• Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t only at peace with aging—she says she’s more alive than ever.
  • “Getting older makes you more alive,” the 62-year-old recently said in an interview. “More vitality, more interest, more intelligence, more grace, more expansion.”
  • Now, Curtis says she’s living by a new motto to remind herself to keep growing.

Aging is a natural and beautiful process—and Jamie Lee Curtis is a big fan.

Speaking with Melanie Griffith for Interview Magazine, the Halloween Kills actress got candid about being over a certain age. “Getting older makes you more alive,” Curtis said. “More vitality, more interest, more intelligence, more grace, more expansion.”

The 62-year-old is certainly living life to the fullest these days. To keep herself from stagnating, the Knives Out star has thrown herself into work: She appears in a trio of new Halloween movies which wraps up next year, on top of launching two new podcasts (Letters from Camp and Good Friend), opening a charitable shop called My Hand in Yours, and remaining a prolific children’s book author.

And her new words to live by show just what Curtis thinks about aging. “I have a new motto: ‘To die alive.’ I want to die in an alive mental state,” she continued. “I’ve been thinking about that because life is hard, and there are a lot of people who die in a really deadened state.”

This isn’t the first time Curtis has urged people to see the value in growing older; just last week she appeared on the ITV show Lorraine to deliver some wisdom. “I’ve also been an advocate for not f***ing with your face,” she said with her trademark candor. “And the term ‘anti-aging.’ What? What are you talking about? We’re all gonna f***ing age. We’re all gonna die. Why do you want to look 17 when you’re 70? I want to look 70 when I’m 70!”

Like a slew of badass women alongside her (Andie MacDowell, Tia Mowry, and Paulina Porizkova, to name a few) the Scream Queens actress is embracing the signs of aging that women are so often pressured to reject. “I would hope a young person would look at me with my grey hair and wrinkly face,” Curtis told Glamour UK in 2019, “and say, ‘That’s cool that you are who you are.’”

But she didn’t always have that self-confidence—she had to earn it through a career that’s spanned over four decades. “People get very complacent. You are definitely not that. You are just you,” Griffith told Curtis in Interview. “You are very regal in your stance.”

“As you know, it’s a process. And for me, it was a big one,” Curtis responded. “From when I was little, I didn’t want to be me. I didn’t even want to be Jamie. When I was in seventh grade, I asked my parents if I could change my name to Janie, because Jamie was a name that nobody had, and I struggled with that individuality. Of course, now I’m happy I have a name that’s mine.”

And we’re happy that we have a role model as outspoken and confident in her own brand of beauty as Jamie Lee Curtis.

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Jake Smith

Jake Smith, an editorial fellow at Prevention, recently graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in magazine journalism and just started going to the gym. Let's be honest—he's probably scrolling through Twitter right now.