Academy Award winner Jamie Lee Curtis is setting out to dismantle the “hierarchy” of Hollywood sets.
The actress spoke with her “Borderlands” co-star Kevin Hart about how she famously asks film crews to wear name tags in an effort to be “equitable” as “there isn’t hierarchy in art.”
“There’s something really uneven about our position on a set, on a movie, in this arena,” Curtis said to Hart on his SiriusXM podcast “Gold Minds.” “You guys know our names, we don’t know yours. There’s something inequitable to me about that…On a movie set, if we were all working together, we would all be wearing name tags so that tomorrow when we came in, I would be able to then say ‘good morning [Sabine]’ without [a] thought because I’ve learned her name.”
She added, “I just want it to be equitable because it’s an important thing. It’s art. There isn’t hierarchy in art. It’s supposed to be a group of people.”
Curtis’ policy of name tags is a well-known one. The star told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 that her on-set rule once led to the highlight of her career: During the production of 2018’s “Halloween,” which marked her return to the iconic franchise, crew members used their name tags to show their solidarity with Curtis’ character Laurie Strode while she was filming the last scene of the film.
“I was in my trailer preparing for my work, which was going to be emotional, cathartic. It was described as a moment where Laurie sort of replays the 40 years since this first occurred,” Curtis explained. “I’m someone who likes name tags because everybody knows my name, but often I don’t know anyone else’s. And so, whenever I start any project, I ask for everybody to wear a name tag. And this was now the end of the movie. This is me shooting my last scene before I was going to fly home to be back with my family. And when I approached the set, the entire crew were standing in silent solidarity with their hands behind their backs. And everyone was wearing a name tag. And the name tag said, ‘We are Laurie Strode.’ What they were saying was, ‘We are with you, Jamie, in this moment. And we know there’s nothing we can do to help you as you do this moment of work alone in a pickup truck. We believe in you, because we are you.’ I gotta tell you, that may be the high point of my career.”
