Jamie Lee Curtis is mourning the death of Charlie Kirk, even if they shared very little common political ground.
“I’m going to bring something up with you just because it’s front of mind. Charlie Crist was killed two days ago,” the Freakier Friday star shared on Monday’s new episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. Maron corrected Curtis, “Kirk, not Crist, prompting her to explain, “Sorry, Kirk. I just call him Crist, I think, because of Christ, because of his deep belief.”
Curtis, who has long championed liberal causes, began to sob over the death of the right-wing podcaster and founder of the influential conservative organization Turning Point USA.
“I mean, I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say,” she elaborated. “But I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died that he felt connected to his faith. Even though I find what his ideas were abhorrent to me, I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith, and I hope whatever ‘connection to God’ means, that he felt it.”
Kirk was discussing mass shooting at at a Turning Point USA event on the campus of Utah Valley University when he was shot. Though he was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was soon pronounced dead. In the days since, Kirk’s death has divided the public, and the Trump administration has vowed to punish those it deems not properly mournful.
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Public figures like Stephen King have also drawn ire for bringing up past statements of Kirk’s that seem to condone politically motivated violence.
Curtis has been a vocal critic of Trump since his first term began in 2016 and supported Democratic candidates for office like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
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But she said politics wasn’t the reason for her emotions over Kirk’s death.
“Today, we as a society are bombarded with imagery. So, we don’t know what the longitudinal effects of seeing those Towers come down over and over and over and over again,” she said, referencing the recent 24th anniversary of the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks, “or watching [Kirk’s] execution over and over and over again.”
Curtis pointed out that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated exactly five years from the day she was born.
“I’m associated with this awful day of someone being assassinated on television,” she said, explaining that she fears we have become “inured” to such violent images. “We are numb to them, but they are in there. We don’t know, we don’t know enough psychologically about what that does. What does that do?”
You can listen to the rest of Curtis’ interview with Maron on the most recent episode of the WTF podcast above.
