60 Minutes - 05/11/2025: Fraud, To Walk Again, Jamie Lee Curtis

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Correspondent Cecilia Vega reports on rampant fraud in government programs like unemployment, food stamps, disaster aid and more. With few safeguards at state and federal levels, taxpayers are falling victim to complex schemes carried out by scammers, hackers and transnational criminal organizations, costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars each year. For people who’ve suffered traumatic spinal cord injuries that have caused paralysis, positive news has been scarce. However, as correspondent Anderson Cooper discovers, innovative technology now in an early clinical trial is allowing participants to stand up and walk or move their arms – by thinking about it. Cooper reports from the NeuroRestore research lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he meets the team leading this groundbreaking research and hears the stories of patients enrolled in the trial. Jamie Lee Curtis has been making movies for almost 50 years. Not surprising for a child born into Hollywood royalty. But to hear her tell it, leaving school as a teenager, only to graduate into an A-list movie star before she was 30, was never the plan. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi talks with Curtis in Los Angeles about her long career in tinsel town and about her recent wave of award-winning performances that came to her in her 60’s. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms and history are clues. You saved her life. We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it, if I'm being honest.

Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson, all episodes now streaming on Paramount+. can don't miss a moment culture's in trouble i can feel it of tv's number one show these people are dangerous i'm doing this alone not at all every bad man gotta have their raven culture justin hartley stars i made a promise i would never stop looking in tracker all episodes now streaming on paramount plus and returning cbs fall It's the most popular F-word in Washington, fraud. The fraud has been incredible. And it costs the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What we learned about who's committing it might surprise you.

What we're really talking about is nation-state actors. We're talking about organized crime rings. We're talking about using vast amounts of stolen Americans' identities to monetize them for, you know, criminal activity. Go. Tonight, we travel to Lausanne, Switzerland, to tell you about promising new technology that's helping paralyzed people with spinal cord injuries stand up and walk just by thinking about it. What was that like? Gaining some superpower, a power that I did not have before.

And now with these implants, you it's i'm a real iron woman four decades after she cemented her place in hollywood with the horror movie halloween jamie lee curtis is savoring a new wave of award-winning performances playing a string of raw volatile characters that suck the oxygen out of the room. Donna, the images in my mind of her buttering the bread with the nails and the eyelash on the cheek. The eyelash. That single eyelash, I think, won me an Emmy. I swear to God. Go. Go sit. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. In 60 Minutes. Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering,

is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. Did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans Did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench?

Those jeans? That jacket? Those heels? Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners find fabulous for less. It's the most popular F-word in Washington, fraud.

And Doge, the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, has been tearing through federal agencies on the hunt for it. fraud. And Doge, the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, has been tearing through federal agencies on the hunt for it. But is Doge looking in the right places? The fraud we'll tell you about tonight is complex, pervasive, and being carried out by transnational criminal organizations, often using stolen identities to target U.S. taxpayers, costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars a year. To be honest, Elon Musk coming out and saying, there is a huge amount of fraud, I welcome that message completely because finally someone is actually saying this.

No one knows the ins and outs of government fraud better than Linda Miller. She spent a decade at the Government Accountability Office tracking how taxpayer money is spent and misspent, and even wrote the rule book on preventing fraud in federal programs. Fraud is willful deception. It involves willful deception, and it has to be proven in a court of law.

