Jamie Lee Curtis is clarifying her stance on Charlie Kirk.
The Oscar-winning actress said comments she made about the slain conservative activist last month were “mistranslated,” and that she was not talking about Kirk positively.
Curtis, 66, told podcast host Marc Maron that despite her disagreements with Kirk “on almost every point I ever heard him say,” she believed he “was a man of faith.”
“And I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected to his faith, even though… his ideas were abhorrent to me,” the Halloween actress said through tears on the Sept. 15 episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast. “I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.”
When asked by Variety about the backlash she received to those remarks, Curtis said some of it was “threatening.”
“An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying as I wished him well—like I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t. I was simply talking about his faith in God,“ Curtis said.
“And so it was a mistranslation, which is a pun, but not. In the binary world today, you cannot hold two ideas at the same time: I cannot be Jewish and totally believe in Israel’s right to exist and at the same time reject the destruction of Gaza,” she continued. “You can’t say that, because you get vilified for having a mind that says, ‘I can hold both those thoughts. I can be contradictory in that way.’”
Cutis rejected the notion that she has to exercise caution in what she says, given that she is a celebrity.
“I don’t have to be careful,” she told her interviewer. “If I was careful, I wouldn’t have told you any of what I just told you. I would have just said, ‘Hi, welcome. I baked you banana bread. Here’s my dog. Here’s my house, blah, blah, blah. What do you want to know?’ I can’t not be who I am in the moment I am.”
During her conversation with Maron, Curtis went on to discuss how modern media has had a numbing effect on people’s response to Kirk’s death and other recent tragedies.
“Today, we as a society are bombarded with imagery,” said Curtis, who compared Kirk’s death to 9/11. “So we don’t know what the longitudinal effects of seeing those towers come down over and over and over and over again. Or watching his execution over and over and over again.”
Unlike assassinations decades ago, Curtis continued, “here we have now these images and we are inured to them. And we are numb to them.”
“We don’t know enough psychologically about what that does. What does that do?” she wondered.
Kirk, 31, was shot during a speaking event at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
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