Jamie Lee Curtis on why she wanted to look as 'real' as possible in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Jamie Lee Curtis was determined to look like she never has before in the new science fiction-action-comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, the stressed-out manager of a Los Angeles laundromat who is enlisted to defeat an evil force, while Curtis portrays an IRS inspector named — wait for it — Deirdre Beaubeirdra.

"Immediately after signing up, she would text us photos of weird outfits and weird hairdos," Daniel Scheinert, who wrote and directed the movie with Daniel Kwan, tells EW. "There was one photo of an IRS auditor that Dan Kwan had found online — I mean, maybe she worked in a DMV, I don't know — but this one photo, Jamie was like, 'That's incredible, please let me be her — please, please, please, please.' And that photo became the reference for the hairdo and the outfit."

Curtis also insisted on looking as "real" as possible on screen. "Everyone assumes that her belly in the movie is a prosthetic, but it's actually her real belly," says Kwan. "She was grateful that she was allowed to just let it out."

"I wanted to just be truthful to this woman," Curtis tells EW. "In the world, there is an industry — a billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry — about hiding things. Concealers. Body-shapers. Fillers. Procedures. Clothing. Hair accessories. Hair products. Everything to conceal the reality of who we are. And my instruction to everybody was: I want there to be no concealing of anything. I've been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies, and the jeans are super tight. I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality. That was my goal."

Everything Everywhere All At Once will receive its world premiere Friday as the opening film of the SXSW Festival in Austin. The film opens in limited theaters March 25 and will be released wide April 8.

Watch the trailer for Everything Everywhere All at Once below.

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