Do we like Jamie Lee Curtis?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of showing up for LGBTQ+ people and charity, in her own words and her own money, with a couple of clumsy public moments.
Curtis is an Oscar winner who has spent decades well beyond the red carpet: HIV/AIDS and children's health causes, plus children's books that tackle climate change, according to The Advocate's profile. That sets up the whole picture. Fame came first, but the causes are what she keeps coming back to.
On the harm check she's about as clean as they come. In 2022 she spoke out against transphobia and against US bills that would penalise parents seeking gender-affirming care, as PinkNews reported. The Advocate named her its Advocate of the Year in 2023, quoting her line “exclusion is hate.” We found no sign of harmful words or harmful company.
The messiest moment was October 2025. On Marc Maron's podcast she said she disagreed with Charlie Kirk on almost everything, but hoped he felt a connection to God, and called his ideas “abhorrent to me.” Some people heard praise, and she told Variety an excerpt had mistranslated her. Where you land depends on whether you read it as grace or as muddled, and her own defence was “I don't have to be careful.”
Politically she doesn't hide. In February 2026 she told Variety the ICE situation was out of control and called the administration's treatment of citizens and people in need inhuman, saying “It's an abhorrence what they're doing.” Supporters see a famous person using her platform, and critics see a celebrity lecture. Either way it's her own words, and nothing from the last few months shifts the picture.
She has also had a gaffe or two. In January 2025, at a Q&A, she said the Pacific Palisades looked like Gaza after the LA fires, and the online backlash was fast. She'd earlier reposted a Gaza photo with a wrong caption and deleted it. In the same period she pledged US$1 million to fire relief, which gives the context.
Her record on speaking up for others is solid. In 2018, after Eliza Dushku alleged on Facebook that stunt coordinator Joel Kramer abused her at 12 on True Lies, Curtis wrote that Dushku had told her privately years earlier. She used her column to call on the industry to protect young performers. His agency dropped him soon after, TheWrap reported.