Jamie Lee Curtis is an Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning Hollywood icon who’s served up four decades worth of unforgettable hits, including Trading Places(1983), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), True Lies (1994), Freaky Friday (2003) and Knives Out (2019).
But nothing in her career, Curtis will tell you, compares to playing scream queen-turned-relentless survivor/heroine Laurie Strode across 44 years and seven movies, beginning with John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween.
“She’s not even a character anymore,” Curtis tells Yahoo Entertainment in an MVPs of Horror interview (watch above) for her curtain call as Laurie, slasher Michael Myers’ longtime favorite target, in this week’s threequel Halloween Ends. “She began as a character. When I was 19, that was a character part for me… By now, 44 years later, Laurie and Jamie are enmeshed. Because the appreciation for her from fans, from all over the world for all these years, has been translated back to me. They love Laurie, they love Jamie. Jamie is Laurie, Laurie is Jamie. It’s kind of a powerful way to end it all. It’s an incredibly difficult and bittersweet time.”
Though Curtis, 63, was born into Hollywood royalty — her parents were Tony Curtis and another horror icon, Psycho star Janet Leigh — she says it’s the character of Laurie and the Halloween franchise she can thank for her success. And even, in a roundabout way, her husband Christopher Guest and their family.
“I would have no career if not for Laurie Strode,” she says. “I would’ve never been able to find a footing in show business. I didn’t have any of those skillsets that you need. She gave me a platform to stand on and grow from. Everything good in my life has come from Laurie Strode. Including my husband and my children. Every job I can link back to Laurie Strode. Seriously.” (In a 2021 Role Recall interview, Curtis told Yahoo Entertainment how interconnected all of her major film successes were, with Halloween leading to Trading Places, Trading Places leading to A Fish Called Wanda, and so on. Curtis met Guest on Wanda and the couple have two children together.)
“And so what she has given me is incalculable in my life,” she says. “My career today is directly attributable to Laurie Strode. And the [new] David Gordon Green trilogy has transformed my professional life, because I am now getting a creative life that I did not have prior to 2018.”
Halloween Ends — which follows 2018’s reboot Halloween (constructed as a direct sequel to 1978’s Halloween that ignored all the other sequels) and 2021’s Halloween Kills — is being billed as the end of the Michael Myers-Laurie Strode saga.
You can probably count on Michael Myers returning someday (horror villains in lucrative Hollywood franchises never die!), but is Laurie Strode really done? Curtis has twice said she was leaving the series before, after both Halloween II (1981) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002).
“Well, let me say this,” Curtis began. “I cannot imagine a scenario where a filmmaker would come after looking at these three David Gordon Green films and the 1978 John Carpenter masterpiece, and say, ‘I have an idea of how I can tell more of this story.’ I’m not saying it can’t happen. Maybe Guillermo del Toro is gonna come up with some crazy great idea, but I doubt it. Also it’s my Beatles birthday this year. I’m 64 years old, and I also feel like these three movies are so beautiful and so important as statements of who we are as society, as much as it is about Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. I just find it hard to imagine that anybody is gonna come anywhere near these movies.”
—Video produced by Jen Kucsak and edited by Leese Katsnelson
Halloween Ends opens Friday.
Watch the trailer:
