Jamie Lee Curtis names her best on-screen lover: “He was my favourite”
It may not be conventional, but Jamie Lee Curtis‘ career-defining onscreen relationship will always be the one between the actor and a serial killer with a penchant for a boiler suit and William Shatner mask.
The second-generation star has achieved more success than most in Hollywood during a career that’s been flying high since the late 1970s, but despite her status as an Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning icon with a litany of classics, cult favourites and box office hits under her belt, Laurie Strode is always going to be remembered as her signature role.
There’s no shame in that when John Carpenter’s Halloween ushered in a new age for cinematic slashers, and she’d go on to play the character six more times in sequels of varying quality, and Curtis would be the first to admit that not only does she owe everything to the legendary scream queen, but it’ll be the first movie that comes up whenever anybody discusses her career.
Whether it’s running for her life in the Halloween franchise, sharing a tender moment with Michelle Yeoh while wearing hotdog fingers in Everything Everywhere All at Once, or seducing her own fictional husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in True Lies, to name but three, the Oscar winner has been part of some unusual onscreen dynamics whether they’re romantically inclined or not.
However, only one co-star gets the honour of being named as her greatest movie paramour, and Curtis doesn’t even have to think twice about it. “For me, it’s Dan Aykroyd,” she told Film Ink in no uncertain terms. “I’ve been in three movies with Dan Aykroyd and I love him. He was my favourite onscreen lover.”
High praise indeed, with Curtis pointing to Trading Places as the pinnacle of her in-camera amorousness. She may have been embarrassed by certain aspects of the 1983 comedy, but if Aykroyd takes the cake for being her finest onscreen lover, then her Ophelia sharing a bed with his Louis Winthorpe III definitely isn’t among them.
They’d reunite almost a decade after Trading Places for the emotional sledgehammer of Macaulay Culkin’s My Girl, which couldn’t have been more different from their first collaboration after reducing audiences to emotional rubble when the young protagonist succumbs to his life-threatening allergy to bees in a moment that didn’t so much seek to tug at the heartstrings than rip them right out of the body.
Their third – and so far final – union came on opposite sides of the fence when they each played one-half of the two warring couples at the centre of the wretched festive comedy Christmas with the Kranks in 2004. Three films, only one time playing de facto love interests, but more than enough for Aykroyd to find a very special place in Curtis’ heart.
