Jamie Lee Curtis’ Epic 2025: Freakier, Louder, StrongerThe Oscar and Emmy winner just had her biggest opening in years — and is an OG influencer for her fellow actors
When Freaky Friday became a late summer box office hit in 2003, it was a movie-star anointment for Lindsay Lohan, then 17, whose only previous lead role was as a child five years earlier in The Parent Trap. Easier to overlook at the time, though, was the comeback narrative for her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, then 44, who was nearly a decade past her last major hit, 1995’s True Lies, and had spent the late ’90s making flops (Fierce Creatures, Drowning Mona) or coasting on her scream queen iconography (Halloween H20 and, not long after, the even more forgotten Halloween: Resurrection). Freakier Friday, which opened in theaters last week and earned $45 million worldwide during its opening weekend on a reported budget of $45 million, marks a remarkable role reversal. Lohan is now on the comeback trail, building on goodwill from a handful of recent Netflix rom-coms, as well as a broader cultural reconsideration of her rough tabloid treatment in the 2000s. Curtis, meanwhile, is now an Oscar winner, currently a strong frontrunner for her second Emmy in as many years as a guest actress in a comedy — and probably far more of a social media star than you realize. The success of Freakier Friday proves something that has been evident for a while now: Jamie Lee Curtis, 66, has reached the peak of her powers.
An Oscar win four decades into your career can do that for you, but her campaign for Everything Everywhere All at Once back in 2022 was really more confirmation of a power that had always been there. Curtis happily took on the role of chief cheerleader for the entire cast, showering praise on her co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Ke-Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu and using her Hollywood connections and existing fame to bring attention to the film. I remember the first time I ever realized Everything Everywhere even existed, thanks to a Curtis Instagram post revealing that to play the dowdy office administration Deirdre, she stopped sucking in her stomach — “I’ve never felt more free creatively and physically.”  Curtis proudly called herself a “nepo baby” during her Oscar campaign. She shared her joy that being nominated for Everything Everywhere put her in the same company as her mother and father, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, both Oscar nominees (neither won). With her best supporting actress Oscar win, though, Curtis has, in at least that way, surpassed them and built a kind of stardom that has nothing at all to do with her parents’ legacy. Part of it is simply the way Hollywood has changed. Curtis’ big Everything Everywhere follow-up was her multi-season guest star turn on The Bear, a pivot to television that would have been incomprehensible for Oscar winners of Leigh’s era. But it was a brilliant move for her daughter, who stole the show in an episode crowded with stars (the season 2 standout “Fishes”) and won her first Emmy; her second, for the equally harrowing season 3 episode “Ice Chips,” is quite possibly on the way in September. Though the awards shine on The Bear has faded a bit, Curtis’ scenes remain an undeniable highlight, even in this most recent, uneven season. 
An Internet Influencer
But her most powerful work, truly, may well be on her Instagram — and I promise that’s a compliment. Curtis has continued to be an effective co-star cheerleader, posting frequently about her The Last Showgirl co-star Pamela Anderson during that film’s David vs. Goliath Oscar campaign earlier this year. Now, Curtis has turned her spotlight to Lohan, with captions like “ATTENTION WORLD! I HAVE BEEN TO THE LOHANAISSANCE AND IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN YOU REMEMBERED!” We still don’t know how far all this celebration might take Lohan, but for Anderson, it sure felt like she came extremely close to her first Oscar nomination last fall — and that Curtis herself was close to sneaking into the best supporting actress race, too. (Both actresses received shocking nominations from the Screen Actors Guild, a sign perhaps that Curtis’ biggest audience is her fellow actors.)  Of course, all this posting can come with consequences — Curtis made probably unintentional headlines over the weekend for suggesting one Freakier Friday review was “a tad harsh.” But when Page Six picks up your Instagram beef only to call you “bold” and quote your many defenders, you may fairly start to consider yourself bulletproof. None of this unvarnished enthusiasm and real-talk is new. In 2002, a truly dire era for women’s magazines and body images, Curtis famously demanded a photoshoot for More magazine that included an unretouched image of herself in her underwear. She was ahead of her time back then, even for herself; as she wrote on Instagram in 2023, that photo shoot “began a cycle of shame and addiction that luckily I have been able to recover from, one day at a time.” But now she seems to be meeting the moment, giddily doing press for Freakier Friday alongside Lohan and their Gen Z co-stars, Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, matching them all beat for beat.  And here’s the real kicker: She’s not even done for the year! The Toronto Film International Festival will bring the world premiere of The Lost Bus, the Paul Greengrass-directed thriller set during California’s deadly 2018 Camp Fire. Curtis produced the film alongside Jason Blum but doesn’t have a role in it; Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera lead the cast. The TIFF premiere slot suggests that Apple has awards season hopes for this one, quite possibly because they know they’ve got an A-plus campaigner on their side. And then she’ll be back onscreen in December as part of the sprawling ensemble of James L. Brooks’ Ella McCay. You can tell 20th Century Studios thinks Curtis is an audience draw by how incredibly prominent she is in the trailer, possibly getting even more screen time than Emma Mackey, who actually plays the titular star.  I’ve already shared my hopes that Ella McCay might be a proper comeback for Brooks, who perfected a winsome, melancholy kind of dramedy with Broadcast News and hasn’t quite gotten back to it since. Even if Ella McCay doesn’t meet my admittedly high expectations, though, it will be yet another feather in the cap for Curtis, who just headlined one of the biggest opening weekends of her career. Underestimate her this awards season — or at any other point, really — at your own peril.
Now that we’ve definitively answered the question of his movie stardom, Pedro Pascal is making the kind of moves that are exactly what you should do when you’re on top of the world. He’s reportedly on his way to starring in the Searchlight film Behemoth!, which will be the first feature written and directed by Tony Gilroy since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. Gilroy, of course, has been busy making Disney+’s Andor, the best show on television and ample evidence of his gifts for writing morally complex characters and dense, satisfying plots. He’s an Emmy nominee this year for the show’s best drama series nomination and, incredibly, the original lyrics to the protest song “We Are the Ghor.” Pascal will be there too, of course, nominated for his presumably final season as the star of The Last of Us. Andor may not have gotten all the Emmy attention it deserved. (Pause here as I get mad all over again about the snubs of Diego Luna, Genevieve O’Reilly and Stellan Skarsgård.) Still, the larger Disney enterprise is clearly happy to keep working with Gilroy as well as Pascal, currently leading the studio’s Fantastic Four reboot. Using the clout they’ve earned from working on Disney IP and making something entirely original, and reportedly “about a cellist”? Yup, Gilroy and Pascal have really figured out this “one for them, one for me” business.
 I’m in New York this week catching up on movies ahead of fall festival season, and tonight I’m attending the Brooklyn premiere of Spike Lee’s latest film, Highest 2 Lowest, which comes to theaters this weekend and will be on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5. I’m still puzzled by this treatment for a movie that stars the incredibly bankable Denzel Washington, but perhaps tonight’s screening will help clear things up.
And for one last plug — this Friday will bring the kick-off of our festival season draft on Prestige Junkie After Party, and having recorded this podcast episode already, I can promise you really won’t want to miss it. Christopher Rosen, our pal Chris Feil and I came up with a points system for every film playing in the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals, weighting factors from winning the top prize in Venice (50 points) to being spotted walking down the street in Telluride (2 points). It’s a fun, somewhat silly but still deeply researched spin on awards season coverage that really sums up what we’re going for at the After Party, and now’s a great time to sign up! For $5 a month, you’ll get that and so much more. See you there!
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