Jamie Lee Curtis is attempting to clarify herself.
The “Halloween” star opened up to Variety in an interview published Tuesday about some controversial remarks she made in the wake of Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk’s death.
Shortly after the right-wing activist was killed last month, the actor got emotional during a podcast interview.
Charlie Kirk speaks onstage during an event in Los Angeles in 2018.
Phillip Faraone via Getty Images
“I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected to his faith,” Curtis said while sobbing on the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast.
“Even though … his ideas were abhorrent to me,” she continued. “I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.”
Being that the “True Lies” star has mostly expressed liberal views throughout her long career, Curtis’ fans who were critical of Kirk’s activism were pretty outraged. Especially since Curtis’ daughter, Ruby Guest, is trans. Kirk was an unapologetic peddler of transphobia.
Jamie Lee Curtis and her husband, Christopher Guest, stand in between their daughters, Ruby, left, and Annie, in 2022.
CHRIS DELMAS via Getty Images
Curtis told Variety that the backlash she received for her statements about Kirk was “threatening.”
“An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying,” Curtis said of the comments she made on a podcast. “As I wished him well — like I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t; I was simply talking about his faith in God.”
“And so it was a mistranslation, which is a pun, but not,” she continued. “In the binary world today, you cannot hold two ideas at the same time: I cannot be Jewish and totally believe in Israel’s right to exist and at the same time reject the destruction of Gaza. You can’t say that, because you get vilified for having a mind that says, ‘I can hold both those thoughts. I can be contradictory in that way.’”
Curtis makes a surprise visit in August to a showing of “Freakier Friday” at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California.
Leon Bennett via Getty Images
When Trish Deitch, the journalist who was interviewing Curtis for Variety, suggested to Curtis that she may want to be “careful” with her words as a public figure, Curtis seemingly became indignant.
“I don’t have to be careful,” she sharply told Deitch. “If I was careful, I wouldn’t have told you any of what I just told you. I would have just said, ‘Hi, welcome. I baked you banana bread. Here’s my dog. Here’s my house, blah, blah, blah. What do you want to know?’ I can’t not be who I am in the moment I am.”
This is not the first time Curtis’ public knee-jerk reactions have been met with controversy.
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In 2023, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, Curtis mistakenly used a photo of Palestinian children fleeing from bombs to show her support for Israel.
After receiving backlash, Curtis’ representatives issued a statement to HuffPost, saying: “I took down the post when I realized my error. … It’s an awful situation for all the innocent people in the line of fire.”
