Jamie Lee Curtis has opened up about the painful moment that sent her down a path of plastic surgery.
Curtis was 25 when she starred alongside John Travolta in the 1985 drama, Perfect, which was directed by James Bridges.
The film centered on a romance between Travolta's character and Curtis’s aerobics instructor, Jessie Wilson. But despite its flashy storyline and iconic scenes, like Curtis’s now-famous leotard workout, the behind-the-scenes reality left a lasting scar.
Speaking on 60 Minutes with Sharyn Alfonsi, the 66-year-old actress recalled a jarring remark made by a cinematographer on set.
“He was like, ‘Yeah I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy,’” she recounted. “I was 25. For him to say that was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished, I ended up having some plastic surgery.”
The Halloween actress revealed that the cosmetic surgery didn’t bring the relief she’d hoped for. “That’s just not what you want to do when you’re 25 or 26,” she admitted. “I regretted it immediately and have kind of, sort of regretted it since.”
Worse, it opened the door to opioid use. “I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate,” she explained. “You know, drank a little bit, never to excess, never any big public demonstrations. I was very quiet, very private about it. But it became a dependency for sure.”
The comment that sparked it all has haunted Curtis for decades, and she’s publicly identified the man behind it.
In a 2019 interview with The New Yorker, she revealed it was the late cinematographer Gordon Willis.
“One day, I was on the movie Perfect, and Gordon Willis, the great cameraman, looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m not shooting her today,’” she said. “I was puffy that day, for whatever reason. I was mortified. Right after that movie I went and had an eye job. That’s when I found Vicodin, and the cycle of addiction began with that.”
The Freaky Friday star has said she always had puffy eyes, even as a child. “I naturally had puffy eyes. If you see photographs of me as a child, I look like I haven’t slept,” she shared in a Variety interview.
“We were shooting a scene in a courtroom with that kind of high, nasty fluorescent light, and it came around to my coverage in the scene, and [the cameraman] said, ‘I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are too puffy,’” she added.
The humiliation drove her to get what she described as a “routine plastic surgery to remove the puffiness,” but the aftermath became anything but routine.
“I was the wildly controlled drug addict and alcoholic,” she later admitted. “I never did it when I worked. I never took drugs before 5 p.m. I never, ever took painkillers at 10 in the morning. It was that sort of late afternoon and early evening - I like to refer to it as the warm-bath feeling of an opiate…I chased that feeling for a long time.”
Today, the Oscar-winning star has 26 years of sobriety and a powerful perspective on beauty standards and the cost of cosmetic procedures.
“I tried plastic surgery and it didn’t work. It got me addicted to Vicodin. I’m 22 years sober now,” she told Fast Company in 2021. “The current trend of fillers and procedures, and this obsession with filtering, and the things that we do to adjust our appearance on Zoom are wiping out generations of beauty. Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.”
Curtis has also criticized the role social media plays in distorting body image. “It’s like giving a chainsaw to a toddler,” she warned. “We just don’t know the longitudinal effect, mentally, spiritually, and physically, on a generation of young people who are in agony because of social media, because of the comparisons to others. All of us who are old enough know that it’s all a lie. It’s a real danger to young people.”
Despite everything, she has chosen to embrace aging and authenticity. “I’m trying to own it. Isn’t that what life is supposed to be? We grow up, we learn, we do all these things. Now we have to own it,” she said on Today in 2024. “We have to own who we are, be who we are, and be in full acceptance of who we are and what we’re not. And I think that’s the beauty of me right now, owning it.”
“I’m sober for a long time, long time-almost 25 years. And the best thing I learned last year in recovery was people aren’t pleased when you stop people-pleasing… It was as if the greatest sage arrived on me," she said, concluding that her current motto is: “I say what I mean, I mean what I say, and I try not to say it mean.”