The last (and yet, most fitting) thing you’d expect to receive on Halloween is a cold call from OG Final Girl, Jamie Lee Curtis.
But, moments after Entertainment Weekly sent a request to the star’s team for more information on the Oscar-winning actress’ involvement in producing filmmaker Zeberiah Newman’s upcoming documentary about ’90s fitness icon Susan Powter, much like Laurie Strode herself, the Halloween franchise star took matters into her own hands.
At the end of a wide-ranging discussion about stepping into her power via her own production company, Comet Pictures, and several upcoming projects (also including Freakier Friday, The Lost Bus, and the Nicole Kidman-starring series Scarpetta, which she’s currently shooting in Nashville, Tenn.) we ended our conversation with a look back (and forward) on the 65-year-old’s legacy with the John Carpenter-created slasher franchise.
“I have hung up my bell-bottoms and my pale blue button-down shirt, and I have relinquished [Laurie] to the ages with a warm, ‘aloha,’ and a thanks for all the years and memories,” Curtis tells EW when asked if she’s truly done with the Halloween movie series for good, after 2022’s Halloween Ends — billed as the final installment in director David Gordon Green‘s three-film revival of the classic series, which began with 2018’s Halloween — dealt what felt like a deadly, permanent blow to any potential that masked serial killer Michael Myers could return for more mayhem.
“And yet,” Curtis continues, “if I’ve learned anything in my 65 years on the planet, it’s never say never. Goodbye.” And then she promptly hung up, without another word.
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The horror icon has played Laurie Strode, Myers’ sister, seven times throughout her career, including in her breakout role in the first Halloween film in 1978.
To date, the franchise (which also includes several films that don’t star Curtis, including filmmaker Rob Zombie’s 2007 attempted reboot) has earned almost $900 million at the box office, with Green’s 2018 revival — which re-introduced Laurie as a traumatized doomsday recluse with a daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) — pulling in the biggest haul of the entire collection with $260 million globally.
In an EW cover story for the 2018 film, Curtis told us that she endured and intense emotional reckoning when re-visiting the trauma Myers inflicted on Laurie over the years. “I started crying the day I arrived,” she said at the time. “I didn’t stop crying until the day I left.”