Is Doge conflating fraud with wasteful spending? Yes, often. You may not agree with what USAID does. You may not want to be investing American dollars in, you know, foreign fertilizer, for example. You may think that's the wrong thing to be spending money on, but that's not fraud. Last year, the Government Accountability Office released a report estimating the federal government loses as much as $521 billion a year to fraud. But Miller and other fraud experts believe the number is higher. I believe the government is losing between $550 billion and about $750 billion a year. We're coming up close to the $1 trillion amount is lost every year in fraud. When most people think of government fraud, I imagine they're thinking somebody is claiming disability benefits when they're not actually eligible,

somebody collecting food stamps when they're not actually eligible. Are those the biggest offenders? Not at all, not by a long shot. What we're really talking about is nation-state actors. We're talking about organized crime rings. We're talking about using vast amounts of stolen Americans' identities to monetize them for, you know, criminal activity. The problem exploded during the pandemic, when the government rushed trillions of dollars into the economy to help struggling Americans. Applications for relief programs moved online,

making it easier for people to access aid. But with few safeguards, scammers, hackers, and organized crime rings also cashed in. Fraud prevention is simply not a priority for federal and state agencies. In 2020, Miller was appointed to an independent watchdog committee that tracked how COVID relief money was spent. We could tell right away, it's like, oh, well, that's all going to get stolen. You saw it coming. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was like they threw money in the air and just let people run around and grab it. The most egregious part is that a lot of the people who stole that money were foreign adversarial nation states.

So who are they? Who are you talking about? We're talking about China. We're talking about Russia. Impersonating Americans in a lot of cases. Right. These are arguably digital gangs in the 21st century that are built off of having safe havens to us, meaning their governments are not going to interrupt their activity even if it's illegal. Brian Vondren is head of the FBI's Cyber Division. He says these digital gangs are armed with a very important weapon.

Is it true that the social security number of just about every single American is available for sale on the dark web? That is a true statement. All of our personally identifiable information, name, date of birth, form or address, social security number, is available on the dark net and can likely be purchased. That's chilling. Yeah. It's very much a way of our lives, though, right now.

And purchased, I hear, for as little as $2 apiece. Yep. Very affordable. Last year, the FBI unraveled one of the largest digital fraud cases in U.S. history in which cyber criminals from around the world use stolen identities to pocket $6 billion in pandemic unemployment funds. $6 billion is an enormous, enormous amount of money. Why is the government a target for this type of fraud? Because of the massive amount of money that exists in the federal government and in the state government. There's no official tally of how much COVID relief money was lost to fraud, but Miller estimates it's more than a trillion dollars.

That's one in five dollars, making it the largest fraud loss in U.S. history. One of the things I've found really disheartening is since then I've talked to some folks who said, well, that was just the pandemic. We don't have to worry about it anymore. Was it? No. I mean, it's whack-a-mole. And these guys are paying close attention. They're seeing where better controls are being put in place,

and then they're going to where the controls still haven't been improved. What are the hotspots for fraud right now? Disaster funding is a really big issue. When a disaster happens in the country, the fraud actors see where it's coming, they look at the zip codes, and they begin buying stolen identities so that they can begin applying for disaster loans, disaster grants, on behalf of stolen identities. That's our FEMA stuff.

The real Americans behind those identities? People like Rich and Deanne Wilkin, who survived the Los Angeles wildfires that tore through their Palisades neighborhood in January. Everything on this side burned, and the school on the other side also burned. They documented the devastation, showing the home they lived in for nearly 50 years gone. All they have left are the few carloads of belongings they managed to take with them. The Wilkins applied for disaster assistance from FEMA,

carefully keeping a file and notebook with important information they'd need throughout the process. So as far as you know, you've done everything you need to do. Help is on the way. Help is on the way. Help is on the way. But help never came. So the Wilkins followed up with a FEMA representative at a disaster center and learned the personal information they'd used to set up their FEMA account had been changed. She says, what's your social security number? What's your date of birth? And your address is such and such.

And I said, no. Does your phone number start with area code such and such? I said, no. What's going through your mind? Yikes. Yeah, WTF. Oh, and by that time, too, we had already heard some of our other friends whose accounts were the same way. And we just go, oh, not us too.

The Wilkins were told their account was locked due to suspected identity fraud. They've spent months waiting for FEMA to resolve their case, and it's unclear whether they will ever get any money. Where will you be in six months? Here. Will you still have this folder in front of you? Hopefully it's been put way in the back of the filing cabinet. It's not just one program.

