Jamie Lee Curtis has opened up on Hollywood’s standards for beauty and aging.
Appearing as a guest on Michelle Obama‘s podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” Curtis didn’t hold back as she talked about the expectations placed on women.
Curtis: Aging Gracefully Is “A Part Of Self-Love”
“You’ve changed the notion of what it means to age in the public eye,” commented Michelle Obama. “You believe in aging. You believe in the beauty of it.”
“**** happens, aging happens,” Curtis agreed, saying “it’s coming for all of us, by the way.”
“It’s not just Hollywood, it’s also the technology, it’s also social media, it’s also filtering… It’s all fakery.”
“And it’s the idea that you’re gonna tell someone that this is going to change you and make you better,” she continued. “So it’s this cycle of bull****, but it preys on our base insecurities, which for many people is what they look like.”
Getty“Now, I’ve never been pretty. And I’m saying it out loud.,” she said. “I was cute, I can look good… [but] that was not my ticket. And that’s very important for me because that was never the thing I relied on.”
She also discussed the surgical work that she has partaken in. “I have succumbed, and have talked about it many times, to trying all the things. I’ve sucked the fat, I’ve cut the fat… and it doesn’t work,” she admitted.
“Because you ultimately are looking in the mirror and realizing you’ve used something outside of yourself to change something to make you, quote, better. But you’re not better because you’re still the same person as you were before.”
“For me, accepting that I look the way I look is part of self-love,” she revealed.
Curtis Gave MORE In Magazine Shoot
Curtis also discussed her infamous shoot with MORE Magazine. According to an Instagram post, she posed in a photo with “no makeup and no air brushing and retouching.”
“Now, I did that magazine, MORE magazine, years ago where I took off my clothes. And the reason I did that is because I was a cover girl of magazines, and again, people were comparing themselves to me the same way I would compare myself to someone else,” she told Obama and Robinson. “And I know what it feels like to look at a picture of a beautiful woman and go, ‘Oh, really? I’m never gonna look like that.'”
“I’m promoting a book for children about self-esteem and and I was doing the cover of More magazine and I realized, I was a liar,” she recalled. “Because if I was paying attention to what I wrote, I wouldn’t have done plastic surgery, I wouldn’t have done liposuction.”
So, she chose to do a photo “au natural” that showed her true self.
“And that was something that was in 2001, we’re in 2026. But that was even then me understanding that what we’re selling is fradulent. It has only gotten crazier,” she concluded.
