Jamie Lee Curtis is an amazing Jewish mom — and godmom to her godchildren, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal (who also helped her get an in with designer Stella McCartney for her Oscars dress — love!).
The 63-year-old, who has two daughters, Annie and Ruby, with husband Christopher Guest, was recently on Jimmy Kimmel, where she kvelled about her daughter Ruby’s upcoming’s nuptials, which will take place in the actress’ home.
“We’re gonna have a beautiful picnic in the backyard. I’m really excited,” Curtis told Kimmel. “Both my children will have been married in my backyard, which brings me to tears… It’s so much more meaningful, just forgetting all of show-off business — being a parent, having both of your children married in your backyard.”
We love that so much.
Curtis, whose father, Tony Curtis, was Jewish, spoke about her excitement for Ruby’s wedding at an AARP interview in 2021, where she recounted how she and her husband “have watched in wonder and pride as our son became our daughter Ruby. And she and her fiancé will get married next year at a wedding that I will officiate.” She and Ruby did a joint interview with People last year in which they talked about trans rights.
“If one person reads this, sees a picture of Ruby and me and says, ‘I feel free to say this is who I am,’ then it’s worth it,” Curtis told the magazine.
While Curtis is a wonderful example of how open and loving all parents of trans kids should be, she’s also just so great at celebrating her children for exactly who they are and taking a genuine interest in their lives. As a video game and anime enthusiast myself, I love how Curtis embraces her daughter’s love for geek culture and its accompanying hobbies, which parents often tolerate at best — or even turn a disdainful eye when their kids grow past a certain age and don’t abandon them. That’s definitely not true about Curtis!
While Annie’s 2019 wedding was a beautiful, floral Jewish wedding — her husband Jason Wolf smashed the glass — Ruby’s wedding is going to be a cosplay wedding. For those of you who don’t know what that is, cosplaying involves dressing up as characters from books, shows, movies or video games. For Ruby’s wedding, Curtis will not only be wearing a costume that her daughter and future spouse chose for her — Admiral Jaina Proudmoore, the powerful sorceress from World of Warcraft — but she will also be officiating the ceremony in said costume.
I love that Curtis is not only letting her child have the exact wedding she wants, but is also actively and enthusiastically participating in it — she even ordered her costume from Etsy! Truly, this is the kind of parent we should all aspire to be.
Ruby’s wedding isn’t the first time Curtis has actively embraced her daughters’ interest: Ruby has joined her mom on the red carpet wearing cosplay in the past, and at the Oscars red carpet this year, Curtis took a chance to talk about how Ruby thought the actress would be perfect to play Kureha, a character from the anime and manga “One Piece,” which is getting a live-action adaptation. It was so, so cute.
I want this to happen https://t.co/Efgk8y4oCm
— Charity Goblin Ruby Vtuber💜🏳️⚧️⚓ (@CGRuby_VT) March 28, 2022
Curtis’ lessons about acceptance don’t only apply to her daughters. The actress is currently promoting her newest film “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” where she learned a pretty poignant lesson about self-acceptance — “my instruction to everybody was: I want there to be no concealing of anything. I’ve been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies,” she wrote on Instagram. Yet for the movie, she said, “I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality. That was my goal. I have never felt more free creatively and physically.”
It’s so lovely to see these pictures of Curtis with what she calls her “Budha-belly:”
In the wake of recent legislation against trans individuals in the US, Curtis has taken to social media to voice her support, posting a picture of herself wearing a shirt featuring a power fist patterned with the trans flag for Ruby’s birthday this month. She wrote that “I am proud and grateful to be the parent of a trans child and am sending support to all of the trans families across the US who are being targeted in this moment by conservative legislatures.”
Curtis called recent legislation that targets parents who let their children have gender-affirming treatments “discriminatory, unjust, and anti-American.”
“Freedom of expression includes gender expression,” she continued. “As a proud parent of my trans daughter, I VOW to use my freedom of speech and my right to vote to SUPPORT my child and ALL children trying to live FREELY as who they are.” She finished with the hashtag #ProtectTransKids.
“My mom is the most supportive mom I could ask for,” Ruby later wrote on Twitter, sharing that same image of her mother. “We stand with the trans community and the rest of the LGBTQ. I will never back down no matter how bad it gets for us we will continue to fight.”
We are so lucky to have this geeky and menschy mother-daughter duo.