Jane Curtin and Harriet Sansom Harris are best known in the UK for their roles in big 1990s sitcoms. Curtin was Mary Albright, sceptical professor and the object of John Lithgow’s affections in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Harris played Bebe Glazer, Frasier’s purringly machiavellian agent.
In the US, both are comedy veterans. Curtin, now 76, began in the first seasons of Saturday Night Live, then won back-to-back Emmys for divorcee double act Kate & Allie. Harris, 68, has had stints on Desperate Housewives and Hacks, but spent most of her career on stage – she trained at Julliard with Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Reeves and Robin Williams and has been a Broadway fixture for 30 years, winning a Tony in 2002 for Throughly Modern Millie.
Their filmographies are lean but meaty. Curtin has been in Antz, The Heat, I Love You, Man and played Melissa McCarthy’s end-of-tether literary agent in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Harris’s first film was Addams Family Values, then came Romeo + Juliet, Quiz Show, Memento and Love Is Strange. There were also cameos in Paul Thomas Anderson movies: as a wealthy client who angers Daniel Day-Lewis in The Phantom Thread, and a quivering theatrical agent – in extraordinary closeup – in Licorice Pizza.
Now they’re co-starring in Jules, as friends of a man (Ben Kingsley) with the beginnings of dementia who finds a spaceship crashed into his azaleas. Out of the ship climbs a creature they christen Jules: short, mute, naked (they dig out inappropriate T-shirts) and a very good listener.
Curtin and Harris spoke on video chat last week, the former in a wood-panelled library on the east coast, Harris fresh from mopping up a new flood at her home in Los Angeles.
Harriet Sansom Harris: Earlier in the year we had to dig a swale. It was epic, it took weeks. I thought we should hang lights on it so it looked like Niagara Falls.
Jane Curtin: What a summer. My dog was constantly wet. The ticks were overwhelming. It was horrible. It was like living in a Stephen King book. The Rain!
HSH: And Then Came the Ticks …
Catherine Shoard: Was Jules the first time you’ve worked together?
HSH: Yes – and the last! No, it was lovely. Everybody should have a chance to work with Jane because it is so much fun.
JC: Oh, please. I love to work. This is why I’m an actress: a group of people get together to do a thing. Sometimes the thing is just incredibly wonderful. Sometimes the thing is just health insurance. But you’re all there to get the thing done and doing the thing is such a joy to me. I love it.
CS: How do you chose your roles?
HSH: Very few people who want to work with me make good things.
JC: I don’t think we really get a chance to choose. They choose us. There are very few older character actors. A lot of people don’t wanna go that route if they’ve had success younger. They get sad and depressed that they’re no longer beautiful. They gave up their power, so they give up. But for most actors who are in it for the experience, it’s not necessarily about how you look – it’s about how the character looks. That’s a hard thing to separate from yourself. But I think if you trust the business long enough, it will reward you with these lovely characters.
HSH: You start getting roles based on how you think and it doesn’t matter if you’d get on the cover of a magazine. Somebody once said to me: “You just don’t look like a millionaire’s wife.” And I said: “I look like a billionaire’s wife.”
CS: As female actors over 60 who haven’t had conspicuous surgery, do you feel like outliers?
HSH: My surgery is all from the neck down.
JC: Mine too. I did a movie with a bunch of women who were in various stages of surgery or non-surgery. I said to one of the non-surgicals, who was in her late 70s: “Isn’t it amazing we’re still working?” And she said: “Look at our faces. We’re honest.” But there were other women there who had gone the whole nine yards and looked great and appropriate.
CS: Do you feel there’s a move away from cosmetic surgery? It must make it more challenging to act if you can’t see truth in your face.
HSH: People have accepted it. That’s why I’m worried people will accept AI, and already have started to. Someone said to me about AI: “You can do anything! Wouldn’t you love to see yourself younger?” I said: “No, no. I did that. I’ve done it all.” People get used to a lack of expression – a lack of urgency of thought or feeling. Yet I also know people who’ve had surgery and look fabulous. I am just lazy so I haven’t done it. I do have other things I like to do.
JC: People question why we don’t have it, and that to me is alarming. “What’s wrong with it? Is there something wrong with having glasses? Why haven’t you done it? You’d look so much better.”
