Jamie Lee Curtis Revisits ‘The Exorcist’ Audition Story William Friedkin Called “Totally Untrue”

Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) has a pretty fascinating story about how she nearly auditioned for The Exorcist. There’s just one wrinkle: director William Friedkin publicly disputed it.

Curtis revisited the anecdote over the weekend during the Academy Museum’s September 26 screening of Halloween, where she appeared alongside director John Carpenter for a conversation moderated by makeup artist Howard Berger.

The story has been making the rounds for years. As Dread Central covered last December, Curtis has said her mother, Janet Leigh (Psycho), turned down a request to let her audition for Regan MacNeil. In that telling, producer and family friend Ray Stark made the call, and Leigh refused because she wanted her daughter to have a childhood.

But back on September 28, 2018, Friedkin responded to coverage of Curtis’s audition anecdote with four very direct words:

“This is totally untrue.”

This is totally untrue https://t.co/bv176uQgly

— William Friedkin (@WilliamFriedkin) September 28, 2018

That’s a pretty significant footnote to a story that keeps getting repeated. Curtis has described an invitation that her mother rejected before an audition happened; Friedkin rejected the account outright. His brief response didn’t explain the discrepancy, so this remains a disputed bit of horror history.

Curtis also revisited her experience actually watching The Exorcist, which apparently followed her straight into school.

In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she recalled showing the movie to friends at home for her fifteenth birthday. The experience left her thoroughly terrified.