Jamie Lee Curtis says realizing she's 'going to die soon' made her want to produce more powerful movies

The Oscar-winning actress tells EW she "stepped into my own power as a producer" to tell stories that otherwise would die "if I didn't bring it out into the universe."

Jamie Lee Curtis, whose many brushes with fictional death at the hands of Michael Myers made her Hollywood's enduring Queen of Halloween, reveals in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that facing real-life mortality inspired the next phase of her career in the industry.

Amid a broader conversation about her work as the producer of an upcoming documentary about '90s fitness icon Susan Powter (and her potential future in the Halloween film series), the 65-year-old tells EW that working on the Powter project made her reflect on her standing in an industry that often casts aside women of a certain age.

"I should've played her in a movie," Curtis says, adding that she once wanted to play Powter in a scripted project during the height of the wellness icon's fame in the mid-1990s. "I was thinking about it back in the day. I wasn't thinking about it today because I didn't know where Susan Powter was. When she was in her ascendancy, I would've absolutely been the person you would've hired. I looked cute in a leotard, I had short hair, I would've cut it shorter, I'm brazen and bold, maybe a little annoying, maybe a little loud."

When asked if she pitched her idea to play Powter in a film in the '90s, Curtis says she wouldn't have had the confidence to advocate for such a project on her own behalf back then.

"I only stepped into my own power as a producer when I realized I was going to die soon. When I turned 60 was a real turning point where I realized all of the things I'd been holding in my head, heart, mind, soul, spirit, and life force were going to die with me if I didn't bring it out into the universe," she says, explaining that she felt compelled to lay the groundwork for her own production company, Comet Pictures, after the epiphany. "That was my moment of truth, and that's when I went to Jason Blum and said, 'I want a production company.' It has yielded quite well for all of us."

Related: Jamie Lee Curtis cryptically teases Halloween future after Laurie Strode's final film: 'Never say never' (exclusive)

Filmmaker Zeberiah Newman's upcoming documentary, which Curtis personally funded, probes into how Powter lost her fortune and ended up working as a delivery driver for Uber Eats in 2024. While the doc will dive deep into the fitness icon's fame — which included her own short-lived talk show between 1994 and 1995, as well as her iconic "Stop the Insanity!" infomercial — it also serves as a societal mirror for the audience.

"This was never an exploitation piece about Susan Powter, it was an indictment of how we discard human beings as they get older in this country. It's an exploration of the incredible cruelty that we inflict on older people and the lack of resources, and the lack of dignity offered these human beings who've lived before us and have been in service to us, and have given us the lives we all are now living," Curtis stresses. "It's an indictment to every family who has shuttered away the elderly in that forgotten, awful way that they do. It is an indictment of how we treat older people in our work lives."

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Earlier this month, PEOPLE reported on Powter's current living conditions, with the star revealing that she lost her amassed fortune due to bad business deals, lawsuits, and relying on a team that pushed her toward a "mortifying" experience with TV stardom.

"They started to produce the 'me' out of me," Powter, 66, said. "And that happened when the money got to here [raising her hand up high]. Then it was like, 'Oh, Suze, don't say that. No, no. It's a little too much. Oh, you're shocking. Shocking.' But that's the same shock that got me there."