Jamie Lee Curtis Is Done Compromising – And She’s Not Slowing Down

Of late, Jamie Lee Curtis has radically shaken up her career. And with a powerful performance in The Last Showgirl, she tells us why she’s done with compromising

Jamie Lee Curtis does not like a mood board. This is what Empire discovered on our photoshoot: that trying to bend Jamie Lee Curtis into a predetermined plan is the quickest way to make her grumpy. “I was so grumpy!” she says a couple of days later over Zoom, laughing. She’d seen our suggested looks and she hated the poses, hated the clothes. She wanted to wear a Loewe blouse she saw Dan Levy wear on a red carpet, with a collar swept up like it was caught in the wind – the chicest thing she had ever seen – but most of all, she just wanted to be herself. Obviously, Empire went along with it – we’re not monsters. “As soon as we started shooting, I was the happiest person because I was free,” she says. “I was on fire! I was shaking because I felt that I had existed, and that I wasn’t trying to pretend to be anybody.”

This is a new era for Curtis. Having broken out in 1978 with John Carpenter’s Halloween, her career has spanned genres: she went from scream queen to comedy – earning BAFTA nominations for Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda, winning the former – before dangling below a helicopter in James Cameron’s explosive True Lies. But now she is finally getting to do what she always wanted to do – playing characters that are varied, complex, and real. In The Last Showgirl she plays Annette, a veteran Las Vegas cocktail waitress and best friend to Pamela Anderson’s Shelly, battling a gambling addiction and diminishing hours. In The Bear she stressed everyone out as Donna Berzatto, Carmy’s emotionally volatile mother, overwhelmed in the kitchen. And then there was IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, which won her an Academy Award.

Clearly, magic happens if you let Jamie Lee Curtis do what she wants to do. “I blew up the mood boards because I’m not who you think I am,” she says, defiant. “That’s probably the biggest crux of it: I’m not who you think I am. Let me show you. I am way more than you think I am.”

So…who are you?

I’m an ideas person, and I always have been. One of my first emails was ideachick@AOL. I write books for children. I’ve invented things. I have patents. That’s who I am and how my brain works. And when I turned 60, I really hit that moment of thinking that I was going to die soon. I looked at the actuarial table, and I was like, “Whoa! Shit!” And I realised that the only tragedy about my eventual death – because I’ve had a gorgeous life – is the creativity that I’ve kept inside me that I never brought out. And so at 60, I kind of flipped my switch and realised, if not now, when? If not me, who? I better get on it.

I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. It’s an extraordinary moment for me.

You’re 66 now. What have you put in motion in those six years?

I started to write a screenplay. I started to buy options for books. I went to Jason Blum [CEO of Blumhouse Productions] with a screenplay that I had written to direct, and said, “Can I have a deal with you? I'm making other movies with you. I have other ideas.” I brought him Scarpetta, a TV series that stars Nicole Kidman based on the Patricia Cornwell books about a medical examiner. I brought him The Lost Bus, which is Paul Greengrass directing a Brad Ingelsby screenplay starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, about the town of Paradise that was decimated in 2018 during the largest wildfire in California history. I brought him two other projects that we’re working on. Jason Blum gave me a deal because I’m hungry for this. I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I’ve been writing scripts since I was first an actor. It’s an extraordinary moment for me.

There’s been a change recently in the roles you’re taking on – they’re weirder, darker, deeper. When did that happen?

Halloween (1978) to me is my first character work, and then my last character work for a long time, until I reclaimed it. After The Fog, I had TV shows, my personality came out. From then on, the most detailed character work was, “What size jeans do you wear?” They just sort of ran Jamie through different spin cycles. That changed, really, with Laurie Strode [in the David Gordon Green-directed Halloween] in 2018 because that woman was specific and curated. It was about something bigger than just ‘Laurie Strode was now 40 years older’. A lot of shit had happened to her. So I think that freed me, because right after that came Knives Out. Going back to that character work was important to me – hiding myself, and letting the character actually do the work.

When you say Laurie Strode was your first character work, what do you mean?

If you think back to when I was 19, I was fly. I was a bit of a party girl. I could throw it down. And the three parts that were available in Halloween were: the flirty, promiscuous cheerleader – I was a cheerleader in high school! I knew what that girl was; then there was the snarky, smart-alec best friend… I mean, (points at self) I am your snarky best friend!; or Laurie Strode – quiet, introspective, virginal, not experienced, innocent, intellectual dreamer. But it was written on the page. So when I auditioned for that part, John Carpenter had never met Jamie. John Carpenter didn’t know me. I walked in as Laurie Strode and got the part. It’s always amused me because now you know me, you would have passed me as any one of those other parts, but not Laurie Strode. I actually dressed that character: the costume person and I went to Kmart and bought her back-to-school clothes. Everything had to match: the skirt, the top, the sweater. And so that was, to me, the first building of a movie character that was not Jamie.

With Annette in The Last Showgirl, how much of her was on the page and how much did you build?

