Jamie Lee Curtis: The new 'Halloween' could be 'my last film' (exclusive)

Jamie Lee Curtis has hinted that she’s planning to retire from acting, and says the new Halloween would be the ideal film to bow out on.

The 59-year-old actress shot to fame playing Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic, and now she’s back playing Strode forty years later in David Gordon Green’s sequel of the same name. She tells Yahoo calling time on her career now – with this film – would give her career “perfect symmetry”.

The character has defined her career in much the same way Michael Myers has defined Laurie’s, but Curtis is proud that it’s this role in particular that she’s become synonymous with.

“Halloween is my life,” Curtis tells Yahoo Movies UK.

“It was my first movie, it may be my last movie. It is a character – at its core – who is intelligent, and capable, and a dreamer, and romantic. I mean all of the attributes you would want for your daughter or my daughter. All of them were epitomised by [director and co-writer] John Carpenter and [screenwriter] Debra Hill in Laurie Strode.”

As Strode, Curtis has battled Michael Myers many times since the 1978 film, including in Halloween II the first sequel in 1981, in 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (alongside her mother Janet Leigh), and in its 2002 follow up Halloween: Resurrection.

However, 2018’s Halloween – written by Danny McBride and David Gordon Green – acts as a direct sequel to the very first film. It asks fans to forget the nine other sequels and remakes that have come before, which – due to the varying degrees of quality of those films – they’ll probably be more than happy to do.

In the 40 years between the first Halloween and this new instalment, serial slasher Michael Myers has been incarcerated in a maximum security facility, while Strode has been dealing with her trauma by preparing for his return, much to the detriment of her personal life and family relationships. Laurie has grown in many ways, but all for the better, explains Curtis.

“She has to fight for her life,” she says, “so then you add resilient, brave, clever – all of the things you want someone in their real life to have, because life will throw you into situations that you need to be able to react to.”

“So if you combine all of the qualities [of Laurie] from the first movie and the last movie, which is a movie about generational trauma. What happens if you don’t talk about… if you don’t get the kind of mental health services that Laurie Strode needed, that’s also an important thing. So, if you combine those two movies and pick words to describe both women, in both times 40 years apart, I would hope those would be all words you would use about me.”

But “last movie” Jamie? Tell us it aint so!

“I don’t know what the ‘eff’ I’m gonna do tomorrow,” Curtis replies.

“So, could [Halloween] be my last movie? Absolutely. Would it be perfect symmetry? Absolutely.”

Halloween is in cinemas from 19 October. Watch a trailer below.

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