Even after building a decades-long career in entertainment, Academy Award-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t consider herself “pretty.”
The Freakier Friday star was a guest on the Wednesday (April 1) episode of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s IMO podcast, where Curtis revealed how she feels about her looks.
Around the 47-minute mark of the video below, Curtis discussed the “fakery” of beauty in Hollywood, calling the “cosmeceutical industrial complex” a “cycle of bullshit.”
“It preys on our base insecurities,” she said. “And for many people, it’s what they look like.
“Now, I've never been pretty. And I'm saying it out loud,” Curtis continued. “I wasn’t pretty like that. I was cute. I can look good. I can fully look good, but that was not my ticket.”
The actress shared that while she’s “never relied” on her looks, she has previously gone under the knife.
“I've sucked the fat, I've cut the fat. I've tried to do the things that people do that everybody's doing, and it doesn't work,” she explained. “It doesn't, first of all, because the self-esteem issue, because you ultimately are looking in the mirror and realizing you've used something outside of yourself to change something to make you, quote, better.”
She added that cosmetic surgery doesn’t change the person, only their looks.
“I think it actually makes you feel fraudulent, and I think that it creates self-hatred,” she said.
Curtis has since leaned on “self-love.” She noted her 2002 children’s book, I'm Gonna Like Me: Letting Off a Little Self-Esteem.
Last year, Curtis spoke to The Guardian about her stance against plastic surgery and warned that it’s a “never-ending cycle.”
“The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that looks better.’ But what’s better? Better is fake,” she told the outlet. “And there are too many examples—I will not name them—but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.”
