The Emmy winner noticed her famous father in a poster of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ while filming in L.A.
Jamie Lee Curtis recently experienced an unexpected run-in with her late father in the most unlikely of places.
While filming the upcoming sequel to Disney’s Freaky Friday with Lindsay Lohan,Curtis looked up and saw her dad, actor Tony Curtis, staring back at her.
“He has been an icon. He is iconic,” the 65-year-old actress told reporters Sunday night, Sept. 8, after winning outstanding guest actress in a comedy series at 2024 Creative Arts Emmys for her role as Donna Berzatto in The Bear. “The other day we were shooting Freaky Friday in a record store, in this cool record store in Hollywood, and there was a Sgt. Pepper’s.”
Her late father Tony Curtis, of course, appears in the collage on the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album alongside other Hollywood greats like Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Marilyn Monroe.
“I was doing a scene with Lindsay Lohan. I was overacting like a b—-, and all of a sudden I kind of looked up and there was my father,” she recalled.
Curtis admitted that she didn’t own a copy of the album herself, and said she bought it on the spot.
“And I forget. I forget because of course I’m old and have my own life, but there he was, and I understand why they chose him to be in [the collage],” she said. “And I’m honored to be his daughter and my mother’s daughter, and this [Emmy] is an absolute stunner for me.”
Curtis often speaks fondly of her parents — including actress mom Janet Leigh — calling herself “an OG Nepo Baby” in a 2022 Instagram post.
“I’ve never understood, nor will I, what qualities got me hired that day, but since my first two lines on Quincy as a contract player at Universal Studios to this last spectacular creative year some 44 years later, there’s not a day in my professional life that goes by without my being reminded that I am the daughter of movie stars,” she wrote.
“The current conversation about nepo babies is just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt,” the actress added. “For the record I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any, that try to tell me that I have no value on my own.”
Jamie Lee Curtis on ‘The Bear’.
Chuck Hodes/FX
Nepo baby or not, Curtis set the Internet ablaze with her work in the summer 2023 episode of The Bear, “Fishes,” for which she won her Emmy over the weekend. The actress played the troubled matriarch of the central Berzatto family, showcasing the highs and lows of a woman dealing with grief, alcohol addiction and the desire to give her family a perfect Christmas dinner.
(WARNING: Light spoilers ahead) The episode ended with a bang — literally — and Curtis has since returned to the series in a few brief moments in subsequent episodes.
“When I saw the first episode last summer and Sugar asks Carmen if he had spoken to their mother, in that second I knew that I would play her. Don’t ask me how. I just knew,” Curtis wrote in an Instagram post about the series in June 2023 after the episode dropped. “A year later, after the wild success of the brilliant first season, Chris Storer offered me the role of a lifetime.”
The Bear is streaming now on Hulu.
