Jamie Lee Curtis returned to her roots for the recent “Halloween” trilogy but admits if she knew it was three films, she likely would have passed …
Jamie Lee Curtis made it clear when she returned for the recent “Halloween” reboot that started in 2018 that it would serve as her final appearance as Laurie Strode in the long running horror franchise.
But it turns out the Oscar winning actress originally just signed on for one film and only found out later that director David Gordon Green was planning a trilogy, which obviously required her for all three films. Curtis admitted during a recent panel at SXSW that had she known that at the start, she likely wouldn’t have returned to “Halloween” at all.
“If they had come to me and said it’s going to be a trilogy, I don’t think I would have said yes,” Curtis said. “Jason Blum is notoriously cheap. How do you make low-budget movies? You don’t pay people. That’s the model.
“While we were editing and doing the mix, David said, ‘You know it’s a trilogy.’ I was like, ‘Uh, no.’”
Realizing that she was expected to appear in all three films, Curtis used that to her advantage to strike a deal with Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum for a development deal that would allow her to create her own projects for the future.
“I went to Jason Blum and said, ‘I have some ideas, maybe you could give me a first look deal, just pay me a little money,’” Curtis said. “I said to Jason, ‘How about a little development deal?’ And I owed him two ‘Halloween’ movies, so what was he gonna say?”
Now Curtis has been working alongside Blum to develop new projects, which included “The Lost Bus,” which was just recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Considering how the “Halloween” trilogy came to a conclusion with the remarkably awful “Halloween Ends,” perhaps Curtis’ instincts were right on the money about not coming back for three more films and perhaps stopping at one was the right idea.
In the end, it worked out for Curtis, who admitted during her panel that she owes her career to the horror genre but she’s never actually been a fan of those kinds of films.
“I’m in love with the independent filmmaking aspect of the genre,” Curtis said. “So because of that, the genre aspect, I appreciate, and I owe my life to the genre, but I don’t have to pretend to you that I’m a genre girl, and that I love it.”
Curtis is currently appearing in the Amazon Prime series “Scarpetta” alongside Nicole Kidman, which was another project she brought to Blum’s attention as part of her overall deal with the studio.