HSH: That’s what hats are for.
JC: For whom am I going to look better? For me? No.
CS: Harriet’s character in the film tries to encourage intergenerational friendships in their town, with mixed results. Showbiz is one of the few professions that allows you colleagues of all ages on a relatively equal footing.
JC: Oh God, yes. If you can stay in this business longer than five years you’re a legend. You’re an icon, because it’s hard.
HSH: Or you’re independently wealthy.
JC: Or you’re a nepo baby. But it’s so much fun, especially if you can make people laugh.
CS: Are there shows or films you currently find funny?
JC: Dead to Me. I can imagine them making it and laughing.
HSH: Carmen Curlers: a great Danish show with the worst name.
JC: The richness of product is overwhelming. Most people get into a rut where you only watch the same things. I end up watching politics all the time because I’m a news junkie. I only have a little window between cooking dinner and cleaning up and the end of the day. So it has to be good to get my attention.
CS: In Jules, your characters base their knowledge of aliens on the movies. Do movies today feel based on reality?
HSH: In the 70s, they felt more real.
JC: The studios were not as invested. There is a sameness now. You have so many cooks involved. Think of the Marvel Universe. Ten-year-old boys in Thailand are probably the most entertained human beings in the world. They’re probably thrilled to pieces – and mazeltov. But there are others who want to be entertained with something a little smarter and a little less dopey and a little less loud. Not everything has to blow up. We want movies where people have conversations, where it’s about individuals and smallness and the minutiae that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. We don’t relate to car crashes. We don’t relate to spider people crawling up and down walls – unless you live in Australia.
CS: But will the rise in AI lead to a reduction in empathy and interest in real emotions?
JC: Not if you fight it with real people and real emotions. One has heart and brain, and one doesn’t. A machine doesn’t have a heart.
HSH: When I see something I know isn’t quite what I think it is, I have an almost nauseated reaction. I’m sure that’s some sort of form of xenophobia that I should really be ashamed of, but something in the back of my mind goes: “I don’t think you can trust that.”
And I like Marvel movies. I like a broad spectrum. I’d just like to read or see something I don’t feel is an utter waste of time. If everything is gonna be a steady diet of what a corporation wants you to be interested in, then there’s no point of view that’s specific to a certain writer or director or group of actors.
I also wondered if the move towards AI was partly because of Covid. It was so expensive to shut down every time someone got sick. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to have AI do it, if an actor couldn’t be there that day? I mean, I’d love to see AI Jane Curtin, but I also really wouldn’t wanna see it. I don’t think it could be made convincingly. The thing you love to watch is unpredictability.
JC: After Fred Astaire died they took footage of him dancing and replaced his partner with a vacuum cleaner for an advert. There was a big brouhaha back then about using celebrities after their death. It was shocking to see Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner which was wearing heels and going backwards. Not now.
CS: The director of Jules, Marc Turtletaub, said the film is about finding meaning near the end of life. Are you searching for meaning?
JC: I’m not. I’m just trying to keep going. If you haven’t found meaning by now, it’s a bit late.
HSH: I am still looking for meaning, but I’m in LA. In New England there’s seasons and an ebb and flow; here there’s constant home repair.
JC: We all know that dying is coming. We don’t want the end to be something dramatic. It would be the biggest gift if we could all have a gentle death. I like that Jules touches on that, and I thought the loneliness was beautifully dealt with. The interaction of these three totally disparate people whose group becomes their means to deal with the world. So many people don’t have that sounding board.
CS: Everyone finds it easy to confide in Jules. Did it make you reassess your relationships with pets?
JC: I had a dog when I was younger that I would project on to. But now my dogs are country dogs and they don’t listen. They’re busy.
HSH: I did think about my parrot a lot. I’ve lived with him for 27 years but some people still don’t know that I have him. I don’t talk about him all the time because it really puts some people off. Not every day is a joy with him, but five days of the week, I’m awfully glad I get to live with him – and a few times a month, it’s just fantastic.
I don’t tell him secrets because he’s a parrot, so secrets are safer someplace else. But it is a certain, confidential relationship I don’t have with anybody else. Only my car and my relationship with my sweetheart have lasted longer. You do feel certain moments are unique or exclusive with one’s pet and occasionally with another human. But with Jules, everybody just opens up.
