Jamie Lee Curtis bursts into the room in a blaze of volcanic red, her three-piece velvet suit matched by her explosive energy. After a profuse apology for being late (she isn’t) comes more colour: “I wrap my Christmas gifts in old Financial Times and recycled ribbon.” It was Martha Stewart who turned her on to the pink paper, advising “it makes for a prettier presentation”.
And Curtis believes newspapers have a future beyond gift-wrapping. “I feel like we are leaning towards an analogue future. We are getting detached and that detachment is creating a weird isolation. And people are craving contact and connection which is analogue. You cannot have contact in a digital world . . . we’re missing the crucial thing that keeps us human.”
It’s a view in keeping with the warmly nostalgic film she is in London (Claridge’s to be precise) to promote. Ella McCay is a Disney comedy-drama set in 2008, a time when “we all still liked each other” (as narrator Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge Simpson, tells us in her comfortingly familiar rasp).
“It’s the key phrase in the movie,” Curtis says of the script penned by celebrated director James L Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good as it Gets). “Jim has said publicly you couldn’t have set this movie today because we’re so divided. The political divide is so vastly hostile. That was a time when you could have differences, but you could still reach across the aisle to find common ground.”
Emma Mackey stars as her near-namesake Ella, a young politician who finds herself thrust simultaneously into the role of state governor and the swirl of a sex scandal (albeit a quaintly tame one). Curtis plays her unfiltered aunt Helen, who doubles as Ella’s confidante.
The film comes alive every time Curtis is on screen, a feature of all her work since her Oscar-winning turn as a fastidious IRS auditor in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, from streaming sensation The Bear to low-budget indie hit The Last Showgirl, even the belated sequel Freakier Friday. Like the protagonist she plays in that body-swap comedy, Curtis at 67 seems possessed by an irrepressible youthful vigour.
“I feel like I’m 14 today,” she declares. “I’m jet-lagged and I’m like this. I’ve been up since 5am. I’m getting on a plane in an hour. This has been my gift, that I have joy of life.” An active TikToker, she marked her recent birthday by doing the 6-7 dance meme.
Now that this career hot streak has arrived, she is determined to bask in it for as long as it lasts. “I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I’ve waited my entire career for a filmmaker like James L Brooks to ask me to play a part.”
But how could it come as any surprise that she landed a role that seems made for her? She arches an eyebrow. “Well . . . you don’t know me. The truth is, my husband is very quiet [filmmaker Christopher Guest, better known for going “one louder” in This Is Spinal Tap]. I’m very quiet. I’m very solitary. I’m actually shy. I could walk into a room of a million people right now and speak to them, but I’m actually shy . . . There are aspects of Helen that are not mine. I speak my mind but I’m not a blurter.”
What they do have in common is screaming. A standout scene in Ella McCay finds Helen and her niece indulging in a cathartic bout of primal yelling that took Curtis back to her early career as a scream queen. For many movie-lovers, she will forever be frozen in time as teenager Laurie Strode in 1978’s Halloween, a character, ironically, old beyond her years.
“I think Halloween was the only serious acting I ever did,” she says. “Because there are three girls in it. There’s a promiscuous cheerleader. I was a cheerleader in high school . . . ”. Comic pause. “Maybe I was promiscuous. Then there’s the smart alec, snarky, wry, quick witted, slightly grumpy girl.” She points to herself. “Perfect for it, quick to snark. And then there’s Laurie, the intellectual, deep, virginal dreamer. And somehow John Carpenter cast me as her. He didn’t know me.”
For a while Curtis continued punishing her vocal cords in a string of slashers that included Halloween sequels, trapped by the genre that had launched her career. It was the 1983 comedy Trading Places that freed her, the role of a smart-mouthed, provocatively dressed (and undressed) sex worker helping her shed any lingering goody-two-shoes image. I tell her it was the first film I saw her in. “Then you saw a lot of me,” she smirks. I was 10 years old. “Yeah, well if those were the first you ever saw, God bless you. And thank my mom.”
