Interview
‘Generations
of women have been disfigured’: Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery,
power, and Hollywood’s age problem
Emma Brockes
The actor
explains how she is fighting back against the ‘cosmeceutical industrial
complex’ and why she has finally found freedom at 66 years old
Emma Brockes
Sat 26 Jul
2025 06.00 BST
I’m
scheduled to speak to Jamie Lee Curtis at 2pm UK time, and a few minutes before
the allotted slot I dial in via video link, to be met with a vision of the
66-year-old actor sitting alone in a darkened room, staring impassively into
the camera. “Morning,” she says, with comic flatness, as I make a sound of
surprise that is definitely not a little scream.
Oh, hi!! I
say, Are you early or am I late?
“I’m always
early,” says the actor, deadpan. “Or as my elder daughter refers to me,
‘aggressively early’.”
Curtis is in
a plain black top, heavy black-framed glasses and – importantly for this
conversation – little or no makeup, while behind her in the gloom, a dog sleeps
in a basket. She won’t say what part of the US she’s in beyond the fact it’s a
“witness protection cabin in the woods” where “I’m trying to have privacy” – an
arch way, I assume, of saying she’s not in LA – and immediately starts
itemising other situations in which she has been known to be early: Hollywood
premieres (“They tell me I can’t go to the red carpet yet because it’s not open
and so my driver, Cal, and I drive around and park in the shade”);
early-morning text messages (“I wake people up”); even her work schedule: “I
show up, do the work, and then I get the fuck out.”
This is the
short version; in full, the opening minutes of our conversation involve Curtis
free-associating through references to the memory of her mother and stepfather
missing her performance in a school musical in Connecticut; the negotiating
aims of the makeup artists’ union; the nickname by which she would like to be
known if she ever becomes a grandmother (“Fifo” – short for “first in first
out”); and what, exactly, her earliness is about. Not, as you might imagine,
anxiety, but: “You know, honestly, I’ve done enough analysis of all this – it’s
control.” Curtis knows her early arrivals strike some people as rude. “My
daughter Annie says: ‘People aren’t ready for you.’ And I basically say: ‘Well,
that’s their problem. They should be ready.’”
“That’s
their problem” is, along with, “I don’t give a shit any more” a classic Curtis
expression that goes a long way towards explaining why so many people love her
– and they really do love her – a woman who on top of charming us for decades
in a clutch of iconic roles, has crossed over, lately, into that paradoxical
territory in which she is loved precisely because she’s done worrying about
what others think of her. Specifically, she doesn’t care about the orthodoxies
of an industry in which women are shamed into having cosmetic surgery before
they hit 30. Curtis has spoken of having a procedure herself at 25, following a
comment made on the set of a film that her eyes were “baggy”. Regretting it,
she has in the years since made the genuinely outlandish and inspiring decision
to wear her hair grey and eschew surgical tweaks. That Curtis is the child of
two Hollywood icons, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and thus an insider since
birth, either makes this more surprising or else explains it entirely, but either
way, she has become someone who appears to operate outside the usual Hollywood
rules. “I have become quite brusque,” says Curtis, of people making demands on
her time when she’s not open for business. “And I have no problem saying: ‘Back
the fuck off.’”
Portrait of
Jamie Lee Curtis lying on her back on a leopardpring chaise longue, wearing all
leopardprint clothes and Dr Marten boots and kicking her leg in the air
I can
believe it. During the course of our conversation, Curtis’s attitude – which is
broadly charming, occasionally hectoring and appears to be driven by a general
and sardonic belligerence – is that of someone pushing back against a lifetime
of misconceptions, from which, four months shy of her 67th birthday, she
finally feels herself to be free. Curtis is in a glorious phase of her career,
one that, despite starring in huge hits – from the Halloween franchise and A
Fish Called Wanda (1988) to Trading Places (1983), True Lies (1994) and the
superlative Knives Out (2019) – has always eluded her. The fact is, celebrity
aside, Curtis has never been considered a particularly heavyweight actor or
been A-list in the conventional way. At its most trivial, this has required her
to weather small slights, such as being ignored by the Women In Film community,
with its tedious schedule of panels and events. (“I still exist outside of
Women In Film,” she snaps. “They’re not asking me to their lunch.”) And, more
broadly, has seen Curtis completely overlooked by the Oscars since she shot
Halloween, her first movie, at the age of 19.
