Jamie Lee Curtis is opening up about the dark reason she decided to get plastic surgery in her twenties. The 66-year-old sat down with 60 Minutes in an interview that aired on May 11, during which, she revealed that she chose to go under the knife at 25 after a cinematographer shared a very harsh and unnecessary criticism about her appearance while on set with her.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy,’” she told host Sharyn Alfonsi. “And I was 25, so for him to say that, it was very embarrassing.”
The comment was made while Curtis was filming the movie Perfect, in which she starred alongside John Travolta in 1985. She ended up getting an eye lift as soon as filming was over, but she admits that the surgery didn’t go well and she wishes she hadn’t done it. “That’s just not what you want to do when you’re 25 or 26,” she said. “And I regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since.”
A big part of the reason why she regrets changing her appearance is because the surgery left her dependent on painkillers. “I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate,” Curtis said. “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.”
In the years since having surgery, the Freaky Friday star has tried to use her platform to encourage women to embrace their natural beauty and imperfections. In 2021, she told Fast Company that she often worries about society’s growing obsession with plastic surgery. “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,” she said. “Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.”
Curtis reiterated during her chat with 60 Minutes that she never should’ve gotten plastic surgery in the first place. “I’ve become a really public advocate to say to women you’re gorgeous and you’re perfect the way you are,” she said. “So yeah, it was not a good thing for me to do.”