Mom of course was Janet Leigh; dad was Tony Curtis. When Jamie was born, dad had just finished shooting Some Like It Hot; when she was one, mom stepped into the shower for Psycho. But when I ask Curtis about growing up in a Hollywood family, she pushes back.
“Not really, because my parents divorced when I was very young. My mother married a businessman and I was raised on a dirt road in a canyon where I was barefoot most of the time and rode bikes. I was not raised around any bit of show business.”
The 1980s and ’90s were a fruitful period with career highlights such as A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies. But there were lean years. “I’m married to a director, a lot of our friends are in show business. I’ve never worked for one of them. So you have to metabolise that not everyone is going to like you, not everyone is going to think you have talent . . . It’s a weird job.” She adds: “You watch a lot of other people get a lot of opportunities.”
Would she care to name names? “I will tell you who got every single part I ever wanted. When you go into an audition, you check in and everybody’s name’s there. I became very good at reading upside down. And you’re like, ugh, Debra Winger.”
A fallow period followed 2003’s Freaky Friday but something changed in 2018. “I turned 60 and I woke up and realised: holy shit, I’m going to die sooner than later — way sooner than later . . . Tick effing tock, Jamie. Go!”
In an unexpected twist, it was a return to Halloween (the 2018 reboot) that kick-started the new chapter of her career. When it became apparent that horror maestro Jason Blum wanted her for a trilogy, Curtis parlayed her commitment into a “little production deal”. Within a year she brought him California wildfires thriller The Lost Bus (which this year became a well-received Apple movie) and the works of crime writer Patricia Cornwell (a friend).
Then came a lucky break: running into Nicole Kidman at the 2022 Oscars, “a woman I’d never met”. It turned out Kidman was a fan of both Curtis and Cornwell and had always wanted to play forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta. And so the upcoming Amazon series Scarpetta was born, with Curtis playing Kay’s older sister, Dorothy.
A year later, Curtis had an even better night at the Oscars as the multiverse-hopping Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the boards. “I didn’t understand it. I still don’t, really . . . We finished the movie the day Covid shut the world down. Then, two years later, the movie’s released. And a year later it wins a handful of Oscars, including Best Picture.” And Best Supporting Actress, I add. “Something that never, ever was going to happen in my life,” Curtis says. Something neither of her parents achieved.
The Oscar opened new doors. Today it occupies pride of place in her home, though with some modifications. “My Oscar has a googly eye attached to its head and there’s a little pin that rests on the base that says ‘they/them’ because it’s a genderless statue and in honour of my trans daughter, Ruby.”
Enter The Bear, pursuing an actor. Watching the first season in 2022, Curtis had a premonition. “There’s a moment where Carmen’s sister shows up and says, ‘Have you called mom? You should call her.” And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to play her.’” Months later, the phone rang. “My agent said, ‘You’ve been offered a part on The Bear.’ And I said, ‘The mother? Yeah, I knew that would happen.’”
Curtis was hailed by critics and won an Emmy for her performance as boozy, overbearing matriarch Donna Berzatto in arguably the show’s best episode to date. This, Curtis says, was the real catalyst for her new lease of creative life. “That show unleashed me. There was no rehearsal, and I had never met any of these people prior to walking into that kitchen, and within an hour we were shooting. It was jumping out of an airplane for me creatively, emotionally, and it did give me confidence.”
Curtis has been an outspoken advocate for women and against cosmetic surgery and the “disfigurement of generations”. Are there more roles available to women of a certain age these days? “There’s been a shift. Not a giant shift, but a shift. Kathy Bates is having a good time. Jean Smart, Demi Moore, Emma Thompson, Sigourney Weaver all have shows. Television is welcoming women past a certain age. The movie business a little less so . . . I am a lucky beneficiary. I’m going to do Murder, She Wrote next year. I am Jessica Fletcher.”
With recognition has come acceptance. “I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m terrific, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m a piece of shit.” You get the feeling she really couldn’t give a damn either way.
“I can’t get enough right now. I’m having just the best time,” she beams. “And I take none of it seriously.”
‘Ella McCay’ is in cinemas now
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