Jamie Lee Curtis revealed on Kevin Hart’s SiriusXM podcast “Gold Minds” (via Entertainment Weekly) that she asks film crews to wear name tags so that everyone remains equal on her film and television sets. The Oscar winner and current Emmy nominee for “The Bear” said that her aim is to dispel the “hierarchy” that inherently exists on sets between actors and the crew since everyone already knows the actors’ names in most cases.
“There’s something really uneven about our position on a set, on a movie, in this arena,” Curtis told Hart. “You guys know our names, we don’t know yours. There’s something inequitable to me about that…On a movie set, if we were all working together, we would all be wearing name tags so that tomorrow when we came in, I would be able to then say ‘good morning [Sabine]’ without even […] thought because I’ve learned her name.”
“I just want it to be equitable because it’s an important thing,” Curtis added. “It’s art – there isn’t hierarchy in art. It’s supposed to be a group of people.”
Curtis had the crew of 2018’s “Halloween” wear name tags during production, and she told THR before the horror reboot’s theatrical release that the crew repaid the respect to her by changing all of their tags to the name of Curtis’ character, Laurie Strode, during the filming of the movie’s last scene.
“This is me shooting my last scene before I was going to fly home to be back with my family,” Curtis explained at the time. “And when I approached the set, the entire crew were standing in silent solidarity with their hands behind their backs. And everyone was wearing a name tag. And the name tag said, ‘We are Laurie Strode.’”
“What they were saying was, ‘We are with you, Jamie, in this moment. And we know there’s nothing we can do to help you as you do this moment of work alone in a pickup truck. We believe in you, because we are you,’” Curtis continued. “I gotta tell you, that may be the high point of my career.”
Curtis and Hart currently start together in Eli Roth’s video game adaptation “Borderlands,” which is now playing in theaters nationwide.