Where there's money, there's fraud. In unemployment, food stamps, disability, tax refunds, leaving Americans struggling to access what they're owed. All the while, criminals are one step ahead, using AI tools like deepfakes, often of innocent people, to cover their tracks. Hi, can you tell me your name? The man you see here is attempting to pass an identity check through the company ID.me to obtain a tax refund from the IRS. Or so it appears. Watch closely as he holds up a driver's license. There's a glitch and you see a sliver of a different man's face.

I won't be able to complete your verification. You can hear someone speaking Mandarin in the background. In some cases, suspected criminals are on the payroll of foreign governments, like China, which employs a group the FBI calls APT41, APT for Advanced Persistent Threat. In 2021, APT41 carried out a highly sophisticated and unusual hack of at least six state governments. What would they want hacking into state government programs? They just want to make money for themselves. Through the U.S. government? Correct.

Via American taxpayer dollars? Correct. They used stolen, personally identifiable information and essentially created fraudulent unemployment claims. And then those proceeds were laundered through shell companies and that money was sent back to these individuals in China. How much did they get? Our best estimate is $60 million. $60 million over the course of how long? Over the course of about two years. Wow. How much of that has been recovered? Very little. Very little. And I assume never will be. That's a likely outcome. And to be clear, this was money that was supposed to go to Americans in need in a crime being carried out that has been linked to the Chinese government. Correct.

Multiple law enforcement and national security officials told us China is a top destination for stolen taxpayer dollars. But the schemes are so complex and difficult to investigate, the true losses are unknown. We've heard that attacks like this are continuing to this day, and it's not just APT 41. There are hundreds of people involved. Do you believe that to be true? I believe that there are sustained campaigns across this globe that are very well resourced with a goal of causing damage

to the United States. Can you really catch a criminal in this arena that is operating in a place like China, Russia, North Korea, Eastern Europe? We have plenty of examples where we have caught people from some of the countries that you mentioned. I do think there's a perception though that some of these criminals are untouchable. They're impossible to get to. Sure, I would agree with that. It also respectfully sounds like you're outnumbered. In the U.S. government, we're all outnumbered. Do you ever feel like you're sort of screaming until you're blue in the face on this and no one

is listening to you? Yes, yes. I have worked with agencies where when I sit down and talk to them, they say, I'm going to stop you right there because you keep saying fraud. And that sounds so insidious. Is there another word we could use? Is there? Well, I say, well, what's the word you'd prefer? And they say maybe misappropriation. Does that make it better? Yeah, I say, well, what's the word you'd prefer? And they say, maybe misappropriation.

Does that make it better? Yeah, it sounds better. And what I usually say is, it is insidious. It's been brought to light that the fraud, not just waste and abuse, the fraud has been incredible. Doge claims it has saved taxpayers more than $160 billion so far, sometimes citing examples of cost cuts that are inaccurate and later walked back. A White House spokesman told us Doge has been working on improving data sharing between agencies and that departments are collaborating to identify fraud and prevent criminals from exploiting taxpayers,

saying, quote, fraudsters will be held accountable. Watching Doge, are you optimistic that real fraud reform will actually come? I, when I watch Doge today, I do see some hints that they are addressing the right issues. But right now I think the jury is still out on whether or not we're going to get that kind of progress. Do you feel like you have to choose your words carefully when you're talking about Doge and Elon Musk? Yeah. Why? Because I really think fraud is not a political issue.

This is mom and apple pie stuff. We all agree that bad actors should not be stealing American taxpayer dollars. But now it's become political. People like me and people in the law enforcement community, we see the adversary not as Republicans or Democrats, but as foreign adversarial nation states and organized crime rings. And I believe that there's opportunities for Doge to save a lot of significant money if they focus on the right things, if they focus on real fraud. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. We don't know what we're looking for. Their bodies are the scene of the crime. Their symptoms and history are clues. You saved her life.

