Before Jamie Lee Curtis could have fun making out with a “bunch of different men” while filming A Fish Called Wanda, she had one small request for her co-stars.
Curtis led the 1988 crime comedy as the title character Wanda, a grifter who takes part in a diamond heist with a group of gangsters. In an attempt to gather intel on the prized gems, she seduces lawyer Archie (John Cleese).
In other words, Wanda gets to “be the paramour for a bunch of different men”, the 64-year-old actor said in a new interview with Vulture, published on Tuesday 22 November.
“It was fun,” Curtis said of the experience, adding that she bought all her co-stars “toothbrushes on opening day”.
“You know, because it’s gross! You’re just gonna be making out with all these strange people. So I asked them to go brush their teeth,” she explained.
In addition to Cleese, Curtis was cast opposite Michael Palin, Tom Georgeson and Kevin Kline.
Elsewhere in the interview, looking back at her decades-long career, the Freaky Friday star described herself as an “accidental actor”.
“I wasn’t originally going to be an actress. I was going to be a police officer. I thought I would be a cop or a social worker. I thought I’d be a really good cop,” she said.
However, after a chance run-in with a talent manager, who suggested she try out for a role as Nancy Drew with Universal, she “ended up signing a seven-year contract at Universal Studios as an actor”.
Curtis later acknowledged that being the daughter of the late Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two major Hollywood icons, “tilted it in my favour”.
However, she shared that having people question her achievements because of her “famous parents” was a “s***ty thing”.
“Then you as a young person have to try to defend it. It’s not fair, and yet we do it all the time. We all do it.”
