"When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus"
About this Quote
“Plan B” doesn’t read here as “give up on your dream.” It’s code for building psychological scaffolding in a career designed to keep you dependent on external validation. Acting work arrives in bursts, often followed by enforced idleness that looks like luxury from the outside and feels like disorientation from the inside. Dushku’s “go nuts” is blunt, almost intentionally unvarnished, and that’s the point: instability isn’t exceptional in this business, it’s structural. The schedule is volatile; the identity can become even more so.
The subtext is also about power. When your livelihood hinges on casting decisions and market trends, having “another focus” is a form of autonomy. It protects against the emotional whiplash of audition culture and the temptation to treat every hiatus as personal failure. Coming from the True Lies era - peak studio-machine, peak star system - the advice carries a generational edge: the people who last aren’t just talented; they’re diversified, anchored, and harder to break.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Dushku, Eliza. (2026, January 17). When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-i-worked-with-jamie-lee-curtis-in-true-lies-76917/
Chicago Style
Dushku, Eliza. "When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-i-worked-with-jamie-lee-curtis-in-true-lies-76917/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"When I worked with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, she told me, You need a plan B, because when you have six months to a year off, you can go nuts. You need to have another focus." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-i-worked-with-jamie-lee-curtis-in-true-lies-76917/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