There was no question to me who Annette was. I knew her backstory, I knew everything about her – it was evident in the writing. [But] the creation of what characters look like is, for me, a really wonderful part of it. The math adds up that Annette has been hustling in Vegas for 40 years. That means she’s been in the sun for 40 years, the way we used to be in the sun. I’m from Southern California – I’m an olive-complected Hungarian Jewess, I tan like a cocoa bean. I mean, now I’m an old white woman who tries to stay out of the sun, but back in the day I was sitting there with reflectors and Orange Gelée Bain de Soleil all over me. And so I wanted Annette to look like that. I wanted her to look like someone who’s been in the sun every day of her life for the last 40 years. I knew I wanted her to be a bottle redhead; I wanted it to look like it wasn’t a good dye job. And her rust-coloured suede jacket was crucial to me – I wanted her to own something that was valuable enough to hock, but that she kept getting it back from that pawn shop. She didn’t own anything worth any money at all, except that one jacket, and there were many times she had to hock it to get the 50 bucks to be able to pay her rent or to pay back a gambling debt or whatever the fuck it was. I’m very specific, but I also show up fully loaded.

It’s quite rare to speak to an actor who becomes this involved in costume details.

I buy her purse, I buy her wallet, I buy her glasses. I work very closely with the prop department.

Why?

It has to feel real. It has to feel like a purse that I carried for a long time, like a jacket I’ve worn for a long time.

Gia Coppola [director of The Last Showgirl] said that Annette’s dance scene was not in the script. How did that come about?

[Gia and I] were walking around the casino and met this beautiful African American woman who worked at a bar. She said, “I’m not a cocktail waitress, I’m a bevertainer.” It’s a term coined by the casinos to get around the unions – she’s a cocktail waitress, but she also entertains. A bevertainer. They have those little platforms all over the casino where three times a shift, you go up to your little platform. And so this young woman said to me, “Would you like me to dance for you?” I felt very uncomfortable, because it felt intimate. And then she said, “I have to, it’s part of my job.” And she went over to her platform, and she danced to her track. Even though she was young and gorgeous, nobody looked. People are hitting the slots, and nobody’s watching. We watched with rapt attention, and when she finished, we clapped. Nobody else clapped. She came down a little sweaty, and went back to serving drinks. I gave her a tip and thanked her, and we walked away, and Gia said to me, “Annette should dance.” I said, “I don’t think so! I think we have enough work to do in three days!” She goes, “Yeah, Annette should dance.” And then we were walking into the rehearsal room, and ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ was playing on the sound system. And I said to Gia – jokingly! – that if Annette was a bevertainer, that would be her track.

Two days later, we were doing the scene where I’m walking around with the tray and she walked up to me and said, “Annette’s going to dance in five minutes”. I was like, “What?!” No. And then that was it. Annette danced. And it was exactly like what happened to that young woman: I got up there, nobody watched. She’s sort of dancing for herself. We did it once, I walked down the stairs, we moved on to the next scene. Never thought about it again. And then I saw the movie, and I saw how Gia utilised that as a storytelling device, and it broke my heart. Kills me every time. That’s the beauty of filmmaking – it’s not in the script, but it’s part of the music of a story, and then you use it in such a perfect way, at such a perfect time, and you’re seeing the dreams of these people dissolve in front of their eyes.

How did it compare to shooting the dance scene in True Lies, in which your character performs a kind of striptease_?_

That was a similar situation. I knew that it was going to happen, [but] originally, I was naked. I said to [James Cameron], “Look, you make the movie you want to make. I’ll do whatever you want me to do here. [But] the truth of the matter is, if I’m naked, you’re gonna lose your audience.” Because, you know, I looked good naked at that point! I said to him, “I am concerned that it’s going to distract from what is really a comedy scene.”

I remember when that movie came out, there were a lot of protests – or, you know, protests with a lowercase ‘p’ – by women feeling that [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character] objectified his wife, or that putting her in that position was denigrating to women. I was like, He was giving her the gift of freedom and liberation and excitement that her quotidian life did not give her! So I loved it. And I actually [had gone] to Jim’s offices and showed him what that sequence could look like, and I constructed it on my own: I had a black velvet dress, and I went to the fabric store and bought some black tulle and made sleeves and a little peplum and a little neck piece. I went into the bathroom in his office, I tucked the tulle into my dress, kind of made my hair look a little more conservative. Walked out into his office, said, “This is what Helen would look like walking into the place.” And then [I did] the sequence where she looks in the mirror, and then I pull the tulle off of my neck, pulled the tulle off of my arms and around the little skirt part, and then I slicked my hair back with water and said, “So here's what she would look like post switch.” And then I unzipped my dress and was wearing a bra and panties. And I said, “I think it’s better if I’m in this for the dance sequence.” And I never danced for him. I just stood there and he agreed.

On the day we shot that, he said, “What song do you want to dance to?” And I chose John Hiatt. There was no choreographer; she just gets her groove on – and Jim had never seen me get my groove on. I don’t get my groove on in my daily life – I was married, I had a young child. And I remember it got very quiet. And then he called, “Cut.” It was just sort of weird. And Jim came over to me, and he said, “If I put a crash pad on the floor, will you let go of the bed post?” What I now know is, it got a little sexy…

It got too real?

