Jamie Lee Curtis is grateful that her mother, Janet Leigh, forbade her from trying out for the iconic horror film The Exorcist in 1973.
The Freaky Friday actress said that a producer on William Friedkin’s iconic horror film called up the Psycho star and asked if her 12-year-old would try out for the part of the possessed girl Regan during a recent interview on The Drew Barrymore Show.
But Leigh turned down the chance for her little daughter, who would eventually star in another horror classic, Halloween (1978), at the age of 19.
“Hey, I’m producing the movie of the book The Exorcist,” he told my mother over the phone. Will you allow Jamie to try out? Curtis recalled. He must have thought, ‘Oh, she’d be amusing,’ when he saw me at a party because I was around 12 at the time, cute, sarcastic, and had some personality. “No,” my mother replied.
In retrospect, Curtis feels appreciative that her mother preserved her early years and prevented her from becoming a celebrity too soon.
“My mom really wanted me to have, thank God, a childhood, which I understand you didn’t get,” she told Barrymore, who debuted as an actress at the age of seven in 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. “You were not given that choice. No one intervened and said, “No, she will have a childhood.” “She’ll be protected.”
In the end, Linda Blair, who costarred with Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow, was cast as Regan MacNeil. She played the same character again in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and briefly appeared in The Exorcist: Believer (2023).
Curtis, meanwhile, has portrayed Laurie Strode, her first film role, multiple times since 1978. Her most recent role was in the 2018–2022 Halloween, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends remake trilogy.