We're doctors and we're detectives. I kind of love it if I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle, save the patient. Watson. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+. Visit BestBustard. Center for Autism and Related Disorders. news, which is why what's happening in early clinical trials in a research lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, is so remarkable. A renowned French neuroscientist, Gregoire Cortin, and Swiss neurosurgeon, Dr. Jocelyne Bloch, have implanted a small stimulation device on the spine of paralyzed patients, helping them once again stand up and walk. What's even more surprising is their newest innovation, which uses an implant

in the skull that enables patients to move their paralyzed legs or arms just by thinking about it. When we visited their lab, NeuroRestore in March, they were working with a 39-year-old woman whose spinal cord was severed six and a half years ago. She'd been told she'd never walk again. Marta Carstiano-Dombi is the most severely paralyzed patient who's enrolled in this clinical trial at NeuroRestore to regain mobility in her legs. She has no feeling below her waist and is unable to keep her balance. Just sitting up on her own is a challenge. You catch me, huh? Sure? Good. In 2018, Marta was a new mom, working at a German tech company when she began training with her husband for an Ironman competition. She was in the best shape of her life, but during the bike portion of the race, she suffered a devastating accident.

You were found... Near a tree. Near a tree. Yes. And your back hit the tree. We're hypothesizing what happened, right, because nobody saw me. So I must have had a pretty tough collision because my spine basically broke like two dimensions. Her spinal cord injury was so severe, doctors said there was no sign of nerve connections left to her lower body.

She'd also broken eight ribs, punctured her lungs, and was bleeding internally. She needed emergency surgery, and doctors told her family she might not survive. You came out of the surgery. I understand you wrote a message to your mom. So the surgery took about seven to eight hours. And I was intubated. I could not talk. And my mom, you can imagine, was in tears. And I just wrote to her, I'm strong.

That strength has been tested. Marta spent 10 days in intensive care and four and a half months in a rehab hospital, learning to adapt to her half months in a rehab hospital, learning to adapt to her new life in a wheelchair. Traditionally, if someone gets a spinal cord injury, what are the treatment options for them? You have to do a little bit of physiotherapy, get into a wheelchair, and then you go back home and that's all. That's it?

That's it. And that was, for many years, the only option. Dr. Jocelyne Bloch and Grégoire Cortin have been at the forefront of researchers trying to expand those options since 2012. Their lab near Lake Geneva is a collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland's MIT, and the Lausanne University Hospital. That's where they've implanted eight paralyzed patients with a

device that allows them to stimulate their spinal cords, enabling them to stand, take steps with a walker, and lift weights. Some can even climb stairs. They use a button to activate the stimulation. Left. And now, thanks to Corteen and Bloch's latest technology, five other patients can move their paralyzed limbs using their own thoughts. It's called a digital bridge, and it wirelessly connects a patient's brain to their spinal cord stimulator. Normally there is a direct communication between the brain and the spinal cord. For me to walk, my brain just automatically tells my legs to walk.

But because of the spinal cord injury, the signal is interrupted. So we are aiming to bridge, bypass the injury by having a direct digital connection between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that controls leg movement. To do that, Dr. Bloch implants a small titanium device originally developed by a French research institute in the patient's skull, directly over their motor cortex, the area of the brain responsible for controlling movement. You see you have the 64 electrodes.

