Jamie Lee Curtis can make a body look borrowed and a foolish character worth caring about. We value her physical comedy, though too many of her films rely on her to make weak writing bearable.
Fi1m perspective
In Freakier Friday (2025), Jamie Lee Curtis examines her hands as though somebody has given her the wrong pair. Playing a teenager inside grandmother Tess Coleman, she slumps and holds her phone at arm’s length, letting the body explain the predicament before the dialogue can. We laughed aloud at her attempt to impersonate a grandmother in public, because the effort to look natural is so painfully visible. Nisha Ganatra’s sequel has more swapping than it can manage, but Curtis commits to the embarrassment without asking us to admire how game she is.
Her film career began in horror as Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), her film debut, before she turned to comedy with Trading Places (1983) and A Fish Called Wanda (1988). That move gave her physical timing more room to work. In the comedies, she lets people look ridiculous while giving us reasons to care what happens to them.
James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) tests that generosity more than it should. Curtis gives Helen comic authority and enough substance to make the marriage worth following, even when the screenplay makes us wish the action would resume. Cameron takes too much pleasure in punishing his characters. She keeps getting laughs, but the performance cannot make the film’s cruelty disappear.
The partnership with Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday (2003) gives the later comedy a firmer basis: two people who have stopped listening must live with the consequences. Freakier Friday keeps interrupting that simple idea to check that we remember its predecessor. Curtis’s physical jokes survive the four-way plotting, but even she cannot make the callbacks feel necessary. The pity is that her scenes with Lohan suggest the sequel could have trusted their affection and left some of the reminders out.
Smaller parts can leave her with too little to do. In Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion (2023), she is good fun for two scenes as Madame Leota, a head in a crystal ball. Scarpetta (2026) gives her more to work with as Dorothy, whose aggrieved bickering with Nicole Kidman makes the surrounding dialogue sound worse. The sisters are the reason to stay, but the competing timelines keep taking us away from them. Eight episodes is a long time to spend waiting for another argument.
Biography
Jamie Lee Curtis is an American actress and producer. Born on 22 November 1958 in Los Angeles, California, she is the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. She made her screen debut in a 1977 episode of the television series Quincy, M.E. and her feature film debut as Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978).
Curtis has appeared in the Halloween franchise, including Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021). Her other notable roles include Ophelia in Trading Places (1983), Helen in True Lies (1994), Tess Coleman in Freaky Friday (2003), and Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). She played Madame Leota in Haunted Mansion (2023), reprised Tess Coleman and served as producer on Freakier Friday (2025), and portrayed Dorothy in the series Scarpetta (2026). She has received an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards and other accolades.
