Love can be a crazy experience, and give people some wild stories to tell—which is exactly how NBC's new sitcom Newlyweds, starring and produced by Freakier Friday's Jamie Lee Curtis, came about. Newlyweds follows Jeanie (Téa Leoni) and James (Tim Daly), two divorced, very different people who marry on a whim. The events of this later-in-life romance that unfold next are wild, zany, and unexpected.
The Direct spoke with Newlyweds star and producer Jamie Lee Curtis (who recently starred in The Bear) about her new series, in which she revealed the genesis of her new show and why producing is so important and fulfilling for her.
Jamie Lee Curtis' Crazy Love Story Is the Genesis for 'Newlyweds'
"I Married a Guy Because I Saw His Picture In a Magazine..."
- The Direct: "What is the craziest situation that [you] have personally found yourself in, thanks to love?"
Jamie Lee Curtis: I married a guy because I saw his picture in a magazine. I literally said out loud to my girlfriend, 'I'm going to marry him.' She said his name. He said he was an actor. I said, 'Oh, cool.' I called his agent. I left my number. He never called me. And then I ran into him at a restaurant two months later, and he had kept my number, and he kind of made the gesture like I know you called me, and I made the gesture like I'm the idiot who called you.
"We got married four months later," Curtis revealed, something that happened "42 years ago:"
Curtis: And he called me the next day, and we got married four months later. So that's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me, is that I saw somebody's picture in a magazine and said I was going to marry him, and married him 42 years ago. And it's still happening... [it was] very much the genesis of this show.
This Is Why Jamie Lee Curtis Finds Producing So Fulfilling
"Producing Is Merely Taking Advantage of Creative Ideas..."
Producing is merely taking advantage of creative ideas
- The Direct: "Jamie, while you do star in this show, you've also been producing a lot more, something [you've] been vocally adamant about [and] which you love. How does diving further in producing kind of fulfill you in new ways and in ways you never expected?"
Jamie Lee Curtis: Well, the truth is, I woke up when I was 60, and I realized that, like, oof, I'm 60. I'm closer to the end than I am to the beginning. And I realize that a creative person. I'm an ideas girl. I'm someone who's had ideas all my life. I write books for children. I wake up with an idea every day, and I realized that when I died, that all the creativity in my head, if I didn't bring it out into the world before, would die with me...
This led her to take advantage of her partnership with Blumhouse's Jason Blum, with whom she had teamed up for Halloween, to put her producing desires to the test.
Curtis: And I thought, oh. And I literally said the words out loud: 'If not now, when? If not me, who?' And I literally called Jason Blum, who I was making 'Halloween' movies for, and said, 'I want a deal. I have ideas.' And within a week, I brought him the movie that we produced a year ago, which was about the Paradise fire that decimated the town of Paradise, California.
The actor revealed that within a week of expressing her desire to buy the book in which her movie (which went on to be called The Lost Bus) was based on, they had the rights.
Curtis: [The one] that Paul Greengrass directed [and] that Matthew McConaughey starred in with America Ferrara from a book that I had heard the story on the radio. And I brought him the book and said, 'I want to buy this book.' Like, within a week, I had a movie that was like being made...
"This show is just part of that same drive," Jamie Lee Curtis noted of Newlyweds, an idea based not only on her own crazy love story, but also a limo she rode in New York in 2019.
Curtis: This show is just part of that same drive, which is, this idea came to me I was in a limo in New York in 2019, and the driver was a man in his 60s, and I was chatting with him, and at one point he talked about that he was divorced. But then he said to me, 'But my new wife,' and literally he was like 65. And I thought, 'my new wife-that's a sitcom about people in their 60s who hook up on a blind date and are different and get married very much like my husband and myself, and then what happens after they get married on a whim, and that was 2019, and now here we are, 2026...
"I'm not in it for the money," Curtis went on to explain, adding that she's "doing this for the creative thrill:"
Curtis: That's how creativity happens. It's thrilling for me, and for me, producing is merely taking advantage of creative ideas that either I have the original idea for, or are good ideas floating out there, and I just grab them and then try to get them made. That's all. I'm not in it for the money. I made money in my life. That's not why I'm doing this. I'm doing this for the creative thrill of seeing creativity get harnessed and gathered and then delivered to a screen or whatever, and that is a thrilling part of my creative life, and I'm now 60. I've been doing that for eight years, and I've now produced three TV shows, three movies, and a new book coming out. Like I am in it.
The Direct's full interview with Newlyweds' Jamie Lee Curtis, alongside stars Téa Leoni and Tim Daly, can be viewed below.
