Jamie Lee Curtis has said she never thought she would experience the highs of her recent career successes.
The 66-year-old actor, best known for roles in Halloween (1978) and Freaky Friday (2003), won her first Oscar in 2023 for her performance in the sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All at Once. A year later, she took home her first Emmy for her supporting part in the hit chef drama The Bear.
Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Curtis said she has been reaping “opportunity after opportunity” ever since receiving the accolades, with the TV host agreeing that the actor has “never been hotter”.
Curtis held back the tears as she reflected on the transformational last five years, saying: “I’m having a moment, I’m having freedom.”
“I’ve been an actor, I’ve been in horror movies, obviously, for a long time – and only recently I’ve understood that I’m an artist,” she said. “I’m being serious… I never referred to myself as an artist until about five or six years ago.”
Curtis said she feels as though she is in a “creative meadow”.
“That makes me cry,” she said, becoming emotional. “I feel like I’m in this meadow and I’m surrounded by just opportunity and beauty.”
Asked by Colbert whether she feels more free in her career, Curtis replied: “It’s incredible. Ultimately, to have a free mind, be able to think for yourself, to have an expression of your soul through the work you do, whatever the work you do, even if it’s a technical job, you still express your soul.
“I feel like this instrument is wide open and free and having opportunity after opportunity that I never thought I’d get.”
Curtis will next star in Freakier Friday, a much-anticipated sequel to the hugely successful 2003 comedy Freaky Friday.
Freaky Friday originally starred Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Tess and Anna, a mother and daughter forced to live as one another after switching bodies.
Asked why the sequel took 12 years, Curtis said the wait was intentional. “Everybody I’ve ever spoken to has asked, ‘Will there be a Freaky Friday sequel?’ When I went all around the world for Halloween Ends in 2022, every stop, they asked,” the actor told People.
“And the answer was, ‘Lindsay has to be old enough to have had a teenager.’ So then obviously Lindsay had this beautiful baby. She came and visited me, brought the baby. At this moment we started really seriously talking about it.”
Freakier Friday is out in cinemas on 8 August.
