Christmas with the Kranks

“I look ridiculous,” said Curtis. “That’s the point.”

Though it is the second time she’s flaunted her imperfections, Curtis is not an exhibitionist. In the magazine spread, it was to make a point. In the case of Kranks, it was scripted. “The script was written and it says, ‘Nora puts on the yellow string bikini. It is a horrible fight. Tight in all the wrong places, bulges everywhere.’ That’s how it’s written. That’s how I chose to approach it. I told the cameraman, ‘Put the lights up high. Make the light bad. Let’s not make it beautiful,’ and he did.”

Still, the worst Curtis looks is still pretty good. She has developed a gut and some love handles, so it’s definitely not the bedroom scene from True Lies, but Curtis emphasized that a real woman could still take care of herself. “I watch what I eat, don’t drink alcohol, go to the gym. Not often, but enough. I don’t eat dessert. I don’t eat bread anymore. I watch what I eat. That’s what I look like. I’m a Hungarian Jew. My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a Hungarian Jew and I am my grandmother now. And that’s who I am so that’s the reality. I just think we’ve been so drunk with this fake image of people that nobody can take looking at a real women in a string bikini anymore and go, ‘Ohhhh.’”

That’s not to say Curtis is against hardbodied women airbrushed to glistening perfection. It’s just not her thing. “People aren’t going to the movies necessarily to see real people. They want the fantasy. They want to believe in this kind of more glamorous life. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with it. If that’s something that you want to believe in, there’s plenty out there to believe in. There are plenty of women who will lead you down that fantasy path. I’m not that person.”

Nor does she look forward to the days of her revealing scenes. “I was mortified. I was mortified leading up to it. I was mortified during it.”

Though it is not a new observation on the feminist front, Curtis is just tired of the beauty myth the media perpetuates. “Unfortunately we have been inundated with this false sense of reality about what people look like. We are doused with it daily. We are submerged by it in every magazine you open, including magazines that are supposed to be for everyday women. If you look at those magazines, it’s like, ‘Show me one. Show me one.’ I did it in More magazine but I’m talking about all those ladies magazines that still have all these celebrities on the cover that don’t look like real people. They’ve been airbrushed out.”

The phenomena has spread to movie advertising too. “It’s not her fault but I remember seeing the poster for a movie that Candy Bergen was in, [View From the Top], and there was a line of people in the poster. Somehow somebody figured out that that’s supposed to be a good advertising tool. So they’ve got the line of people and I remember going down the line of people and I was in my car at a stoplight. I looked up at the poster and I went, ‘That’s so and so. That’s so and so.’ And I literally got to the last person and it was like, ‘Who is that?’ And I thought at one point that it was like Brittany Murphy or somebody and then I realized, ‘Oh my God!’ I mean, it was like one of those moments. I said, ‘That can’t be Candy Bergen.’ And I mean I swear to God, they had her painted like she was 18.”

Curtis admires her fellow actresses who have flaunted their age and natural appearances. “Kathy Bates in About Schmidt. She looked fabulous. She looked like a woman. Those are the examples of people looking like real people.”

With all this talk about bodies and sexuality, Curtis reflects on her own work, including her roles as sexpot love interests who took their tops off. Now that she is a mother, which her children at 18 and nine years old, she prefers to make family movies like Christmas with the Kranks.

“I’m just not interested in sort of ‘adult fare’ in movies right now. If I never see another person have sex on film, I will be happy. I’m done. I was done after It’s a Wonderful Life with them on the phone call, where Jimmy Stewart’s on the phone call to his old friend and Donna Reed’s coming up behind him and they’re just so palpably in love with each other and you see that. If I never see people slamming up each against each other, I will be fine. To me, I am looking for something I can go with my family to. I am, there’s no question. I have a 9 year-old son and I want to go to the movies. I’d like to see Sideways, apparently that’s funny. But that would be an adult fare that I would like to go see with my husband. There may be people banging up against each other in that, I don’t know, but that wouldn’t be what I was going to see. I’d be going to see the comic storytelling. But I am looking for family fare, and there isn’t a lot. There isn’t a lot. And I work very little. So now as the mother of two, I have to keep it into family fare. And all the adult fare that I did was primarily before I had children and/or my sensibility may have been that it was somehow okay. The one thing people, and I know there’s another actress who talked about it recently, about her kids responding to her adult work and that they were mortified. And she was like, ‘Well, you know, this is my work.’ Well you know what? I didn’t really think about it. And yet I have an 18 year-old daughter and I would be mortified if she and her friends took in a movie of more adult fare. And I would really be mortified of my little boy. And yet, I’m going to have to live with that.”

This means that her poor kids may never be able to enjoy the sexy comedy of their mother’s fine work. “Would you want your mother topless in a movie? Would you want your friends [to]? When you’re 20 years old, you just don’t think about that. And certainly that’s something that you choose to do. I try not to regret it like a big regret, but it’s certainly going to be something I’m going to have to navigate. And that’s going to be a big difficult moment for my boy.”