Jamie Lee Curtis is reflecting on the cruel criticism she acquired early on in her profession.
When the actress, 66, starred within the 1985 romance drama “Perfect,” she claims the cinematographer made a comment that not solely damage her, however triggered her to go underneath the knife.
“He was like, ‘Yeah I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy,’” Curtis recalled to Sharyn Alfonsi on Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes.”
“I was 25. For him to say that was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished, I ended up having some plastic surgery.”
The movie was directed by James Bridges and adopted reporter Adam Lawrence (John Travolta), who falls in love with aerobics teacher Jessie Wilson (Curtis) throughout an task.
The “Halloween” star defined that going ahead with the operation didn’t go properly.
“That’s just not what you want to do when you’re 25 or 26,” Curtis defined. “I regretted it immediately and have kind of, sort of regretted it since.”
“I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate,” she continued. “You know, drank a little bit, never to excess, never any big public demonstrations. I was very quiet, very private about it. But it it became a dependency for sure.”
Curtis now has 26 years of sobriety underneath her belt and might see the challenge by a extra appreciative lens.
“Of course, I look really good in a leotard,” Curtis mentioned, referencing her iconic scene from the movie. “Believe me, I’ve seen enough pictures of me in that leotard where even I go like, ‘Really? Come on.’”
“It went on like seven minutes,” Curtis teased about making the unique scene. “It’s a lot.”
Curtis even recreated the sequence in January with Jimmy Fallon, which was aired on “The Tonight Show,” leotard and all.
In the meantime, this isn’t the primary time Curtis has spoken concerning the remark, which she beforehand shared was made by Gordon Willis.
“One day, I was on the movie ‘Perfect,’ and Gordon Willis, the great cameraman, looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m not shooting her today,’” she revealed to The New Yorker in 2019. “I was puffy that day, for whatever reason. I was mortified. Right after that movie I went and had an eye job. That’s when I found Vicodin, and the cycle of addiction began with that.”
That very same 12 months, the daughter of actress Janet Leigh and actor Tony Curtis spoke to Selection for the “Recovery Issue” and dove deeper into her beauty surgical procedure.
“I naturally had puffy eyes. If you see photographs of me as a child, I look like I haven’t slept,” Curtis recalled. “I’ve just always been that person, and we were shooting a scene in a courtroom with that kind of high, nasty fluorescent light, and it came around to my coverage in the scene, and [the cameraman] said, ‘I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are too puffy.’”
The remark made the actress really feel “mortified and so embarrassed,” so she determined to have a “routine plastic surgery to remove the puffiness.”
Shortly after, Curtis grew to become hooked on Vicodin.
“I was the wildly controlled drug addict and alcoholic,” admitted the star. “I never did it when I worked. I never took drugs before 5 p.m. I never, ever took painkillers at 10 in the morning. It was that sort of late afternoon and early evening—I like to refer to it as the warm-bath feeling of an opiate…I chased that feeling for a long time.”
In 2021, the Hollywood icon confessed why she feels cosmetic surgery is detrimental to right now’s society.
“I tried plastic surgery and it didn’t work. It got me addicted to Vicodin. I’m 22 years sober now,” she reiterated to Quick Firm. “The current trend of fillers and procedures, and this obsession with filtering, and the things that we do to adjust our appearance on Zoom are wiping out generations of beauty. Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.”
Curtis additionally feels social media has altered folks’s self-perception and has pushed comparability to an all-time excessive.
“It’s like giving a chainsaw to a toddler,” she mentioned. “We just don’t know the longitudinal effect, mentally, spiritually, and physically, on a generation of young people who are in agony because of social media, because of the comparisons to others. All of us who are old enough know that it’s all a lie. It’s a real danger to young people.”
Curtis, in the meantime, has lengthy been a powerful proponent of embracing growing older and loving herself in each stage.
“I’m trying to own it. Isn’t that what life is supposed to be? We grow up, we learn, we do all these things. Now we have to own it,” she instructed As we speak in 2024. “We have to own who we are, be who we are, and be in full acceptance of who we are and what we’re not. And I think that’s the beauty of me right now—owning it.”
Curtis has additionally taken a step again from being a folks pleaser.
“I’m sober for a long time, long time—almost 25 years,” the star expressed. “And the best thing I learned last year in recovery was people aren’t pleased when you stop people-pleasing … It was as if the greatest sage arrived on me.”
She added, “I say what I mean, I mean what I say and I try not to say it mean.”
