Jamie Lee Curtis has a secret to getting more on-screen time in movies, even in busy ensemble films like 2019’s “Knives Out.”
Don’t go back to your trailer.
“Here’s the deal,” Curtis told Insider at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Saturday. “It’s my secret sauce. Don’t go back to your trailers. Trailers are not your friend. Jonathan Wang, our producer of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ will tell you I never left the set. I don’t believe in it.”
When director Rian Johnson filmed 2019’s “Knives Out,” for instance, he incorporated Curtis into more scenes than he had originally planned, simply because she was hanging around on set all the time.
“He once called me his MVP on ‘Knives Out,’ and when he was asked why, he said, ‘Because she was always on set,'” Curtis said, “‘She never left the set.’ He ended up using me in shots he wasn’t going to use me in because I was on set.”
Curtis isn’t wanting for screen time these days. The actor, who won a Golden Globe for her turn as disgruntled IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is perhaps busier now than she’s ever been. She has four projects currently in the works, including “Borderlands,” an adaptation of the popular video game, costarring Cate Blanchett.
The actor will also costar with Nicole Kidman in “Kay Scarpetta,” a TV adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s bestselling Kay Scarpetta books. Curtis, who will play the medical examiner’s sister Dorothy, is also executive producing the series, which Amazon is reportedly close to ordering two seasons of, according to Deadline.
Before those projects appear on the big and small screens, however, Curtis faces one of the biggest moments of her 46-year career as an Oscar nominee for best actress in a supporting role — a milestone she downplayed onstage at the Santa Barbara Film International Festival during a Q&A with film critic and historian Leonard Maltin.
“I’m the only Oscar nominee who has ever sold yogurt that makes you shit,” she mused, referring to her famous ads for Activia.
Curtis also told Insider she does her best to stay grounded and not let the trappings of Hollywood influence her everyday life, which she shares with her husband Christopher Guest, and their two children, Ruby and Annie Guest.
“I’m a sober woman,” Curtis told Insider. “And so I like the phrase ‘chop wood, carry water.’ I just try not to focus on the show business part and just try to be a part of my family and my friends. I’m not drawn by all of the show business or ‘show-off’ business stuff.”