Jamie Lee Curtis says she was “mistranslated” over tearful comments she made about Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk days after he was shot dead at an open-air college event in Utah.

In a revealing interview with Variety, Curtis clarified her comments about Kirk’s death with her trademark wit and fierce intelligence.

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Jamie Lee Curtis fights back tears as she discusses “man of faith” Charlie Kirk’s death

The controversy over Curtis’s words began with an interview she gave just two days after Kirk was shot and killed live on the internet.

“I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say,” Curtis said during an appearance on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron on September 12.

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Fighting back tears, she added, “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 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,” the Halloween actress said.

A longtime LGBTQ+ ally, Curtis has shared unwavering support for her trans daughter Ruby since they came out in 2020.

When Curtis won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, she gave the statuette they/them pronouns in Ruby’s honor.

Christian nationalist Kirk considered transgender people a disease to be stamped out of society.

“The transgender thing happening in America now is a throbbing middle finger to God,” he said in 2023.

Critics called the sympathetic words in Curtis’s podcast interview a betrayal, but the actress doesn’t see it that way.

“An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying as, ‘I wished him well,'” Curtis said pukishly. “Like I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t; I was simply talking about his faith in God. And so it was a mistranslation, which is a pun, but not.”

Curtis zoomed out to describe how the internet and public debate in general today don’t welcome nuance.

“In the binary world today,” Curtis continued, “you cannot hold two ideas at the same time: I cannot be Jewish and totally believe in Israel’s right to exist and at the same time reject the destruction of Gaza. You can’t say that, because you get vilified for having a mind that says, ‘I can hold both those thoughts. I can be contradictory in that way.’”

Curtis disputed the idea that, as a public figure, she has “to be careful.”

“I don’t have to be careful,” Curtis replied sharply to Variety’s correspondent. “If I was careful, I wouldn’t have told you any of what I just told you. I would have just said, ‘Hi, welcome. I baked you banana bread. Here’s my dog. Here’s my house, blah, blah, blah. What do you want to know?’

“I can’t not be who I am in the moment I am,” she said.

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