Well, all
that has changed now. In 2023, Curtis won an Oscar for best supporting actress
for her role as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in the genre-bending movie Everything
Everywhere All at Once. That same year, she appeared in a single episode of the
multi-award-winning TV show The Bear as Donna Berzatto, the alcoholic mother of
a large Italian clan – she calls it “the most exhilarating creative experience
I will ever have”. Anyone who saw this extraordinary performance is still
talking about it, and it led to a larger role on the show. Doors that had
always been shut to Curtis flew open. For years, she had tried and failed to
get movie and TV projects off the ground. Now, she lists the forthcoming
projects she had a hand in bringing to the screen: “Freakier Friday, TV series
Scarpetta, survival movie The Lost Bus, four other TV shows and two other
movies.” She has become a “prolific producer”, she says, as well as a Hollywood
elder and role model. All of which makes Curtis laugh – the fact that, finally,
“at 66, I get to be a boss”. You’d better believe she’ll be making the most of
it.
The movie
Curtis and I are ostensibly here to talk about is Freakier Friday, the
follow-up to Freaky Friday, the monster Disney hit of 2003 in which Curtis and
Lindsay Lohan appeared as a mother and daughter who switch bodies with
hilarious consequences. I defy anyone who enjoyed the first film not to feel
both infinitely aged by revisiting the cast more than 20 years on, and also not
to find it a wildly enjoyable return. The teenage Lohan of the first movie is
now a 37-year-old mother of 15-year-old Harper, played by Julia Butters, while
the introduction of a second teenager – Harper’s mortal enemy Lily, played by
Sophia Hammons – allows for a four-way body swap in which Curtis-as-grandma is
inhabited by Hammons’ British wannabe influencer. If it lacks the simplicity of
the first movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to taking my
10-year-old girls when it opens next month.
I witnessed
my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and
their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age
It is also a
movie that presented Curtis with an odd set of challenges. She has a problem
with “pretty”. When Curtis herself was a teenager, she says, she was “cute but
not pretty”. She watched both her parents’ careers atrophy after their youthful
good looks started to wane. Part of her shtick around earliness is an almost
existential refusal to live on Hollywood’s timeline, because, she says: “I
witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their
life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age. I
watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it
was gone. And that’s very painful.”
As a result,
says Curtis: “I have been self-retiring for 30 years. I have been prepping to
get out, so that I don’t have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to
leave the party before I’m no longer invited.” In the movie, Curtis was allowed
to keep her grey hair (although it looks shot through with blond) but her
trademark pixie cut was replaced with something longer and softer. I take it
with a pinch when she says things such as, “I’m an old lady” and, “I’m going to
die soon” – even in age-hating Hollywood, this seems overegged – but one takes
the point that she found the conventional aesthetic demands of Freakier Friday,
in which she “had to look pretty, I had to pay attention to [flattering]
lighting, and clothes and hair and makeup and nails”, much harder than playing
a dishevelled alcoholic in The Bear.
On the other
hand, Curtis is a pro and, of course, gave Disney the full-throated,
zany-but-still-kinda-hot grandma they wanted. (There is a scene in which she
tries to explain various board games – Boggle, Parcheesi – to the owl-eyed
teens that reminds you just how fine a comic actor she is.) It’s the story of
how Freakier Friday came about, however, that really gives insight into who
Curtis is: an absolute, indefatigable and inveterate hustler. “I am owning my
hustle, now,” she says and is at her most impressive, her most charming and
energised when she is talking about the hustle.
To wit:
Curtis was on a world tour promoting the Halloween franchise that made her name
and that enjoyed a hugely successful reboot in 2018, when something about the
crowd response struck her. “In every single city I went to, the only movie they
asked me about besides Halloween was Freaky Friday – was there going to be a
sequel?” When she got back from the tour, she called Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO. “I
said: ‘Look, I don’t know if you’re planning on doing [a sequel], but Lindsay
is old enough to have a teenager now, and I’m telling you the market for that
movie exists.’”
As the
project came together, Curtis learned that Disney was planning to release
Freakier Friday straight to streaming. “And I called Bob Iger” – it’s at this
point you start to imagine Iger seeing Curtis’s name flash up on his phone and
experiencing a slight drop in spirits – “and I called David Greenbaum [Disney
Live Action president], and I called Asad Ayaz, who’s the head of marketing,
and I said: ‘Guys, I have one word for you: Barbie. If you don’t think the
audience that saw Barbie is going to be the audience that goes and sees
Freakier Friday, you’re wrong.’”
This is what
Curtis means when she refers to herself as “a marketing person”, or “a weapon
of mass promotion”, and she has done it for ever. It’s what she did in 2002
when she lobbied More magazine to let her pose in her underwear and no makeup –
“They didn’t come to me and say: ‘Hey Jamie, how about you take off your
clothes and show America that you’re chubby?’ The More magazine thing happened
because I said it should happen, and I even titled the piece: True Thighs.”
