There is no statue of Jamie Lee Curtis that can be found anywhere in the United States, I learned from a cursory and near-debilitating Google search. My heart immediately sank. Things didn’t improve when a continued search had me discovering – and “much to my chagrin” doesn’t quite cover it – that there are no known statues of Jamie Lee Curtis, in existence anywhere. Lincoln gets a whole memorial, and Jamie Lee Curtis can’t get her face carved into a mountainside? Unsurprisingly, I’m not one for manual labour, so I guess I’ll do the next best thing: attempt to summarise my love for a woman that, as Ariana DeBose recently noted, is “all of us”.
What that means exactly, we may never know, but a fact transgresses: Jamie Lee is a rare famous person that we seem to be collectively rooting for.
The daughter of screen icons Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, the now 64-year-old broke out in John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween, a role she’d go on to reprise in six sequels/reboots. Five years later, in 1983, she earned a BAFTA for her work in John Landis’s Trading Places. Her roles in the subsequent 40 years have been notably wide-ranging and included James Cameron’s True Lies, Mark Waters’s Freaky Friday, and, most recently, her BAFTA-nominated performance in the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once. In addition to her work on screen, Curtis has become known over the years for her sleek, sophisticated but never matronly style (one hand on the hip is practically her signature), her natural grey pixie crop, and, especially to a chronically online generation, for being unabashedly outspoken on a range of issues.
Whether she’s defending nepo babies, denouncing Kanye’s antisemitism, reminding Lea Michele that she hasn’t won a Tony Award, kissing co-star Michelle Yeoh, or saying she’s down to star in Season 3 of The White Lotus despite not knowing what it is, Jamie Lee Curtis remains a topic of conversation. Even though many are rooting against her at the Oscars, more hopeful that her Everything Everywhere All At Once co-star Stephanie Hsu or Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Angela Bassett will take home the Best Supporting Actress prize, she still manages to stay beloved. There’s a secret sauce here, and I think it’s worth trying to reverse engineer the recipe so we can attempt to parse out some key ingredients.
There’s a now common press cycle for JLC. She goes viral. Internet reacts. She exasperatedly responds to the reaction, and in doing so spawns a second wind of virality. Need an example? I’ll give you two in just a moment. But first it’s worth explaining that Jamie Lee Curtis loves the internet. I thought about scrolling down to find her very first Instagram post but then realised with nearly 7,000 posts, who has the time? (I’m chronically online and have less than half of that). This is a key piece of information: whereas many might cower over a slip-up or a misinterpretation, Jamie Lee’s response is always to explain, apologise, double down; anything that makes it clear that she’s engaged.
And it’s usually fire! For instance, she took a 2010 Daily Mail headline, “Don’t mess with Jamie Lee Curtis! Furious actress gives her friend a roasting”, which included photos that appeared to show her giving a friend a verbal lashing, and nine years later turned it into a meme by recreating the moment anew. When a clip promoting her charity, My Hand in Yours, during a 2021 appearance on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills went viral, JLC leaned all the way in and converted a fleeting moment of notoriety into $45,000 of sales for the charity. In one day.
These are examples of JLC’s savvy. There’s also a dissonance which sets her apart from some of her social media contemporaries like Lynda Carter and Dionne Warwick (the unabashed joy their tweets bring me deserves an investigation all of its own), women of a certain age who can adapt to the internet’s hyper-specific parlance. Take the nepo baby discourse that erupted in December. At first Jamie Lee was outraged (“The current conversation about nepo babies is just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt,” she wrote at the time). By February, she was making jokes about her own nepo baby status to a room full of laughs at the SAGs.
Exhibit B: The “trauw-ma” meme. Throughout the press tour for 2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills, Curtis spoke repeatedly about trauma, or as she called it, “trauw-ma”. Generational trauw-ma. Family trauw-ma. Collective trauw-ma. A supercut eventually went viral in articulating the malaise many of us were feeling in the midst of Covid. In October 2022, with the meme now in the rearview, Curtis hit reverse and put the perfect button on it during promotion of Halloween Ends: “Yes, I’ve seen the fucking meme, so don’t worry. It was funny. But the movie also made a fucking fortune, so fuck you!”
And when Jamie Lee Curtis says “fuck you”, you really, and I mean this in the best way possible, feel denigrated, but also revitalised. Why? Because she is honest, kind and above all uncalculating. This comes through in every “fuck you” and is, in part, what distinguishes her from many of her peers, who often over-curate their online presence.
She gave a similar response when asked about DeBose’s rap, stating: “She is a fantastic talent. These people should shut the fuck up, back the fuck off, and let this woman just shine her light.” Being opinionated, punchy, crass and spicy is internet gold. All too often people attempt this by choosing to say the most outrageous, contrarian, mean-spirited thing possible. Yet JLC proves, time and again, that laughing at yourself and rooting for others is a winning combo.
In a Hollywood ecosystem built on overwrought talking points and antiquated stunts, Jamie Lee Curtis – and now we’re veering into part of the speech I’d be making at the statue unveiling in, say, Santa Monica – is someone who stands firmly against the bullshit. To JLC, everything matters… but nothing matters, so long as you’re kind, and try to do your best by others. Case in point? Curtis said this upon the public coming out of her daughter Ruby as transgender: “You become a little more mindful about what you’re saying. How you’re saying it. You still mess up, I’ve messed up today twice. We’re human.” And that’s why Ariana DeBose wasn’t wrong.
But are we all JLC? Or, realistically, is she more an aspiration in living a life of kindness and goodness (hence why she deserves a monument)? Perhaps we’re not all JLC. And that’s okay. She embodies what we can strive to be – and pardon me while I quote her here: joyous, celebratory, sisterly, hot, spicy, and so incredibly talented.
