While Jamie Lee Curtis has spent the last few weeks making the rounds on her latest press tour for the upcoming Halloween film, the nearly 60-year-old actress has dropped a number of interesting facts. First, she revealed that she was (allegedly) a candidate for Linda Blair’s role in The Exorcist and now, she’s sharing how at one point during the filming of the original Halloween, she believed she’d be fired.
Speaking in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Curtis revealed that after the first day of production, director John Carpenter called her. And at the time, she thought the worst.
“I remember the phone rang in my apartment and my roommate Tina said, ‘Jamie, John Carpenter’s on the phone.’ It scared me, because I didn’t know if he was going to fire me. Often I’d heard people got fired. He was on the other end of the phone and he said, ‘Hey darling, it’s John. I just want to tell you I thought today went great. I‘m so happy.’”
Of course, as we all know, Curtis managed to hang on to the role and would later reprise it four more times over the course of the next several decades. That’d be shortly after the first film in Halloween II, once more in Halloween H20, a piss-poor cameo in Halloween: Resurrection and just recently in the new effort from David Gordon Green and Danny McBride.
Although many diehard fans of the series will insist no one else can play the part (and indeed, it’s admirable that Curtis has returned to her roots after such a long career), I think that’s a load of bullshit. Look, when it comes to horror, characters aren’t exactly built upon stone foundations. More often than not, they’re disposable, just another face to meet the end of someone’s knife.
Still, we’re pleased that Curtis has hung around this long in the role of Laurie Strode and you can catch her again when Halloween creeps into theaters next week.
