Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t waiting around to be shown the door. She’s been slowly inching away from it herself. In a candid conversation with The Guardian, the Oscar-winning actor opened up about her long-standing ambivalence toward the entertainment industry, shaped by watching her famous parents, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, be cast aside as they aged.
“I have been self-retiring for 30 years,” she admitted. “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.”
Curtis, who is gearing up for the release of Disney’s upcoming Freakier Friday on August 8, reflected on how witnessing her parents lose their careers profoundly impacted her own approach to fame and longevity. “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 said. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”
Despite contemplating her eventual exit from the spotlight, Curtis isn’t slowing down just yet. In addition to Freakier Friday, she’s starring in a reboot of Murder, She Wrote, producing The Lost Bus (a drama about the 2018 Camp Fire starring Matthew McConaughey), and both starring in and executive producing Scarpetta, a crime series based on Patricia Cornwell’s bestsellers alongside Nicole Kidman, greenlit for two seasons at Prime Video.
She’ll also be seen in James L Brooks’ upcoming ensemble film Ella McCay with Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edebiri, Rebecca Hall and Albert Brooks, and is set to lead and produce the psychological thriller Sender, starring alongside Britt Lower, David Dastmalchian, and Anna Baryshnikov.
