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Jamie Lee Curtis Reveals Secret to Getting More Screen Time

Four decades into her acting career, Jamie Lee Curtis is now sharing her “secret sauce” that helps her get more on-screen time in the films she works on. Now that she’s secured her first Oscar nomination, she can reveal that one of her many keys to success in Hollywood is never leaving the set during shooting.

“Here’s the deal,” Curtis tells Insider at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. “It’s my secret sauce. Don’t go back to your trailers. Trailers are not your friend. Jonathan Wang, our producer of Everything Everywhere All At Once, will tell you I never left the set. I don’t believe in it.”

In addition to her recent role as the IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre on EEAAO, Curtis recently garnered attention for her performance in Knives Out as the matriarch of the Drysdale/Thrombey family, Linda. Curtis says she ended up in more scenes than originally intended simply because director Rian Johnson always saw her hanging out on set.

“He once called me his MVP on Knives Out, and when he was asked why, he said, ‘Because she was always on set,’” Curtis says. “’She never left the set.’ He ended up using me in shots he wasn’t going to use me in because I was on set.”

At the time of the film’s release, Johnson did in fact call Curtis the MVP of the set, telling Entertainment Tonight, “First of all, she would be early [every morning]. She’d beat all of us to set. Sometimes she would show up on set when she wasn’t even supposed to be in the scene and just be hanging out, and I would get really confused and kind of nervous. So I would put her in the scene! I was like, ‘Jamie Lee Curtis is here! Film her!’ She got into scenes she wasn’t even supposed to be in – just because she was there!”

On the horizon, Curtis has four upcoming projects, including the screen adaptation of the video game, Borderlands, as well as Spychosis, Kay Scarpetta, and Disney’s Haunted Mansion. If she sticks to her tried but true method, we could see more of her in these upcoming roles than originally planned.





Jamie Lee Curtis Honored at Santa Barbara Film Festival, Talks Career

During a career-retrospective conversation, the Halloween scream queen and Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar nominee had festival–goers in stitches with her candor and jokes.

“I’m the only Oscar nominee who sells yogurt [Activia] that makes you shit,” cracked Jamie Lee Curtis during a career–retrospective conversation with film historian Leonard Maltin on Saturday night at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. The newly minted best supporting actress Oscar nominee for Everything Everywhere All at Once was in town to collect the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Maltin Modern Master Award, and charmed attendees – including more than a few Academy members – with self–deprecation (“All the ‘nepo baby’ jokes, believe me, I’ve heard them all”), a claim that she “invented” Instagram and general candor about her 45 years as a screen actress: “I know what I can do, I know what I cannot do, and I’ve managed to have a really rich and robust group of opportunities in show–off business.”

Maltin – the namesake of the award Curtis was collecting, and a friend of Curtis’ late parents, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and Curtis herself – was barely able to get a word in edgewise, but neither he nor the audience seemed to mind, as Curtis tended to find her way to real insights or heartfelt observations. One, for example: “I am the granddaughter of immigrants from Hungary and from Denmark, people coming to America having the opportunities and the difficulties and the heartaches and the tragedies and the tiny little bit of joy. And then they each – both of them – raised children who became massive stars from incredibly impoverished beginnings. And then to have their daughter, who did not come from an impoverished beginning – I’ve had a life of privilege and ease, I have never pretended anything but that – but nonetheless, that their daughter is sitting here, talking to you about the craft of acting, about a lifelong career – I’m 64 years old, I’ve been doing this since I was 19 – I’m honored and you’ve honored my parents and my grandparents.”

Curtis claimed that she never had any intention of following in her famous parents’ footsteps. “I was never going to be an actor,” she said. “I was going to be a police officer.” But then a tennis coach–turned–manager encouraged her to audition at Universal to play Nancy Drew in a film project. She didn’t land the role, but was signed by the studio – which was run by her godfather, Lew Wasserman, the most powerful person in Hollywood at the time – to a seven–year contract, and left college to go focus on that. She struggled to gain traction, and in fact was devastated to be fired early in her career – along with 11 other actors – from the TV series Operation Petticoat (an adaptation of a film in which her father had starred), but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. “Had I not been fired from Operation Petticoat, I would not have been able to audition for Halloween,” she explained in reference to that 1978 John Carpenter horror flick, “and that is the job that changed my life.”

