Jamie Lee Curtis Is Trending: a Tonight Show Turn as Elizabeth Holmes, a 1981 Today Clip, and a Reiner Award on The View
Jamie Lee Curtis spent Halloween week doing what she has done for five decades: showing up everywhere at once. A Tonight Show cold open as Elizabeth Holmes, a Today show reunion with her own 1981 self, and an emotional View appearance honoring Rob and Michele Reiner put the 67-year-old at No. 5 on the U.S. trending list.
It is Halloween week, and the original final girl is back on top of the search charts. Jamie Lee Curtis is trending at No. 5 in the United States after a run of television appearances that stretched from late-night comedy to daytime tears, each one tied to her new NBC sitcom, 'Newlyweds,' which she co-created and which premiered October 23.
The clip doing the most work came from Wednesday's Tonight Show, where Curtis played Elizabeth Holmes opposite Jimmy Fallon's Nathan Fielder in the cold open — a spoof of A24's documentary 'You Can See Everything,' about Fielder living with Holmes in the weeks before she reported to prison. In a blonde wig and a Holmes-like voice, Curtis kept insisting she was not deceiving him: 'I'm always being real,' as the entertainment accounts read by the bureau reported. The documentary itself opened October 16 and has taken in $45.1 million domestically in two weeks, one account reported.
On Today, the joke was time travel: Curtis was shown her own interview from October 31, 1981 — 45 years ago almost to the day — with Tom Brokaw, and later posted the side-by-side on Instagram, explaining that her short hair in the old clip was the result of hair burned off by bleach and a perm for a movie. 'Weird to see the past in the present. Thrilled to be back,' she wrote, Parade reported.
The week's most serious moment came on The View, where Curtis became emotional discussing the legacy of Rob and Michele Reiner and was presented with the Children's Institute's Michele and Rob Reiner Champion for Change Award, which she is set to receive at the institute's gala on November 8. And because it is Halloween, the horror explainers followed: Curtis also walked fans through how Laurie Strode could smoke in the original Halloween and still read as the good girl — she smokes like a beginner, coughing — keeping fiction's most famous survivor at the center of her signature season, 48 years on.
