Jamie Lee Curtis Defends Timothée Chalamet from Online Backlash

The path to an Oscar isn’t all glamor and parties. It’s also a lot of politicking and watching your words, which is something Timothée Chalamet learned the hard way after he said that “no one cares” about ballet or opera.

The comments bothered a lot of people, but so has the way they have been interpreted by an always ravenous social media machine. Jamie Lee Curtis has intimate understanding of both.

“He’s a talented kid and he made a stupid comment that he’s going to regret,” Curtis told Den of Geek at SXSW on the eve of both the Oscar ceremony and the premiere of her own new film about eerie online culture. “And that’s okay. In today’s marketplace, where every single word we say is recorded, it’s going to happen to all of us. It certainly happened to me, and I’ve been raked over the coals for things I said on a podcast about something once—when in fact, it wasn’t what I said, but I got reamed for it, and that’s okay. We’re all grown-ups. He’s growing up, and I’m sure he regrets his comments. And if he doesn’t, that’s okay too, but it was a silly comment that obviously denigrated a beautiful art form.”

Curtis shared those thoughts with Den of Geek while promoting Sender, which she produced through her company Comet Pictures and in which she plays a supporting role. The issue was close to her mind, and not just because Sender also features Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of ballet dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lisa Rinehart. Curtis was thinking about the awards season discourse because Sender debuted at SXSW, the same festival that premiered the movie that led to her Best Supporting Actress win, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

According to Curtis, her journey with Everything Everywhere All at Once began with a recommendation from a young filmmaker working at Comet Pictures named Russell Goldman. “When I told Russell that I had been offered a movie by the Daniels, he said, ‘Do it,’ not a second after the word ‘Daniels,'” she reveals. “I didn’t know they were geniuses because I had not seen their work. Russell was really one of the loudest voices that convinced me to do it.”

Now Curtis is back with Goldman as her director via Sender, which stars Britt Lower of Severance fame as Julia, a recovering alcoholic who gets caught in a “brushing scam,” which Goldman describes as a particularly modern racket.

“They send you cheap objects that are most likely related to your search history online, and they send it to your home so that they can write five-star reviews in your name,” Goldman explains. “Then those products can then get boosted on the algorithms on Amazon or any site like that. It sounds very complicated, but it’s how some people feel like they can make money. And it makes you feel insane.”

After her sister was caught in a brushing scam, Curtis discussed the phenomenon with Goldman. “We talked about how creepy that is for a woman who is basically trapped in her house to receive packages she did not ask for. What she gets and why she gets it is very personal, and paranoia and psychological torture occur,” says Curtis.

According to Lower, Julia is already in a vulnerable mental state before she begins receiving unwanted packages at the start of Sender. “Julia’s world has gotten much quieter in her journey to sobriety, and so she’s hyper focused on every detail of new things coming into this space she’s created for herself. There’s a mystery to them.

“Julia is getting a quick fix from ordering things, but then other things come in. She’s been addicted to alcohol, and all of a sudden she transitions to trying to quickly fix her life by ordering a bunch of stuff, and it just gets way out of hand.”

Mail getting out of hand isn’t something that Baryshnikov has experienced. “I loved getting packages as a kid!” she enthuses; “The idea of things arriving is so delightful to me, especially when I don’t know what it means yet.”

But for her co-star David Dastmalchian, things are a little different, especially since he was mailed a pair of dirty underwear. “I have a fan mail post office box, and it’s happened a couple of times, from the same person I don’t know,” Dastmalchian shares. “My dear stepfather, who I love so much, he’s my first line of defense. So anything that is scary or weird or inappropriate, luckily, never gets to me, because he goes through everything, and then I get all the nice stuff. But I got them when I was picking it up myself one time, and they were accompanied by a really bizarre letter.”

Unlike the people in their movie, the makers of Sender can laugh about their mail experiences. And hopefully Curtis’s kind words mean that Chalamet doesn’t have to worry about unpleasant things arriving in his mailbox.

Sender premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on March 14.