Jamie Lee Curtis almost didn't get cast in Halloween

Despite appearing in a varied array of projects, from A Fish Called Wanda to True Lies, there is no doubt that James Lee Curtis’ signature role is that of Laurie Strode, the part she has played in four Halloween films and will portray again in director David Gordon Green’s upcoming franchise reboot. But in a 1980 clip just reposted on Facebook by filmmaker, longtime interviewer of horror genre notables, and now podcast host Mick Garris, the actress reveals that she was by no means a shoe-in when it came to getting the job of the original film’s final girl.

“From the photograph I guess was submitted, they didn’t think I looked like one of the three women,” Curtis tells Garris. “I was real lucky, I had a very persistent manager who kind of, ‘Come on, see this girl, she’s great!’ And ended, up, a couple of meetings, three or four meetings [getting the role].”

Curtis also discusses the difficulty of shooting the John Carpenter-directed horror classic out of sequence.

“It was a tough movie to make, because we shot it in 20 days,” she says. “So, we shot it completely out of sequence, just completely out of sequence… So, I can do one scene where I’m being chased at the end, and running around, and then we’ll do a scene at the beginning of the movie — get the blood off, get your hair done again — and then you go and be like it never happened. Ten minutes ago you were running scared, and 15 minutes after, nothing’s happened, and you’re just looking out the window, and you see something that seems possibly weird. And so, the continuity was so strange that it takes a good director I think to really kind of help you out through there.”

Watch the red band trailer for Halloween above.