And it is
what she was doing a few weeks before our interview when she turned up to the
photoshoot in LA bearing a bunch of props she had ordered from Amazon,
including oversized plastic lips and a blond wig. Curtis says: “There are many,
many actresses who love the dress up, who love clothes, who love fashion, who
love being a model. I. Hate. It. I feel like I am having to wrestle with your
idea of me versus my idea of me. Because I’ve worked hard to establish who I
am, and I don’t want you to … I have struggled with it my whole life.”
Curtis is
emphatic that her ideas be accurately interpreted and, before our meeting, sent
an email via her publicist explaining her thinking behind the shoot. “The wax
lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I’ve been very vocal about the
genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex,
who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”
Obviously,
the word “genocide” is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper
meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. “I’ve used that word for a long
time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we
have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept
that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures,
fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are
altering their appearances. And it is aided and abetted by AI, because now the
filter face is what people want. I’m not filtered right now. The minute I lay a
filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that
looks better.’ But what’s better? Better is fake. And there are too many
examples – I will not name them – but very recently we have had a big onslaught
through media, many of those people.”
Well, at the
risk of sounding harsh, one of the people implicated by Curtis’s criticism is
Lindsay Lohan, her Freakier Friday co-star and a woman in her late 30s who has
seemingly had a lot of cosmetic procedures at a startlingly young age (though
Lohan denies having had surgery). In terms of mentoring Lohan, with whom Curtis
remained friends after making the first film, she says: “I’m bossy, very bossy,
but I try to mind my own business. She doesn’t need my advice. She’s a fully
functioning, smart woman, creative person. Privately, she’s asked me questions,
but nothing that’s more than an older friend you might ask.”
But given
the stridency of Curtis’s position on cosmetic surgery, don’t younger women
feel judged in her presence? Isn’t it awkward? “No. No. Because I don’t care.
It doesn’t matter. I’m not proselytising to them. I would never say a word. I
would never say to someone: what have you done? All I know is that it is a
never-ending cycle. That, I know. Once you start, you can’t stop. But it’s not
my job to give my opinion; it’s none of my business.”
As for
Lohan, Curtis says: “I felt tremendous maternal care for Lindsay after the
first movie, and continued to feel that. When she’d come to LA, I would see
her. She and I have remained friends, and now we’re sort of colleagues. I feel
less maternal towards her because she’s a mommy now herself and doesn’t need my
maternal care, and has, obviously, a mom – Dina’s a terrific grandma.”
The general
point about the horror of trying to stay young via surgery is sensible and, of
course, I agree. At the back of my mind, however, I have a small, pinging
reservation that I can’t quite put my finger on. I suggest to Curtis that she
has natural advantages by virtue of being a movie star, which, on the one hand,
of course, makes her more vulnerable around issues of ageing, but on the other
hand, she’s naturally beautiful and everyone loves her, and most average women
who –
“I have
short grey hair!” she protests. “Other women can –”
They can, of
course! But you must have a physical confidence that falls outside the normal –
“No! No!”
She won’t have it. “I feel like you’re trying to say: ‘You’re in some rarefied
air, Jamie.’” I’m not! She responds: “By the way, genetics – you can’t fuck
with genetics. You want to know where my genetics lie?” She lifts up an arm and
wobbles her bingo wings at me. “Are you kidding me? By the way, you’re not
going to see a picture of me in a tank top, ever.” This is Curtis’s red line.
“I wear long-sleeve shirts; that’s just common sense.” She gives me a beady
look. “I challenge you that I’m in some rarefied air.”
I think
about this afterwards to try and clarify my objection, which I guess is this:
that the main reason women in middle age dye their hair is to stave off
invisibility, which, with the greatest respect, is not among the veteran movie
star’s problems. But it’s a minor quibble given what I genuinely believe is
Curtis’s helpful and iconoclastic gesture.
And when she
talks about cosmetic surgery as addiction, she should know. Curtis was an
alcoholic until she got sober at 40 and is emphatic and impressive on this
subject, the current poster woman – literally: she’s on signs across LA for an
addiction charity with the tagline: “My bravest thing? Getting sober”. I’m
curious about how her intense need for control worked, in those years long ago,
alongside her addiction?
“I am a
controlled addict,” she says. “In recovery we talk about how, in order to start
recovering, you have to hit what you call a ‘bottom’. You have to crash and
burn, lose yourself and your family and your job and your resources in order to
know that the way you were living didn’t work. I refer to myself as an Everest
bottom; I am the highest bottom I know. When I acknowledged my lack of control,
I was in a very controlled state. I lost none of the external aspects of my
life. The only thing I had lost was my own sense of myself and self-esteem.”
Externally,
during those years of addiction, she seemed to be doing very well. Her career
boomed. She married Christopher Guest, the actor, screenwriter and director,
and they have two children and have stayed married for more than 40 years.
