The two movies and two TV shows Jamie Lee Curtis called perfect: “It’s the combo platter”
It’s not an over-exaggeration to say that Jamie Lee Curtis has award-winning movies running through her blood, thanks to not only her esteemed parentage, both Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh being nominated for Academy Awards, but also in the fact that she is an Oscar winner herself with Everything Everywhere All at Once.
What made the fact that she picked up the industry’s biggest award even more impressive is that when she first read the screenplay for the Daniels’ movie, she apparently barely understood more than ‘one second’ of the script or the plot, although she did get to grips with her tax office character Deirdre Beaubeirdre right away.
The Oscar win put her squarely back in people’s minds after she had spent a good fifteen years or so post-Freaky Friday without a big hit, a run that came to an end thanks to the unexpected success of the Halloween reboot in 2018 and a leading role in Rian Johnson’s smash hit whodunnit Knives Out a year later, but it was undoubtedly the insane, twisting, genre mash-up Everything… in 2022 that relit a career that had been going since the late 1970s and her breakthrough in John Carpenter’s seminal first Halloween film.
Aside from the fact that Lee Curtis had two legends of cinema for parents, she is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge lover of cinema, expressing her admiration for classic films both recent and of years gone by, citing her father’s 1957 thriller The Sweet Smell of Success as one example and 2024’s multi-award-winning Anora as another.
But while picking her favourite ever TV shows, she mentioned a historic one-two from Francis Ford Coppola as perhaps the best of them all, saying, “The Godfather is a perfect movie. The Godfather, Part II is a perfect movie.”
Moving on to TV shows, she then added, “Breaking Bad is a perfect television show. Better Call Saul is a perfect show. But I have to pick one, so I’m going with Better Call Saul.”
Continuing, “It’s the combo platter of originality, writing, storytelling, character development, tension, mystery and incredibly beautiful visuals. Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman, even though that character was invented in Breaking Bad, [he] is clearly one of the greatest television characters ever.”
Better Call Saul is indeed one of those rare beasts as a spin-off that ranks alongside the original, and that some people even prefer, although Breaking Bad is thought of by many as possibly the best and most consistent television series ever made.
Again created and co-written by Vince Gilligan and starring his future Pluribus lead Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul acted as a prequel to Breaking Bad and was almost as successful, pulling in countless award nominations over a six-season run, including 53 Emmy nods, the most nominations without a win in history.
Lee Curtis, meanwhile, is coming off the back of another acclaimed performance in Pamela Anderson’s The Last Showgirl and also appears in another film, which is getting great reviews, the John Turturro movie The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Something of a love letter to the Big Apple over the decades, it features Turturro’s lifelong petty thief being forced into one final act of criminality to get a haul back.
