she found herself sitting down for a writing project of an entirely new kind. “I came back with full mojo, rejuvenated about the movie-making process,” she says.
“Nobody was getting paid much and we worked our arses off… but I forgot how fun it is. And I ended up writing a screenplay, which is something I’ve never done and never thought I would do.
“I thought, ‘F*ck yes! I get it!’ I see why people do this… because this is who I am. Writing affords you the opportunity to say what you mean. I’ve been an interpreter of others’ ideas for a very long time, and I have to take responsibility for those ideas — to invest and digest and wear them like a skin.”
She points to Mother’s Boys, an all-but-forgotten thriller from 1994 in which she plays a woman who abandons her husband and sons — only to return three years later, harassing and stalking them as she begs for reunification.
“That movie is a great example: I had to wear that woman for a long time — and I didn’t agree with any of the things she said.”
As for a memoir, don’t hold your breath. “The only good memoirs tell the truth,” Curtis says, “and that means betraying confidences and intimacies. I’ve had it done to me and it’s been upsetting. So I don’t believe I would ever do so.”
Mother’s Boys was a flop, but the film that hit cinemas mere weeks later would turn out to be the biggest hit in Curtis’s canon.
“True Lies was a monster,” she says of James Cameron’s fizzy action blockbuster in which she co-starred with Arnold Schwarzenegger, reinforced the comedic chops she had revealed in films such as 1983’s Trading Places and 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda and showcased her outrageously toned body in a scorching striptease for the books.
“It was such a great, transformative part to play — literally and figuratively. It was deeply emotional, wickedly funny and gorgeous to look at.
There are sequences in that film that are just landmarks, and I can’t believe I got to be in it.”
Her memory of the film may be slightly marred, however — earlier this year, Curtis wrote an opinion piece in which she discussed the “new, horrific reality” that the #MeToo movement exposed, pointing to actor Eliza Dushku’s claim that a stunt coordinator on the True Lies set sexually molested her during filming. (Dushku, who played Curtis’s daughter in True Lies, was 12 at the time of filming.)
“I’m older and therefore clearly have some stories to tell,” Curtis says. “But my stories are private and not on that level of malevolence; I certainly didn’t have anyone sexually assault me.
“[But] it’s everywhere — it feels like a big wave. Women are mad as hell, and they aren’t going to take it anymore.”
As for Curtis, she remains defiantly, contagiously upbeat about what the future holds — it is, she reckons, pretty much in her DNA.
“I was a cheerleader in high school,” she notes. “And cheerleaders are really only there when your team is losing, to bring energy and support. I’ve always taken that role in whatever work I do.”
So when she turns 60 in November, Curtis will undoubtedly spend the day serving as her biggest champion, happily embracing the dawn of a new decade.
And she already has a sense of how the day might unfold: “I believe we will be having breakfast at my house. I believe we will be wearing PJs… I like to not worry about what I wear. And I believe everybody will be gone by 11.
Which, to me, is the perfect party: show up at nine, leave by 11. Thank you for your nice wishes. Now get the f*ck out.”
Halloween is in cinemas nationally from Thursday, October 25.
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Originally published as Jamie Lee Curtis: ‘Women are mad as hell’
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