With a career spanning five different decades, it is beyond doubt why Jamie Lee Curtis was this year’s recipient of the Venice Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, even if she couldn’t quite believe it. The actress is not short of confidence in her acting ability, but more that she feels it strange to be honored in such a way when she still feels so young inside. “I feel so alive, like I’m this 14-year-old person just beginning their life. That’s how I wake up every day with that sort of joy and purpose,” the 62 year old told The Hollywood Reporter. However, when it comes to what she feels the highlight of her career has been, it all comes back to her most iconic role.
Jamie Lee Curtis couldn’t give a worst moment of her career, instead commenting, “I don’t have one. There are hard days in everybody’s jobs. My worst day at work doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how hard other people really work. So I’m declining to answer your question.” However when asked what her career highlight, she was surprisingly quick to pick out a very recent memory from her final bit of filming on Halloween in 2018.
“When I was making 2018 Halloween, the last scene of the movie that I had to shoot was a moment where Laurie Strode is sitting alone in a pickup truck, watching Michael Myers headed to a supermax prison where he will spend the rest of his life. And she is seeing this person who has caused her 40 years of trauma being taken away. And the scene was just me alone in a truck. When we went to shoot it, it’s just my little truck with about 14 cameras around it and cranes and lights and a crew. I was in my trailer preparing for my work, which was going to be emotional, cathartic. It was described as a moment where Laurie sort of replays the 40 years since this first occurred. I’m someone who likes name tags because everybody knows my name, but often I don’t know anyone else’s. And so, whenever I start any project, I ask for everybody to wear a name tag. And this was now the end of the movie. This is me shooting my last scene before I was going to fly home to be back with my family. And when I approached the set, the entire crew were standing in silent solidarity with their hands behind their backs. And everyone was wearing a name tag. And the name tag said, “We are Laurie Strode.” What they were saying was, “We are with you, Jamie, in this moment. And we know there’s nothing we can do to help you as you do this moment of work alone in a pickup truck. We believe in you, because we are you.” I gotta tell you, that may be the high point of my career.”
Jamie Lee Curtis is set to appear in the sequel to that movie, Halloween Kills, which is released this month. She is not stopping there either, as she also revealed that she is finally able to bring a decade long pet project to screens that she cited as her dream project. “I am just getting a project that I’ve been working on for 10-plus years, which is the story of the birth of the high five, which was born from a closeted, gay, young black baseball player named Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and invented [that form of celebration] on Oct. 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium. I’ve been trying to tell his story for a long time. I think we are just now going to be able to do so with Ryan Murphy Television at Netflix.”
For someone who is now in their 60s, Curtis certainly continues to have the lust for life that has seen her through her career so far, and receiving a Lifetime Achievement award is not going to make her slow down in any way.