Jamie Lee Curtis says she is preparing to retire from acting because she saw how Hollywood “rejected” her parents after they reached a “certain age”.
In an interview with The Guardian, Curtis talked about how hard it was watching her parents, the late actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, struggle in Hollywood as they aged.
“I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age. I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful,” she said.
Curtis, who won an Oscar in 2023 for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, said she had been preparing to leave for a while. “I have been self-retiring for 30 years. I have been prepping to get out so that I don’t have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to leave the party before I’m no longer invited.”
In the same interview, The Bear actor likened what she called the plastic industry’s “disfiguration” of women to “genocide”.
She posed for the interview with a set of enlarged red plastic lips as a prop she brought herself. “I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who have disfigured themselves,” she said. “The wax lips really sends it home.”
On whether the word was appropriate, Curtis said she believed it was. “I have used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word,” she said. “I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances.”
Curtis will next be seen in Freakier Friday, sequel to the beloved 2003 classic Freaky Friday. The original starred Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as Tess and Anna, a mother and daughter forced to live each other’s lives after switching bodies.
Asked why the sequel took so long, Curtis said it 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 releases in theatres on 8 August.