After decades spent in Hollywood, Jamie Lee Curtis has nothing to hide. That was the approach she took for her next role: quirky IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra in Everything Everywhere All at Once, which opens the 2022 SXSW Festival Friday. Curtis took to Instagram on Thursday to declare that she had sworn off concealers and deceptive garments for the film, opting to let it all hang out. 

“In the world, there is an industry—a billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry—about hiding things. Concealers. Body-shapers. Fillers. Procedures. Clothing. Hair accessories. Hair products. Everything to conceal the reality of who we are,” she captioned a photo of herself in character, staring into the camera from a cubicle. “And my instruction to everybody was: I want there to be no concealing of anything,” she added, quoting her recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. 

She then addressed the pressure women often feel to shield parts of their bodies for public consumption. “I’ve been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies, and the jeans are super tight,” Curtis continued. “I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality. That was my goal. I have never felt more free creatively and physically.”

Everything Everywhere All at Once co-writer-director Daniel Scheinert told Entertainment Weekly that Curtis would send him and fellow co-writer-director Daniel Kwan “weird outfits and weird hairdos” for her character. “There was one photo of an IRS auditor that Dan Kwan had found online—I mean, maybe she worked in a DMV, I don’t know—but this one photo, Jamie was like, ‘That’s incredible, please let me be her—please, please, please, please,’” Scheinert recalled. “And that photo became the reference for the hairdo and the outfit.” Kwan added, “Everyone assumes that her belly in the movie is a prosthetic, but it’s actually her real belly. She was grateful that she was allowed to just let it out.”

Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Michelle Yeoh, opens in limited theaters March 25 before being widely released on April 8.

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