Yes, and it stopped being funny. I’ve been an actor since I was 19 and the biggest laugh I ever got in a movie ever, including A Fish Called Wanda, was letting go of that bed post in True Lies. It’s absolutely a pin to a balloon of sexual tension, and it’s just effing funny. But that moment is another example of not knowing what was going to happen. All it says [in the script] is: ‘She dances’.

Roles having some basis in reality seems important to you. What about Deirdre Beaubeirdre in a batshit film like Everything Everywhere All At Once?

I know Deirdre. I’ve met her before. This is a woman who nobody touches. That job is her power. She controls people. She can make their life miserable, or she can make their life great. The reason she had [fake] nails is because that’s the only time every week somebody touched her. She would get her nails done at the little Vietnamese nail place down the street from where she lived, because somebody would touch her.

My only criteria for the work I do is, “Do I believe it? Do I believe that person exists lock, stock and barrel?” That’s my criteria. I have no trained talent, and so for me, my talent is that I get goosebumps on my arms when I’m in the zone. When something moves me, my body responds, and I go, “Oh, okay, I’m where I’m supposed to be.” It’s that clear to me – that’s the truth telling.

You also made a quite famous statement against the unreality of show business by posing in More magazine in 2002 just as you were: in your underwear, no make-up, no retouching. It was a seismic moment.

I don’t like the fantasy part of show-off business. Every red carpet is a fashion statement that absolutely terrifies me, because it’s this fantasy – as if these people own those clothes, as if they look like that. That idea that we put that out into the world. That posturing is something that I am not comfortable with. I go out and buy my dresses because I want to feel and look like an authentic human being. That’s my goal in the whole thing. I hate the fantasy part of it and yet it’s the game. And I try to play the game, but I also want to question the game. More magazine came up because I had already done plastic surgery. I had tried it. It didn’t work for me. You take fat from one place, it shows up in another. They don’t tell you that, right? And so I had already humiliated myself by trying to alter myself to fit the requirement. And I’ll tell you exactly where it happened. I was making the [1985] movie Perfect.

Deirdre Beaubeirdre is what I look like if I relax my entire body. All of us walk around clenched.

This is the one where you play the aerobics instructor who doesn’t love journalists…

We were shooting the scene where John Travolta is in court and he’s about to be sentenced to time in prison because he won’t divulge a source. I’m sitting in the front row of the courtroom, and we were doing my coverage, and [cinematographer] Gordon Willis said out loud to the crew, “Oh, I’m not shooting her today – there are bags under her eyes.” I was 28. I got plastic surgery before I turned 30.

Because of what Gordon Willis said?

Oh, absolutely because of that, because I was feeling like I wasn’t pretty enough and I couldn’t sustain a movie career if Gordon Willis said he wouldn’t shoot me because my eyes were puffy that day for whatever reason. That’s what I was talking about in More magazine. What I realised is you were looking at pictures of me in True Lies. You were looking at me in Perfect. You were holding me up as some example of what women were supposed to look like – that was what the movie Perfect was about. My character has an argument with John Travolta and says, “What is so wrong with wanting to be perfect, wanting to be the best you can be? Why is that bad?” So here I was being held up as that example. And I’ve seen the movie Perfect and I did not know I looked like that when I looked like that. I was riddled with insecurities.

But when Perfect came out you became a sex symbol.

People were like, “Damn girl!” And because of that, when I wrote books for children, one of my books was about self-esteem. And I realised in the selling of that book about feeling good about yourself, that I needed to acknowledge that I didn’t feel good enough about myself. And so I said to More magazine, “I will do that [shoot], but I want you to take a picture of me with nothing on, in unflattering light, and show that picture, and then show the picture of me in beautiful light with all of the costuming and the make-up and the styling, and I want you to say how long it took, how many people, how much money it cost, and then put them side by side.”

So that was 2002. Everything Everywhere All At Once came out in 2022, right? So that’s 20 years later; I’m basically owning it because Deirdre Beaubeirdre is what I look like if I relax my entire body. I’m telling you, all of us walk around clenched. Many of us walk around in clothing that is designed to compress. But all I did was go without compression and relax and not worry about it. And that created Deirdre. That’s all me. That’s not a fat suit. That’s not me putting on weight. That’s what I looked like the day I showed up. And I wanted that to be real and just to be like, “Honestly, this is what many women look like.” And all of that is connected back to More magazine, and the beauty ideal that I have struggled with.

Your recent work really is the opposite of vanity – you’re throwing everything into the character, whatever that requires.

Looking pretty in the movies was never my thing. It’s just not who I am; it’s just not been my currency. Whether you thought I was pretty or not, it wasn’t like I felt like I was a great beauty and that the camera would love me. Lately I’ve been able to become characters which have freed me from any vanity, which then frees me as an artist – because then it doesn’t matter, because then I’m just doing the work. And I’ve always wanted to do the work.

Originally published in the April 2025 issue of Empire. Jamie Lee Curtis was shot exclusively for Empire in Los Angeles in December 2024, by Robert Ascroft. The Last Showgirl is in UK cinemas now.