There are tears, laughter, and no shortage of smiles over the course of my interview with Jamie Lee Curtis for this week’s Little Gold Men (listen or read below). For the past few weeks, it seems like that’s gone for just about every interaction the newly minted Oscar nominee has had—she’s been hit hard by this recognition from her peers, arriving more than 40 years into her storied career. “I am both weepy and giddy,” she says. 

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The nomination comes for Curtis’s alternately hilarious and poignant supporting turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, itself the most nominated film of the year—and once upon a time, a huge underdog. The movie, directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, has gained awards buzz ever since its premiere nearly a year ago at SXSW, but Curtis—who’s developed a protection mechanism or two over the years—tried to drown out the prognosticating, at least when it came to her own chances. Part of this, she tells me, had to do with the ghost of For Your Consideration, the 2006 awards-campaigning spoof directed by her husband, Christopher Guest. And part of it had to do with the fear of facing disappointment head-on.

But in the end, Curtis decided to lean in. She got up early to watch the nominations announcement. A friend came over for support, and to record the moment it really, finally happened. And now, as she describes, Curtis finds herself in a place she’s never been in before—one where she feels the spirit of her late parents, Oscar nominees Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. “They were the first thing I thought of,” she says. “I never thought I would reach their level.”

Vanity Fair: You are a nominated star of the most nominated film of the year.

Jamie Lee Curtis: You know, I woke up this morning, and we have a group chat—our little EEAAO family—and I wrote them all this morning and said, “Is this really happening?” They all wrote back and said, “Apparently!” It’s a beautiful moment for all of us.

Could you have expected that group chat to have lasted as long and been as lively as it remains? It’s been quite a year for this movie.

Well, it’s a three-year group.

That’s right. Shot quite a while ago.

And we all weathered COVID, the shutdown, on the group chat. We regrouped when the movie debuted at SXSW, and since then, the group chat has been a big cheerleading fest of watching this little movie start to grow, start to expand its reach in both audience and obviously the critical reviews, and then the real reaction, which is people coming up to you talking about how the movie changed them. We’re in show-off business—I don’t pretend, you know what I mean? I try not to take it all so seriously. But this movie for this moment, post-COVID: a movie about immigrants, about immigrant families, and about the reunification between a mother and a daughter and a husband and a wife, has really changed people’s lives. People never thought they would see their stories on screen like this, and that’s incredible.

We’re approaching a record number of first-time acting nominees this year. Four of them are in this movie, and three of them—you, Michelle, and Ke—started in this business decades ago. There’s a real statement in there about longevity in this business and the way it evolves, wouldn’t you say?

I’m like the old mule. [Laughs] I’m the donkey who’s been shrugging on the plow in all sorts of areas for a very long time. I only realized it this morning when I knew I was going to talk to you that it’s like discovering a secret room in the house you’ve lived in your whole life that you never knew was there—or if you did, you had papered over it or plastered over it and just forgotten about it. Having my name called that morning was a total shock. I know people would say, “Oh, come on Jamie, you knew.” I chose not to read lists. I didn’t want to be told. I told all my friends, “Please don’t send them to me because it’s going to hurt too much.” I understood that it existed. I knew that the movie would [be nominated], I knew that Ke would, I knew that Stephanie would, I knew that Michelle would. I knew that the Daniels would, but I did not know for me. It is like discovering a secret room and going, “Oh, my God.” 

I am giddy with excitement about it. The smile has not left my face. I’m kinda curmudgeonly. I’m very careful because I’ve been an actress since I was 19; I’m 64 and I’ve tried not to get my heart broken by the industry. I have felt like an outsider. I’m in genres that are not traditionally recognized in the more mainstream show-off business—I’ve been a horror-genre participant since I was 19. I’ve been in a lot of comedies, and comedies aren’t often recognized in these bigger categories. Needless to say, my secret garden is blooming and I am both weepy and giddy.

How fitting that it is for a movie that has every genre under the sun smashed together.

Yes. And how lovely that it’s Deirdre who’s going to take me to the Oscars. When I read the script and met the Daniels, I said to them, “Look, I don’t know what the fuck your script is about. Really, I’m not a multiverse person. I don’t really understand the multiverse. I see where you’re going with it, I see what you’re going for. But I do know her.” And the reason I said yes is because I know her. I’ve known Deirdres my whole life. Deirdres are also forgotten people.

I think of those scenes that you and Michelle have that visually can seem quite absurd, but you two find real meaning and depth and create this relationship and this life. To your point about understanding this character, especially given the nature of the way this movie was made, what was your experience on set day to day? How did that contrast with how you saw the film come together?

90% of my work in the movie was shot day one and day two. Day one, I had to not crack up when James Hong would try to steal the scene by farting or burping or falling asleep in the middle of the scene. I remember that after we did the first big master of the scene over me to them, I looked at Ke and he looked at me and he asked, “Was I okay?” I said, “Were you okay? You were amazing.” He said, “I haven’t acted in 20 years until this moment.” So that was day one. Day two was on me, over them to me. I got to do all of Deirdre’s work. There was no rehearsal, but it’s not as if we were finding it on the day I showed up. I knew my work. And then day three and day four, I was flying on wires. Day three I was on wires in the stairwell, doing the sequence with the knee kick. Day four I was doing the sumo wrestling. Yeah. That’s how fast this got made.