And so each of these is what? It's electrodes that are recording populations of neurons underneath, And you can immediately see which ones are the best correlated to certain movements. Like the hip is here, and then the knee is here, and then the ankle is here, etc. When a patient thinks about moving a limb, those electrodes record the brain's activity. Then a computer uses artificial intelligence to translate the recordings into instructions for the stimulation device implanted on the spinal cord. That device sends electrical pulses activating muscles in the legs or arms. All of it happens in about half a

second. Gert-Jan Oskum was the first person to get the digital bridge four years ago after he was paralyzed in a bike accident we met him for a walk by lake geneva so now the stimulation is on now it's on yes do you feel it at all in your body i do feel a little tingling sensation from the stimulation with my brain his headpiece powers the implant in his skull, and on his walker is the computer. It's cumbersome and tiring, physically and mentally, but he can walk up to 450 feet. It's incredible to me, though, that you can continue talking with me, even though this machine is reading the signals from your brain. It's able to discriminate walking and talking at the same time. That's incredible.

For somebody who has not been able to control their movements to suddenly be able to control their movement, I mean that's... Yeah, there is this initial phase of surprise, you know, when they realize that they are giving the order and it's happening, you know? Wow. Nice.

Wow. That was me? That's you. That's you. They're like, did I do that? Like, is it me or you actually stimulated, no? Say, no, you did it. They think you're pressing a button somewhere

and doing it. They don't understand because I've been paralyzed for so many years. Ready? Started. Increasing amplitude. Marta got the digital bridge implanted in September. She's worked with a team of engineers and physical therapists

to figure out how much electrical stimulation is needed to move her legs. Nice. And hop. So that's the stimulation, the electrical stimulation is making the leg move. Yeah, Marta is completely paralyzed. This is the magic cappy. But Marta's also had to teach herself to think about moving the exact same way every time. Right.

So the AI can recognize her thoughts. She practiced at first with this avatar. Stop. You have to relearn or rethink how to walk. Exactly. So we were experimenting a little bit. What do I think about? Is it I think about the hip being contracted?

Do I think about the knee lifting up? Do I think about the ankle? To show us how she does that, they disconnected her skull implant from her spinal cord stimulator and connected it to this exoskeleton. You can control this with your thoughts right now? Yeah. If I want to do a right movement, right hip flexion, it does a right hip flexion. You're not pressing any buttons or anything, you're just thinking... Sure.

Can you look at me without looking at it and just... Do a right one, yes. I think it works. It does work. After training with the digital bridge for just two days, Dr. Jocelyne Bloch and Gregoire Cortine, or G as Marta calls him, put her to the test, eager to see if she could take some steps. Jocelyne and G come in and it's like, okay, show off.

So what can you do? They said show off? Yeah. Were you ready to show off? I did not know if I'm able to show off. This was the thing, huh? Using a harness to support about half her body weight and physical therapists to help place her feet on the ground,

Marta took her first steps. Despite having no sensation below her waist, she was able to move her paralyzed legs with her thoughts. What was that like? Gaining some superpower. A power that I did not have before. And now with these implants, you know, I'm a real iron woman. Nice. When we were there in March, Marta wasn't able to walk on her own yet,

but she said she'd already regained something she'd lost. It's giving me my perspective back, standing up again and looking people in the eye. That's different. A difference in how you think about yourself or in how others see you? Or how you interact in the world? Everything. Everything. You leave the hospital on your wheelchair and you notice the different looks. Right away you notice? Yeah. Scared looks. Also a lot of smiles that are a little bit too long.

Those well-meaning smiles reminded Arnaud Robert, who's quadriplegic, how much his life had changed. A Swiss journalist, he'd spent decades traveling the world. But three years ago, he slipped on a patch of ice and was instantly paralyzed from the neck down. He regained some function in his right arm with physical therapy, but wanted to see if the digital bridge could help him with his left. Opening and closing a hand is far more complex than walking. It is because of

the possibility to access a different muscle individually. The hand is tricky with all these different little muscles and it's very subtle. But after surgery and training at Cortina and Bloch's lab for eight months, he was able to use his left hand to help hold a glass and type. Even to be able to move my fingers, this is something that I couldn't do. And of course, moving the arm like that, this is something that I couldn't do either. That's incredible. It's really incredible. I mean, I don't want to pretend that I'm using this left arm on a daily base. There is a long, long way to get it functional for every quadriplegic in the world.