JC: Jade [Quon, who plays Jules] had the ability to be perfectly still. Her eyes were the only thing that were really alive. She accepted willingly anything you wanted to say. She would absorb you. That sort of Greta Garbo stillness was very compelling.
HSH: Those really blackened eyes! You don’t know what the person’s thinking, but the pupils being so large, like a baby – you fall into it. It really was just such so receptive. A sympathetic observer and a being who would listen and not judge.
CS: All three of the main characters in Jules have children who don’t pick up the phone. Do you think people are more ready these days to abandon elderly relatives?
JC: We all know that that is true. Children in the west do generally abandon. You never know who’s going to end up taking care of you. It’s hard. People live so long and they need so much care they have to go to a nursing home. Medicine has saved a lot of lives, but it has isolated people, especially older people. I used to think I would hate to be old in New York City. I was so wrong. That is the place you want to be old because you have other old people who are still walking around. In suburbia it doesn’t work the same way.
HSH: Kids just move away and they get new friends. This is not the first generation that’s done that. My parents were not put in homes, because they died, but friends of mine were not in a position to stop working and care for a parent. They didn’t have the money.
JC: In rural Africa, people with mental illnesses are taken care of by the community. But we can’t do that. We have too many distractions. Our sense of community is gone.
HSH: During Covid, I was on a different side of the country to most of my close friends and had an enormous amount of anxiety about whether I was gonna see them again. When we started work on Jules, I thought: “This is incredible. I’m getting to do what I love with people I respect.”
Jane and I had a little dressing room and we were supposed to keep our masks on if we weren’t on camera. There were air purifiers everywhere. Everyone that came in was in masks. And at some point, I think I know who it was, Jane, but I won’t say … one of us said: “Let’s just take these off.” Once that happened, an intimacy had been established: “It’s just us. Let’s do this. We get tested every 25 seconds and we were sharing a plate of spaghetti 45 seconds ago. We’ve got whatever the other person has.” To have that bonding during a very isolating time was fantastic.
CS: Do you believe in extraterrestrials?
JC: I do believe that there are probably things out there, but I’m so connected to this Earth I can’t go beyond it. That’s why I never really could have a conversation with Dan Aykroyd because he really believed in them. He wanted to talk about them and I didn’t.
HSH: If they’re coming, they’re taking their time. And if they’re gonna come and do something terrible to the planet – well, they’ve got a lot of competition.
CS: One of the running jokes in Jules is that nobody believes Milton when he says a spaceship has crashed in his garden. They’re wilfully blind to the bigger picture. What are the big things at the moment we don’t notice?
HSH: The environment. You can’t stop wars or crime or addiction or abuse but you can try to save a planet so life can go on. More attention has to be spent on that and less on some of the things that are distractions. Things that are very meaningful to the people who are advocating for them. But it would be nice if we could tithe and say: “Yes, I’m gonna be an advocate for this thing that is so important to me, but I still have to give 10% of my time to figuring something else out, and not feel my one agenda is so much more powerful.” People are entitled to be passionate about what they’re passionate about. You can’t stop what’s wrong. But you can try to keep a planet for a time when people can figure it out.
JC: I have three grandchildren. I think about the glaciers melting, about sea turtles going into the Gulf of Maine and becoming driftwood. I just can’t understand why we won’t stop it. Why people are saying we don’t have to eliminate fossil fuels in order to prevent climate change. That’s just crazy talk. That has got to stop. But there’s not much I can do about it now. It’s up to other people. I will speak out about it as much as I can but I don’t have that much sway.
HSH: I was having dinner with a vegan friend of ours. I cooked and thought I’d done it all correctly, so she could have something nice. But she always carries food with her, so she was eating her food, and that’s fine – whatever makes you comfortable. But then she started talking to us about how we should really become vegans. We were eating a very inoffensive meal and, in the nicest possible way, I said: “You know, my carbon footprint is so much less than yours. I haven’t had children. I recycle. I eat meat maybe once every two months. You had these kids and you should, because you wanted them, but you shouldn’t sit there and talk to us during dinner about how we’re ruining the planet.”
• Jules is released in the UK on 29 December
