Jamie Lee Curtis: ‘I’m not a trained actor. I’m an instinctual actor’
By Javier Romualdo
Los Angeles, Oct 12 (EFE).- Jamie Lee Curtis has carved out a distinguished acting career for herself in the horror genre and beyond, enjoying a successful 45-year track record in cinema in part due to her instincts in choosing the roles she plays and faithfully portraying her characters.
“I’m not a trained actor. I’m an instinctual actor,” the daughter of legendary Hollywood stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh told Efe. “And for me it’s just truth, period, end of story. That’s the only thing I care about at the end of the day. Did I tell the truth? Did I act the truth of the person, in the moment, based on circumstances of that person’s life?”
She sat down for the interview prior to Friday’s US premiere of her latest film “Halloween Ends,” a slasher movie that she says will be her final appearance in that 14-installment franchise.
The 63-year-old American actress made her feature-film debut in 1978 with her role as Laurie Strode in “Halloween,” a classic horror film directed by John Carpenter, and has since appeared in seven other installments of that series released over the course of more than four decades.
A long hiatus, however, followed Curtis’ appearance in the 2002 picture “Halloween: Resurrection,” and she spoke to Efe about what lured her back.
“When (director) David (Gordon Green) sent me the original 2018 script (for “Halloween,” the 11th installment in the film series), having not done a Halloween movie for a very long time, if it had been some other storyline, I don’t think I would have done it,” she said.
“I think it was because it told the truth, and as an actor that’s my job, so it felt like a fit again.”
“Halloween Ends” picks up five years after the events of the 2021 movie “Halloween Kills.” Strode, now a grandmother, is living with her granddaughter and determined to leave behind the traumas associated with being targeted by masked serial killer Michael Myers.
But according to the film’s synopsis, the death of a boy, allegedly by his babysitter, “ignites a cascade of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil she can’t control, once and for all.”
Curtis said the film begins with a sense of hope.
“I remember we shot the first day of the movie, the first scene of the movie, and I went in for lunch. I was sitting in my trailer and my face hurt,” the actress said. “And then I realized in the scene I had been smiling. And Laurie Strode hadn’t cracked a smile in a long, long time.”
That brief respite, however, lasts just “a second before her life gets consumed by Michael,” she added.
Curtis is bidding farewell to the Halloween franchise at a time when she is garnering Oscar buzz for her performance in a very different picture – the absurdist science fiction comedy-drama film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
The success of that film, one of the surprises of the year in independent cinema, owes a great deal to Curtis’ supporting role as an IRS inspector who is unmoved by people’s problems.
Curtis has won numerous awards and honors during her decades-old acting career, including a best-actress British Academy Film Award for her role in the 1983 film “Trading Places” and a Golden Globe Award for her role in the 1994 spy action comedy film “True Lies.”
But an Oscar nomination has eluded her so far. EFE
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