But it was certainly a success because I see that I can do things that I wouldn't, I was not able to do before. But something else has happened as well. After using the digital bridge over time, both Arnaud and Gert-Jan have improved their ability to move their paralyzed limbs, even when the system is turned off. How is that possible? What happened? That was also our question, and we could not do much in a human being to understand it.

Since it wasn't possible for them to see the changes in their patients' spinal cords at a microscopic level, they did studies in animals to understand what was happening. What we understood was completely unexpected, that this training enabled the growth of new nerve connection. So new nerves start growing and they grow on one very specific type of neuron that is uniquely equipped to repair the central nervous system. So we also observed that the less the severity of the spinal cord lesion is, the better the regrowth happens. If it's a complete spinal cord injury, it will be hard to regrow. But indeed, there is something happening.

How well the digital bridge works still needs to be studied in a lot more patients. They hope to launch clinical trials in the U.S. in the next two to three years. The FDA has already designated it as a breakthrough device, which will prioritize the review process. And Cortin and Block have co-founded a company called Onward Medical to bring this technology out of the lab, making it faster, smaller, and widely available. It's not changing my everyday in ways people might think, oh, she's getting back her life she had before.

So as long as it makes me feel good that I can stand up and hug my husband or hug somebody that I love, that means a lot. What's your goal? To go out in the park and just stand up and do some steps with my family. It's not a stroll in the park, how it would look for most other people,

but for me, it's just good enough to make me happy after six months of hard work just before Marta was to return to her family She did what doctors years ago told her she never would She took a few steps no harness to hold her just just her walker and her iron will. He's the man for the job. I'm gonna do everything I can. Don't miss a moment. Coulter's in trouble. I can feel it. Of TV's number one show. These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every bad man gotta have their router. Coulter!

Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking. In Tracker. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+. And returning CBS Fall. In Hollywood, it's not unusual for actors to try and fit the industry standard of beauty and marketability, plotting every outfit and career move with the prowess of a chess master. But Jamie Lee Curtis is not one of them.

Candid and spontaneous, she fearlessly calls it as she sees it, even when it comes to herself. We met Jamie Lee Curtis in Los Angeles, where, at 66 years old, she is savoring a new wave of award-winning performances. We asked her about her decades-long career. She told us it was anything but planned. My life hinged on a couple seconds I never saw coming. I never thought I'd be an actor in my life. My teeth were the color of concrete. They were gray.

I was cute but not pretty. And so I never saw that coming. She probably should have. Jamie Lee Curtis was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of screen idols Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two of the biggest stars during the golden age of cinema. But Jamie Leigh says she wanted to be a cop. She was home from college when a friend convinced her to audition for Universal Studios. I did the scene and she said that was very good or whatever. And I was like, okay, great, thanks. I said, listen, if this is going to work out, I need to know, because I'm going back to

college in like two days. Very practical. So like, she laughed or whatever. And they called me the next day and they gave me a seven-year contract at Universal. And I quit college. Almost immediately, she booked the 1978 horror film Halloween. While I'm here tonight, I'm not about to let anything happen to you. Curtis was cast as the bookish babysitter Laurie Strode, terrorized by an unrelenting killer.

It was her first movie. She was 19 years old, playing the lead. Were people saying, oh, she got the job because of who her parents are, because of the pedigree? I know. I guarantee you the fact that my mother was in Psycho was a determining factor. That maybe that will get them a little extra publicity. Now, did it get me to that final two? No. My auditions got me to the final two.

This was a $300,000 horror movie. This was not a job that a lot of people wanted. Halloween ended up grossing more than $70 million and became a cult classic. But it didn't exactly launch Jamie Lee Curtis's career. My big break after Halloween was I was on Love Boat with Janet Leigh, beautiful Janet Leigh playing my mother. And then I was in a Charlie's Angels episode where I am Cheryl Ladd's best friend, pro golfer. So those are the two jobs I get post Halloween.

