Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis thought John Carpenter was going to fire her from horror classic

Forty years on from the release of the original Halloween, it is hard to imagine anyone but Jamie Lee Curtis playing Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s slasher movie. But the actress herself feared that Carpenter was going to replace her after just one day’s shooting on the horror classic.

“I called her up to say how great she was, and she thought I was firing her,” Carpenter recalls with a laugh.

“I remember the phone rang in my apartment and my roommate Tina said, ‘Jamie, John Carpenter’s on the phone,'” says Curtis. “It scared me, because I didn’t know if he was going to fire me. Often I’d heard people got fired. He was on the other end of the phone and he said, ‘Hey darling, it’s John. I just want to tell you I thought today went great. I‘m so happy.'”

Curtis would reprise the role of the Michael Myers-battling Strode in 1981’s Halloween II, 1998’s Halloween H20, and 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection and is now doing so again in director David Gordon Green’s Halloween (out Oct. 19), a direct sequel to Carpenter’s original film.

“The woman we meet in 2018 is someone who has suffered tremendous PTSD, suffered a trauma that no one addressed in her life,” says Curtis of her character. “She never recovered from it and the woman we meet is someone who has now spent forty years waiting, knowing that this man would come back.”