Jamie Lee Curtis: Please Refrain From Sucking

When I ask whether she's inclined to be as provocative on camera, she bristles at the word. "I don't have enough emotional strength to provoke," she protests. "To provoke means you have to be able to stand up and take the heat. I'm still flabbergasted that my role in _True Lies _ touched off a feminist protest, but so were the other 129 people who worked on that movie for seven months. We were absolutely dumbfounded, because none of us ever thought, let alone articulated, 'Isn't what Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is doing to his wife mean? The only way I could go out there comedically in those scenes was knowing I was very safe, being way supported, by Arnold, by Jim Cameron, by the script, by everyone on the crew wanting it to be great. I mean, there I was standing around in my panties, and Bill Paxton, who hadn't even started working in the movie, came to the set wearing only a little g-string. No, I'm not a provocative type, at all.

"What I do have," she admits, "is a sense of play. I like to eschew the stereotype, to blow open people's perceptions of show business, because I think this business is like a drug for people. [The public] wants to think the worst of people, to hear that people are horrible. Now, it's true that show business does wreak havoc on personal lives, because it's a fantasy world where you're working in a very sexually-charged environment in close quarters and people get very confused about what's real and what's fake. There's lots of misbehavior and bad choices, sure. But, like, I've been married since 1984 and, of the four show business couples that got married right that same time, three of us--Mariel Hemingway and her husband, Bette Midler and Martin von Haselberg, and Christopher [Guest] and I--are all still married. I like to use my whatever you want to call it--my exposure--to tell the truth about the business, because, rather than perpetuate the illusion, I say 'Let's make fun of it.' "

While it's impossible not to enjoy Curtis's fireball level of play in person, I wonder if perhaps not everyone gets her us well on screen. Despite a daring dramatic performance in Love Letters and whip-smart comic turns in Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies, she has yet to touch Sandra, Julia, Meg, Demi-level stardom and salary, let alone Anjelica Huston, Debra Winger or Meryl Streep-type prestige. I toss this query her way: Don't directors and producers get her?

"The way I've survived in this industry is that I don't give a shit that so-and-so hasn't gotten me or even talked to me about a job, let alone hired me," she asserts. "If they don't get it, what am I going to do? Call them and say, 'Get me! Please!'? I tell my agent, 'I don't want you calling a casting director, saying. "So, what about Jamie Lee Curtis as the older sister? I mean, I know that as written she's black and 14, but Jamie could do it.'" My position with my agent is, 'do not sell me. Just be a good sieve for what comes through. It embarrasses and humiliates me to think that you're going around pitching me to people that don't get it. If you're saying, 'You just have to meet her, then you'll get it,' then I say, 'Fuck them. If they don't get it, I don't want them to.' "

"The jobs that have made my career something on which I can look back with pride, they came to me. Jim Cameron got me. Having him call me at my house, his knowing that he needed someone who could deliver that stuff in True Lies, that was a dream experience, a gift. John Cleese, on A Fish Called Wanda, and our new one that reunites the film's cast, Fierce Creatures, got me a little less. I'm very happy with my level of 'gotness,' so I can admire Woody Allen and still not feel badly that he's never called me up, because obviously, he doesn't get me. That's fine. It allows me to be an actor in a world where he makes movies, and I do my work in movies with people who do get me."

How does Curtis react on reading about the $12 million and more being lavished on some actresses in the business? "For one thing, I don't read the trades unless I'm in a dentist's office and they're just there" she says. "Way too much is made about salaries. Stars flat-out get paid too much. I only hope those people who get $12 million a picture give a lot of that money away on philanthropy. Now, if somebody was going to pay me $12 million, I'm not going to say. Thank you very much, but just pay me $1 million.' I get paid a very good salary, but certainly not as much as many women in the movies. It may be that I work simply because I know that if I demanded a higher salary, they might go, 'Fuck, if we're gonna pay her that much, let's go pay her that much instead.' Frankly, I think that's kept me in the game a little bit longer than some other people who have priced themselves out of the industry."

When I wonder aloud whether Curtis wouldn't have liked a go at a hit comedy like Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping, Four Weddings and a Funeral or, say, a big-scale blockbuster like Batman, she declares, "I like what I'm not able to do. I'm bored with what I am in movies, so I don't admire anybody who's kind of in the same range as I am. I'm much more interested in people willing to sacrifice what seems like anything to get the work done, someone like Sean Penn--whose The Indian Runner was such a fabulous movie. I sat there with my mouth open."

"I've liked Gary Oldman from a long time ago. I meet someone like Meryl Streep and all I want to know is, 'When you were doing that scene in Sophie's Choice, did you wake up, swig some orange juice, get up the kids and feed them, play a little Nintendo with them, then just go and do that scene?' See, my facility as an actor isn't even close to that. I'm not even in the same room. You mentioned a lot of romantic comedies before. Usually I don't like them, because they set up my expectations to the point where I go home, look at my husband, who's definitely not wearing those baggy slacks and nice loafers I saw Hugh Grant wearing in some movie, and I go. 'Why aren't you charming like Hugh Grant?'"

Fine, but I've heard, in fact, that Curtis was considered for roles in a couple of those very same movies. "I'm not going there." she states, "because there is nothing I loathe more than an actor saying what part they turned down. I want to slap them and say, 'Who in the fuck are you to say that you owned that part before the person who played it? You didn't take the part, you asshole. You may have been offered it, but you didn't do it, so the part is theirs. Don't you dare try and take away a big chunk of that person's success by saying, I could have been in that movie instead of so-and-so.'"

OK, fine, but taking away nothing from Michelle Pfeiffer, couldn't Curtis have been a very credible Catwoman, for instance? She shrugs, "You know what the problem is? Those big, huge movies are dinosaurs. People rarely score in those movies, because by the time you're exposing film on the characters, those sets, the lighting, the costumes, the history of the piece are all in the way. I don't think Jim Carrey was funny for one second in Batman Forever--and he's a very funny man. That movie didn't yield one good comic performance. Julia Roberts in Hook failed, because the movie was a big, elephant thing. I'm certainly not talented enough to deliver laughs in a vacuum.

"I've also never been particularly competitive about parts," Curtis adds. "I've never lobbied for one. I'm fairly sane about the way I get work. I'm fairly comfortable about the way work comes to me. When it stops coming, I will stop looking for it. I once believed, quite incorrectly, that something would change when I had success. Absolutely nothing changed, except that I got more famous. Your work as an actor will not change your life.

"I am certainly not the one to whom the [studios] are going to go first. There is a whole slew of 35-year-old women working, with a myriad of talent and styles, all of them capable of doing stuff I do. But I stopped thinking about stuff like. 'If you're a leading lady, you can't play a mom.' I've played moms in the last seven pictures I've done. I'll play grandma tomorrow. I got a call yesterday to do a TV series and if the series were good and if I wasn't on a break, I'd be doing it. My take on my career is like, 'OK. Great. What day do you want me?' The Heidi Chronicles is a perfect example. If they're gonna do that piece on stage, they're not going to call me. If they're going to do it for a feature, they're not going to call me. It just so happened that the feminist uproar over True Lies kept the movie in the public light long enough to make it a hit. Because of that, I would maybe be the first choice for The Heidi Chronicles as a TV movie. I was the one that could help them get it made. So I got to do the work." She adds. "And, I didn't suck."

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