Were you thinking at this point, like, people aren't hiring me, they just want my mom around or the name? You know what? Sure. But didn't that bother you? No. Because, because I was doing my thing. Curtis's thing was transforming into a scream

queen for a new generation with a string of horror movies. I read that you didn't even like scary movies. I don't like scary movies. Still? Still. Oh, please. Awful. Why? Awful. The smart aleck answer is because life is scary.

It's a surprising thing to hear from an actress who's known for being fearless. Before that spin around the bedpost opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies, Curtis held her own next to Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in her first comedy feature, Trading Places, directed by John Landis. She says her role as Ophelia, a wise, kind-hearted streetwalker, is what really launched her career. That part, I mean, she's gritty and the gum and the whole thing. How much of that did you bring to her? John stuck gum in my mouth every day. Literally, I would stand there and he'd walk up, I'd

go, okay. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a great part. But here's the other thing, and this is crucial and this will make the piece. If I'm not's, you know, it's just a great part. But here's the other thing, and this is crucial, and this will make the piece. If I'm not in Trading Places, John Cleese does not write A Fish Called Wanda for me. I'll treasure it. If I'm not in A Fish Called Wanda, Jim Cameron does not write the part in True Lies for me. And that grouping of films gave me my career, for sure. If it all sounds like a fairy tale, it wasn't. By the mid-80s, Jamie Lee Curtis was a well-established actor

when she made a movie with John Travolta called Perfect. By all accounts, and from every angle, she was. I took it very seriously as an actor, and of course, I look really good in a leotard. And believe me, I've seen enough pictures of me in that leotard where even I go like, really? Come on! But she says a cinematographer working on the film criticized the way she looked.

I was like, yeah, I'm not shooting her today. Her eyes are baggy. And I was twenty-five. So for him to say that was very embarrassing. So as soon as the movie finished, I ended up having some plastic surgery. And how did that go? Not well. That's just not what you want to do when you're 25 or 26. And I regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since. Even now? Way so now because I've become a really public advocate to say to women, you're gorgeous and you're perfect the way you are. So, oh yeah, it was not a good thing for me to do.

That's when you started taking it public about this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Painkillers. Well, they give me to do. That's when you started taking in public about this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You started taking painkillers. Well, they give them to you. I became very enamored with the warm bath of an opiate. You know, drank a little bit. Never to excess,

never any big public demonstrations. I was very quiet, very private about it. But it became a dependency for sure. Curtis says she's been sober for 26 years. Did you worry when you shared your story of how you got sober that it would impact your career? I think I worried more that selling yogurt that makes you s*** was going to impact my career than for me to acknowledge that I had an addiction.

I make the joke. It's a funny joke, but it's true. Take the Activia Challenge now. It works or it's free. Ah, that yogurt commercial. Famously parodied by Saturday Night Live. Now the good news. I just discovered... Curtis, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, suddenly began selling pantyhose and hawking rental cars. Hertz came out on top. True Lies had made $400 million.

You could have done anything you wanted to do. But you were taking those spokesperson jobs. Why? For the most part, because they allowed me to stay home with my kids. So I am an imperfect working mom because no working moms are perfect. It's all scotch tape together. I'm looking at one. You're speaking to one. We make it look good, we think we've done it, but the truth is we feel bad, Lee. But I know how much time away from them I spent in pursuit of my own creativity. Curtis

has two children with Christopher Guest, the actor and director best known for This Is Spinal Tap. CHRISTOPHER GUEST, It's famous for its sustain. I mean, you can just hold it. And taking aim at dog shows and even filmmaking in a series of mockumentaries. They've been married for more than 40 years. CHRISTOPHER GUEST, My mother was married four times. My father was married five times.