Hearing the amount of work you put into it—you think you are going into a genre movie, or at least don’t know that this is going to be an awards movie. It makes me think of the other work that you’ve done: How do you feel about what you were saying earlier, that genre performances don’t get put in those kinds of conversations very often when it comes to accolades? A number of your performances that are incredibly memorable fall into that category, and therefore were not considered on that plane.

Oh, were for sure not. There are two things I want to share with you. One is, there’s a wonderful book by Marisha Pessl called Special Topics in Calamity Physics. It’s a mystery novel, but in the middle, it talks about how life is supposed to progress and how where you go to school and who you marry and your first job is what determines your life. And she says, and I quote, “It isn’t. Life hinges on a couple seconds you never see coming. And what you do in those seconds determines everything from then on.” That’s been my creative life. My life has hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming. I never saw Chris Guest coming. I never saw Halloween coming. I never saw Everything Everywhere All at Once coming. They just showed up.

The other thing I wanted to mention to you is what you brought up again about Michelle. I did this movie because of Michelle Yeoh…. And what Michelle and I discovered, as you said in those moments that could have been absurd, was that beautiful deep loneliness that occurs with people. The heartbreak of relationships that come to an impasse, that longing for connection between people. Two lonely forgotten women, one in an unhappy marriage, one who’d gotten out of her marriage. Even though it’s a fantasy world, the hotdog universe is simply a portal for feelings. I will tell you that the work with her, which we discovered really in an improvisation on that day, was shot in about an hour. It was this beautiful moment that I will never forget…. Where we went emotionally together, it was unexpected, and also just such a beautiful testament to her depth as an actress. What a beautiful scene partner she was. She’s just an extraordinary woman. And, yeah, it’s crazy. It’s just, it’s all crazy. It’s gorgeous.

For the listeners, Jamie Lee Curtis is smiling right now.

Oh, Jamie Lee Curtis has been smiling since Tuesday, January 24 at 5:31 in the morning.

You mentioned being a little bit wary of the lists and all that, but you knew you were going to wake up and listen to the nominations announcement. There must have been nerves associated with that.

So I had COVID. I didn’t get to go to the Critics Choice Dinner, but it was perfect because I got to watch as an audience member, and I got to listen to [producer] Jonathan Wang talk about his family and the struggles of immigrants. It was appropriate that I was at home watching. I am a head cheerleader, and I was moved to tears. I was sobbing. So I was very happy to see that. Obviously I had people whisper in my ear—people who I love whispered it in my ear and I would say to them, “Please stop. That’s lovely and that would be amazing, but A, that’s not of course why I did it, and B, it’s out of my control.” So I’m sober 24 years and I live in reality. and I have my feet on the ground, and there’s a phrase in recovery that I like to say, which is, “Be where your feet are.” Therefore I need to ground myself in reality. 

I am also married to Christopher Guest and my husband made a film called For Your Consideration. A great movie, but it’s about this very thing. It’s about how that longing for something changes people. And so when people whispered in my ear, I was aware of it, and I decided in that moment to lean in rather than lean back. Leaning back is, “No, no, no. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, that will never happen.” That’s self-deprecating. I didn’t need to do that. What I kept saying is, “Wouldn’t that be amazing?” and lean in toward it. Because Chris made that movie, which is scripted to be heartbreaking, I needed to excise his movie, which is a fiction, and live in the reality. I thought, well, if I don’t watch them, then I’m going to look at my phone and if my phone isn’t going off at 5:35, I’m going to know it didn’t happen. The disappointment will be the same. So I chose to confront it. 

So you’ve opened the secret door. I’m curious what you found in it—and by that I mean, clearly with this moment comes a lot of reflection over life and career. What is the promise of that room? What do you see that maybe you couldn’t see before about who you are as an artist? 

[Crying] My parents were in there. It felt like they knew that would happen. even though I didn’t. I have followed—nepo baby!—in my parents’ footsteps. In my mother’s case, literally followed her. Yet their fame and success was always—to me, their stardom at the time was so ginormous that even though I’ve had fantastic success, I never thought I would reach their level. That was never even—I mean, just not even. 

In a weird way, they were the first thing I thought of, both of them coming from nothing. My father being raised on the streets of New York by a tailor who immigrated from Hungary, and my mother being raised in Stockton, California by immigrants from Denmark. Both of them found their way to the top of the pile of this industry, and both of them were nominated for Oscars and all of a sudden they were my parents and they were welcoming me. I really didn’t expect that, but they were the absolute first thing that I thought of. How thrilled my grandparents would be, how thrilled my parents would be for this moment for their daughter.

That’s a pretty beautiful note to end on. I think.

Thanks for making me cry.

Well, Jamie Lee Curtis—congratulations.

Thank you so much. Jamie Lee is smiling.

This interview has been edited and condensed.