Jamie Lee Curtis names the “best thing” she has ever done in her career
This year was collection season for Jamie Lee Curtis. After decades of being one of the most reliable genre actors in modern cinema, Curtis was finally given her due with Hollywood’s highest honour: an Academy Award. Her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once might have been the one that finally got her Oscar gold, but according to Curtis herself, it wasn’t her best role.
That distinction does to Helen Tasker, the housewife-turned-hesitant spy in James Cameron’s True Lies. “You know the great thing about True Lies is that it was a character,” Curtis explained to Vanity Fair. “Helen Tasker was just absolutely maybe the best thing I’ll ever get to go do.”
“At the centre of this action-centric movie was a domestic love story. Everything happened organically because of the centered love story,” Curtis said. “Nothing was superfluous. Nothing was added on to justify some trope of an action movie. Everything was organic to the characters and the fact that she was not good at it was sort of perfect. There were a couple of places in it where Helen’s a little clumsy. She trips down the hall, she sort of drops the gun.”
One of the most famous instances of Curtis’ character being slightly off-balance was the film’s tango scene. “Arnold and I had rehearsed the tango months before and then we needed a refresher course two days before the tango sequence which is the end scene of the movie. My quad muscles, because I do a lot of lunging, were burned out by the end of the rehearsal,” Curtis recalled.
“The next day I remember getting up and going like, ‘Oh, I can barely walk.’ Like they were done. And we had to this over and over and over and over again. And you will see in the end of the tango I can’t hold myself up and I actually slip.”
Curtis was sure the mistake was going to be left on the cutting room floor, but Cameron had other ideas. “I was so angry that he kept in the movie because my ego wanted the tango to be really fabulous and to have ended it on a high,” Curtis said. “But what was so great about it was that it was completely Helen, that Helen no matter what is still going to make a mistake.”
Check out Curtis discussing True Lies down below.
