Jamie Lee Curtis and Téa Leoni Confess What They Got “Very Competitive” About on the ‘Newlyweds’ Set

    &lt;<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/taylor-s-solo-projects-presentation-16_9-7.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
    Image via NBC</figure>

The pilot of the show is obviously directed by the legendary Pamela Fryman. What is the biggest thing you took away from working with her?

LEONI: You know, to have somebody that was so pure at the helm for a pilot, it’s really important. I don’t care how many years we’ve all been doing this — for me, stepping on that stage for the first time, and in five or six days, you’re going to be in front of a live audience…

CURTIS: Creating characters — not just interpreting.

LEONI: Creating characters. And you have 22 minutes to introduce an entire notion of the whole thing. And to have Pam, that was honestly, for me, my first big exhale in the process of coming on board.

DALY: And she exudes a kind of gravitas. Not to get too heavy about it, but there are some directors, when they come and tell you to do something, you’re like, “Get out of here.” But if you said to Pam, “What if I do this?” And she would say, “No, that doesn’t work.” You’d be like, “Oh, okay.” I knew that she wasn’t saying it from any place other than, “I’ve got this. I know what this is.”

LEONI: And we had both worked with Pam.

LEONI: Oh! Well, for me, I was working with Pam after a 36-year hiatus. She always had really great instincts. Always. So I heard her name, and I felt better. And now? My god.

CURTIS: We got lucky. She’s very special.

LEONI: She set the confidence for us to feel like we got this.

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.

• When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
  conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
• You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
  doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
• The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
  until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
• You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.

• This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
  them equally seriously.
• You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
  rival, and that never entirely goes away.
• It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
  other, but whose turn it is this year.
• You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.

• Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
  meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
• You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
  more real than public ones.
• The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
  it would cost either one to say it out loud.
• Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
  stop hiding.

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.

• Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
  days, which is precisely the point of it.
• You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
  decades of something merely comfortable.
• The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
  enormous life afterwards because of it.
• You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
  same way.

It’s firing on all cylinders in front of the camera and behind it, which leads into my next question. I love the wardrobe on the show, and I feel like the outfits really tell you a lot about the characters. I’m curious if you collaborated at all with the costume designers and if you have a favorite outfit that you got to wear in this show.

DALY: Lederhosen. I was like, “I’ve got to wear lederhosen. Let’s face it.” I’m kidding.

CURTIS: We hired Michelle Cole, who I had heard about. And when I heard she was available, we talked about bringing her on. Obviously, Claudia was pretty simple — the only thing I said was, “She just wears black.” It just makes it easier because guess what? I just wear black, and I know I look good in it, so I don’t have to worry about it. But I have loved watching how she’s done the rest of the cast. It’s been thrilling to watch.

LEONI: She’s amazing. She’s a legend in our industry, and a lot of the costume designers that I came up with, if you were in with Michelle — if Michelle gave you a nod about your wardrobe — that felt great. The other fun thing about it is that she’s really open to play. For me, with this character, I was kind of channeling a teacher that I had in the ’70s and her style. So in my head, I almost unconsciously came in imagining that, first of all, she’s on a teacher’s budget, and Michelle completely embraced that. There was no “let’s stick her in Prada,” which was going to drive you nuts.

LEONI: Jeannie has yet to wear anything new.

CURTIS: There’s a lot of vintage.

LEONI: And that’s become sort of our thing — everything in her wardrobe is secondhand. And as a thrifter myself, I was really into that.

That’s so cool. I hope we get some Halloween costumes or something.

LEONI: Oh, there are some costumes in this show.

The ‘Newlyweds’ Cast Reveals the Skills They’d Love to Learn

“Honestly, I would really love to be a pool shark.”

    &lt;<img src="https://static0.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/taylor-s-solo-projects-presentation-16_9-5.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2" />
    Image via NBC</figure>