Jamie Lee Curtis does not like a mood board. This is what Empire discovered on our photoshoot: that trying to bend Jamie Lee Curtis into a predetermined plan is the quickest way to make her grumpy. “I was so grumpy!” she says a couple of days later over Zoom, laughing. She’d seen our suggested looks and she hated the poses, hated the clothes. She wanted to wear a Loewe blouse she saw Dan Levy wear on a red carpet, with a collar swept up like it was caught in the wind – the chicest thing she had ever seen – but most of all, she just wanted to be herself. Obviously, Empire went along with it – we’re not monsters. “As soon as we started shooting, I was the happiest person because I was free,” she says. “I was on fire! I was shaking because I felt that I had existed, and that I wasn’t trying to pretend to be anybody.”

This is a new era for Curtis. Having broken out in 1978 with John Carpenter’s Halloween, her career has spanned genres: she went from scream queen to comedy – earning BAFTA nominations for Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda, winning the former – before dangling below a helicopter in James Cameron’s explosive True Lies. But now she is finally getting to do what she always wanted to do – playing characters that are varied, complex, and real. In The Last Showgirl she plays Annette, a veteran Las Vegas cocktail waitress and best friend to Pamela Anderson’s Shelly, battling a gambling addiction and diminishing hours. In The Bear she stressed everyone out as Donna Berzatto, Carmy’s emotionally volatile mother, overwhelmed in the kitchen. And then there was IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, which won her an Academy Award.

Clearly, magic happens if you let Jamie Lee Curtis do what she wants to do. “I blew up the mood boards because I’m not who you think I am,” she says, defiant. “That’s probably the biggest crux of it: I’m not who you think I am. Let me show you. I am way more than you think I am.”

Read more at Empire.