That's nine. My stepfather was married four times. My father was married five times. That's nine. My stepfather was married three. So I come from an immediate family of 12 marriages. So my joke, I'm still married to my first husband, you know, it was important to me that I stay married to my husband, that he's my husband. Did you ever pass a role that you wish you had taken? No. Once their kids were grown, Curtis traded in carpool duty for unapologetically driving

her own career. We're going this way. She runs her own production company, which has a TV series and the work starring Nicole Kidman and a feature film about the catastrophic Paradise wildfires in 2018. She's also running her own charity. Curtis has raised over a million dollars for Children's Hospital Los Angeles and donated another million to victims of the recent wildfires, which destroyed much of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades,

including this home, where she filmed the millennial hit Freaky Friday and the upcoming sequel, Freakier Friday. And four decades after the first Halloween, she finally put that franchise to rest. But it is a string of raw, vulnerable characters that came to Curtis in her 60s that led to a comeback even she never imagined. You know, I mean, he's cute-ish. Playing the aging waitress in The Last Showgirl.

I could also get you a job. Or sucking the oxygen out of the kitchen as the combustible matriarch Donna Brazato in Hulu's TV series, The Bear. Donna, the images in my mind of her buttering the bread with the nails and the eyelash on the cheek. The eyelash. That single eyelash, I think, won me an Emmy. I swear to God. Go, I'm good. Go. Go sit. I've waited my whole life for Donna. Patiently, quietly cooking. My own creative mental life, my own, you know, my own alcoholism.

It's just so beautifully written that you don't have to do anything. But it was 2022's mystical, somewhat mind-bending, everything everywhere all at once that pushed Jamie Lee Curtis out of her comfort zone. Did you understand that role when you got it? Not one second of it. Did I understand that script? No. With nothing but a stack of receipts, I can trace the ups and downs. Curtis says she did understand Deirdre Beaubierdre, the hard-boiled bureaucrat from hell.

It does not look good. We all know Deirdre. She's a woman who's not loved. She's a woman who uses her power in her job to control people because she has no love in her life. Curtis was unrecognizable, but her performance did not go unnoticed. Jamie Lee Curtis! Before the moment, though, first,

when they call your name... Yes. You say, when they call your name. Yes. You say, I think... Shut up. Totally. Because that wasn't supposed to happen. Your mom never won an Oscar. Dad never won an Oscar.

No, they didn't. They were both nominated. Does this make you feel like you're on even footing with your parents, who were these gigantic stars? You know what? I think about surpassing my parents, which I have, emotionally. I've surpassed my parents with sobriety. My mother was restricted by what the industry wanted from her and expected from her and would allow from her. My mother would have hated The Last Showgirl because I showed what I really looked like.

And so I have, I don't want to say surpassed them, but I have freedom. The morning after her Oscar win, a photographer asked Curtis to recreate a photo of actress Faye Dunaway and her statue from nearly 50 years ago. She agreed with one condition. And I said to him, yeah, but I won't do it seriously. We have to make it funny. Jamie Lee Curtis hasn't just embraced imperfection. She's made it an art. The last minute of 60 Minutes. Next week on 60 Minutes, we'll tell you about 32-year-old tech billionaire Palmer Lucky,

who has big ideas about the future of warfare. Lucky is the founder of Andrel. It makes a line of autonomous weapons that look like something out of a sci-fi movie. There's the Roadrunner, a turbo jet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify, and destroy a target. No soldier needed, it's powered by artificial intelligence. It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn't have

any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground in making a land system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground in making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. That story and more next week on another edition of 60 Minutes. Now streaming. Everyone who comes into this clinic is a mystery. of 60 Minutes. I'm being honest. Solve the puzzle. Save the patient. Watson. All episodes. Now streaming on Paramount+. Now streaming.

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These people are dangerous. I'm doing this alone. Not at all. Every bad man gotta have their router. Culture! Justin Hartley stars. I made a promise. I would never stop looking. In Tracker. All episodes now streaming on Paramount+.

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