After numerous auditions for the part of Laurie Strode, she landed the part that made her – like her mother, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – a legendary “scream queen,” and also impacted numerous other aspects of her life. “All of my life goes back to Halloween,” she volunteered. “All the good things in my life, including my husband, including my family – everything can be traced back to Halloween.” But in the immediate aftermath of that film’s success, she strangely received few other offers, which is why she is extra grateful to Carpenter for writing her a part in his next film, 1980’s The Fog.

As it turns out, Carpenter was but one of “three Johns” – a double–entendre that she had some fun with – who gave her major professional breaks. John Landis had hired her to narrate a documentary short about horror films, and then fought for her to star opposite Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in his 1983 comedy Trading Places. “I owe John Landis a great debt of gratitude because that flipped the switch,” she said, meaning that she was no longer pigeonholed as a horror movie actress. And then, because of the aptitude for comedy that Curtis demonstrated in Trading Places, John Cleese wrote her a part in his 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda.

There were other notable movies along the way, including Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel in 1990, James Cameron’s True Lies in 1994 (she acknowledged Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger for giving her above the title credit with Schwarzenegger even though they didn’t have to) and John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama – as well as the occasional return to the Halloween universe, starting with Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. Curtis, who has since starred in several additional sequels, said that one of the few regrets of her career was not insisting that Debra Hill, who had co–written and produced the first Halloween, also be a producer of the second. “She wasn’t angry at me,” Curtis said of Hill, who died in 2005, “but I was angry at myself.”

Curtis acknowledged that she was a last–minute replacement for others in several of her better–known roles, including the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday and the 2019 mystery Knives Out, both of which proved to be blockbusters. And she passed along a lesson that she learned on ensemble films like the latter: “Here’s the deal. It’s my secret sauce, you guys. Don’t go back to your trailer. Trailers are not your friend. Stay on set. I’m telling you that pearl of wisdom: stay on set. Be an active set–sitter.” Her part in Knives Out was markedly increased simply because she was around.

And then came discussion of Everything Everywhere, an art house flick that exploded into the most commercially successful film in the history of A24 and the most Oscar–nominated film of the year. Curtis said her agent told her she had received a script from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for a film in which she would star opposite Michelle Yeoh, and for that reason she instructed her agent to say yes – but he urged her to read the script first, given how weird and unusual it was. She says she was charmed and knew off the bat that she wanted to play the officious IRS agent Deirdre – “a forgotten person,” like Yeoh’s character – with a dowdy look similar to the one she employed for Billy Bob Thornton’s 2001 film Daddy and Them, in which she starred opposite Ben Affleck, with one exception: she wanted her to have beautifully manicured nails, since she figured that the only time Deirdre was ever touched by another human was when she visited the beauty parlor.

And, moments before being presented with the festival’s award by none other than her husband, the comedy master Christopher Guest, Curtis emphasized the tremendous pride that she feels in being associated with Everything Everywhere: “It’s a beautiful movie about many things – it’s about love, it’s about family reunification, it’s about the American dream and the failure of the American dream and what we put immigrants through, it’s about marriage, it’s about a child – it’s deep.”

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Jamie Lee Curtis Laughs About Becoming ‘a Meme Forever’

Jamie Lee Curtis is aware she’s become a meme in the best way – and she’s perfectly okay with that!

The Everything Everywhere All at Once actress made an appearance on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last year when her friend and Halloween costar Kyle Richards hosted an event in support of Curtis’s My Hand in Yours charity. But what transpired thereafter was a viral meme due to cast member Dorit Kemsley calling the charity’s purchasable wind chime “the chicest.”

“I’ve never seen the show,” Curtis, 64, said on Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast. “I didn’t even see my entire episode. I just saw the meme. The meme that kept on ‘meme-ing.'”

