Arts & Entertainment

Jamie Lee Curtis says she owes her career to “Halloween”

By David Villafranca

Los Angeles, Oct 13 (EFE).- Jamie Lee Curtis was 19 when she started her film career fleeing Michael Myers in the first “Halloween” film and more than four decades later, she finds herself grappling again with the deranged mass murderer in “Halloween Kills,” set for release this week.

“I don’t think I would have made a mark,” the actress tells Efe when asked what her life would have been had director John Carpenter not cast her as Laurie Strode in the 1978 film.

The movie launched Curtis as Hollywood’s foremost “scream queen” and she went on to appear in a string of horror films, including several installments in the “Halloween” franchise, before stepping away from the business in 2006 to focus on her family.

When she was invited in to portray a middle-aged Laurie in a direct sequel to the original film, she jumped at the chance to work with director David Gordon Green and producer Jason Blum.

Released in 2018 to worldwide success, “Halloween” carries the 1978 film 40 years into the future as if the intervening sequels never happened.

And “Halloween Kills,” from the same team as the 2018 release, picks up where that film left off, with Myers apparently doomed after Laurie, daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson locked him in the basement of a burning house.

Of course, he managed to escape.

“Well, I think what happened is that Michael is the phoenix. Michael survived the fire. I think he has ascended, he is transcendent. He has metamorphisized into something more powerful than he’s ever been,” Curtis tells Efe.

“His violence level in this new move is – and I was talking to David about it – it is the natural progression of violence to get more violent,” she says.

“Every kill now is more exaggerated and longer. Where it used to be one attack, now there are five. It shows his transcendence. He is more brutal and it is, again, corresponding to a level of violence around the world that is more brutal, so it’s an interesting moment to be releasing the “Halloween Kills movie,” the actress says.

Curtis praises Green and Blum for their vision.

“It shows how smart Jason Blum is and how prescient David Gordon Green is to make a movie about female trauma ahead of the MeToo movement and then to make a movie about mob violence and communal collateral damage in advance of all the public outrage all over the world,” she says.

Though she was the daughter of Hollywood stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis, now 62, has no doubt that the original “Halloween” film was the key to her having a screen career.

“I’ve been rejected by brilliant people and great directors,” she says. “I’ve been up for great parts and never gotten them. “It is the nature of being an artist. I don’t know why ‘Halloween’ and why these movies and why all these years later I get to do this.”

“I wake up in grace every single day and think ‘OK, great, let’s do it, what are we doing today?’ That’s how I do it. So I can’t intellectualize it. I just need to stay out of the f—–g way,” Curtis says. EFE dvp/dr

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