Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis opened up about her considerations of retirement and Hollywood’s aging problem in relation to her parents, icons of the industry Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis.
In an extensive interview with The Guardian tied to the upcoming Aug. 8 release of Disney’s Freakier Friday, the Halloween actress slammed the entertainment world’s treatment of older actors, particularly women.
“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,” she explained. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”
Because of this, Curtis added, “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 accompanying photoshoot for the story, Curtis donned oversized plastic lips to lambast the rise of cosmetic surgery over recent years, and the pressure women feel to alter themselves. Two months ago, she told 60 Minutes that she once had plastic surgery at 25 following a derogatory remark about her appearance and “regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since.”
“The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery,” The Bear star said of the aesthetic choice. “I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”
Defending her use of the word “genocide,” she added: “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. 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. And it is aided and abetted by AI, because now the filter face is what people want. I’m not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that looks better.’ But what’s better? Better is fake. And there are too many examples — I will not name them — but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.”
Alongside the soon-to-be-released followup to 2003’s Freaky Friday, Curtis will star in a Murder, She Wrote reboot; is producing The Lost Bus, a film based on the 2018 Camp Fire starring Matthew McConaughey; and starring and executive producing Scarpetta, based on Patricia Cornwell best-selling novels, which is already picked up for two seasons at Prime Video, alongside Nicole Kidman. She will also produce and star in the psychological horror film Sender, alongside Britt Lower, David Dastmalchian and Anna Baryshnikov, and appear in James L. Brooks’ dramedy Ella McCay, also starring Woody Harrelson, Emma Mackey, Ayo Edebiri, Rebecca Hall and Albert Brooks.
The post Jamie Lee Curtis Says She’s Been “Self-Retiring” & “Prepping To Get Out” After Watching Her Parents Be “Rejected” By Hollywood As They Aged appeared first on Deadline.