(There’s no miracle to this. As Curtis puts it, wryly: “It’s just that we have
chosen to stay married. And be married people. And we love each other. And I
believe we respect each other. And I’m sure there’s a little bit of hatred in
there, too.”) I wonder, then, whether Curtis’s success during those years
disguised how serious a situation she was in with her addiction?
“There’s no
one way to be an addict or an alcoholic. People hide things – I was lucky, and
I am ambitious, and so I never let that self-medication get in the way of my
ambition or work or creativity. It never bled through. No one would ever have
said that had been an issue for me.”
Where was
the cost?
“The
external costs are awful for people; but the internal costs are more sinister
and deadly, because to understand that you are powerless over something other
than your own mind and creativity is something. But that was a long time ago.
I’m an old lady now.”
She is doing
better than ever. With the Oscar under her belt, Curtis has just returned in
the new season of The Bear and has a slew of projects – many developed with
Jason Blum, the veteran horror producer with whom she has a development deal –
coming down the line. Watching her bravura performance as Donna Berzatto, I did
wonder if playing an alcoholic had been in any way traumatic. She flashes me a
look of pure vehemence. “Here’s what’s traumatic: not being able to express
your range as an artist. That’s traumatic. To spend your entire public life
holding back range. And depth. And complexity. And contradiction. And rage. And
pain. And sorrow.” She builds momentum: “And to have been limited to a much
smaller palette of creative, emotional work.
“For me, it
was an unleashing of 50 years of being a performer who was never considered to
have any range. And so the freedom, and the confidence, that I was given by
Chris [Storer, the show’s creator], and the writing, which leads you …
everywhere you need to go – it was exhilarating.” She continues: “It took no
toll. The toll has been 40 years of holding back something I know is here.”
Well, there
she is, the Curtis who thrills and inspires. Among the many new projects is The
Lost Bus, a survival disaster movie for AppleTV+ about a bus full of children
trying to escape wildfires. The idea came to Curtis while she was driving on
the freeway, listening to an NPR report on the deadly wildfires of 2018 in the
small town of Paradise, California. She pulled over and called Blum; the movie,
directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matthew McConaughey and America
Ferrera, drops later this year. For another project, she managed to persuade
Patricia Cornwell, the superstar thriller writer, to release the rights for her
Scarpetta series, which, as well as producing, Curtis will star in alongside
Nicole Kidman.
This burst
of activity is something Curtis ascribes to the “freedom” she derived from
losing “all vanity”, and over the course of our conversation “freedom” is the
word she most frequently uses to describe what she values in life. Freedom is a
particularly loaded and precious concept for those on the other side of
addiction and, says Curtis, “I have dead relatives; I have parents who both had
issues with drinking and drugs. I have a dead sibling. I have numerous friends
who never found the freedom, which is really the goal – right? Freedom.”
It’s a
principle that also extends to her family. Curtis’s daughter Ruby, 29, is
trans, and I ask how insulated they are from Donald Trump’s aggressively
anti-trans policies. “I want to be careful because I protect my family,” says
Curtis. “I’m an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they
are. And if a governmental organisation tries to claim they’re not allowed to
be who they are, I will fight against that. I’m a John Steinbeck student – he’s
my favourite writer – and there’s a beautiful piece of writing from East of
Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion,
institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.”
There are
many, many other subjects to cycle through, including Curtis’s friendship with
Mariska Hargitay, whose new documentary about her mother, Jayne Mansfield, hit
Curtis particularly hard, not least because “Jayne’s house was next to Tony
Curtis’s house – that big pink house on Carolwood Drive that Tony Curtis lived
in and Sonny and Cher owned prior to him.” (I don’t know if referring to her
dad as “Tony Curtis,” is intended to charm, but it does.) There’s also a school
reunion she went to over a decade ago; the feeling she has of being “a
14-year-old energy bunny”; the fact we’ve been pronouncing “Everest” wrong all
this time; the role played by lyrics from Justin Timberlake’s Like I Love You
in her friendship with Lindsay Lohan; and the “Gordian knot” of what happens
when not being a brand becomes your brand.
Curtis
could, one suspects, summon an infinite stream of enthusiasms and – perhaps no
better advertisement for ageing, this – share urgent thoughts about every last
one of them. In an industry in which people weigh their words, veil their
opinions and pander to every passing ideal, she has gone in a different
direction, one unrestrained by the usual timidities. Or as she puts it with her
typical take-it-or-leave-it flatness, “the freedom to have my own mind,
wherever it’s going to take me. I’m comfortable with that journey and reject
the rest.”
Freakier Friday is in Australian cinemas from
7 August and from 8 August in the UK and US
No comments:
Post a Comment