Curtis added: “It became a meme forever.”

Describing how her appearance came to be, Curtis said Richards, 54, asked her about coming on RHOBH to discuss My Hand in Yours.

“This is where the meme that Dorit was talking about how chic my wind chime is. That wasn’t a euphemism. I was a peddler,” she explained. “She was so kind and enthusiastic about how chic our products are that I actually renamed the wind chime – the Chic Dorit Wind Chime – on MyHandInYours.com.”

Even though she said it was just “a one-off” appearance, Curtis later appeared on the season 12 reunion in October. However, her first cameo on the reality series occurred in season 4, when she reminisced with Richards about their early days working together and the friendship that formed from there.

Other than her viral meme, the only portion of the Bravo hit Curtis has seen was a scene of Richards in tears in the season 12 reunion trailer over the ongoing tension between her sister Kathy Hilton and series alum Lisa Rinna.

“I’ve never seen an episode of Housewives. I don’t know anything about it, except that I saw a trailer where Kyle was crying,” she told E! News in October. “And I called her immediately and said, ‘Why are you crying? What happened?'”

“That was a level of stress and upset that you wanna see in a horror movie out of her, not in a reality TV show,” Curtis told Entertainment Tonight separately.

“I don’t know who made her upset, but I called her out of real concern,” Curtis said, adding it was “important to me.”

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Jamie Lee Curtis Shares Flashback Photo with Lindsay Lohan

Ever one to built excitement and get her fans buzzing, Jamie Lee Curtis’s recent Instagram throwback with Lindsay Lohan has started garnering attention from various publications. In their article about it, People Magazine writes:

Jamie Lee Curtis could be hinting toward quite the freaky reunion with Lindsay Lohan.

On Friday, Oscar nominee Curtis, 64, shared a throwback photo of herself and Freaky Friday costar Lohan, now 36, from the time they made the 2003 family comedy together.

“It’s Friday. I’m just sayin! Freaky fingers crossed!” the actress wrote, as she tagged Lohan and Disney in the caption to her Instagram post.

Lohan, who returned to movies in December with the Netflix holiday rom–com Falling for Christmas, chimed in with a comment on Curtis’s post, where she shared three emojis: “🤞 😍 🙌.”

Curtis has floated the possibility of reuniting with Lohan for a Freaky Friday sequel numerous times in recent months. At the Glass Onion premiere in Los Angeles in November, Curtis told PEOPLE about the possibility of reuniting with Lohan onscreen again.

“There would be nothing I would love more, honestly, than to be able to work with her again, share our time again, and now be able to share it at this age with both of us 20 years older, or whatever we are,” Curtis said.

Though Curtis is open to collaborating with Lohan on any project, she has been specifically seeking the idea of a Freaky Friday sequel and told PEOPLE it’s more than just wishful thinking.

“We’re talking,” Curtis said, when asked if there’s real weight to the concept of making a follow–up to Mark Waters’s 2003 adaptation of Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel of the same name. “There’s a lot of good talk going on.”

During an October appearance on The View, the Halloween actress said she’d love to play an “old grandma” who switches bodies with Lohan in a Freaky Friday 2.

“So then Lindsay gets to be the sexy grandma, who is still happy with Mark Harmon in all the ways you would be happy with Mark Harmon,” Curtis said. “And simply, I would like to see Lindsay be the hot grandma, and I would like to see me try to deal with toddlers today. I wanna be a helicopter parent in today’s world, as an old lady.”

Despite playing a tense mother–daughter duo in Freaky Friday, Curtis told PEOPLE that she and Lohan have remained in touch since wrapping the Disney flick.

“We’ve stayed close throughout her journeys, and she moved out of the country for a while,” Curtis said in November. “We’ve never not been in contact.”





VIDEO: Jamie Lee Curtis Chokes Up Crediting Michelle Yeoh; Talks Janet Leight

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ star Jamie Lee Curtis discusses her love for all sides of “Show (Off) Business,” what she learned from her industry parents and why Michelle Yeoh is the reason she was nominated for the Academy Awards.