No one would have blamed Jamie Lee Curtis for fading into obscurity or Hollywood nepo trivia by now. The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, she started her career with the kind of long horror run – three additional horror pictures between Halloween and Halloween II – that makes a genre actress an icon in retrospect, feted at cons for years and occasionally awarded with old-guard supporting roles or cameos, but rarely cast in major big-studio leading roles. But she successfully pivoted to playing the bombshell in comedies like Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda, with sidelines in action for both Kathryn Bigelow (Blue Steel) and Bigelow’s ex James Cameron (True Lies). Even after all that, the 2003 version of Freaky Friday could have been a career capstone. She had been in the business for 25 years, revisited Laurie Strode in a 20-years-later Halloween follow-up, and despite Freaky Friday becoming one of her biggest hits, she was in the midst of a transition to TV roles. Over the ten years following that movie, she did a handful of family-friendly comedies, but seemed content to work in movies and TV occasionally, in between Activia ads. (Memorably parodied by Kristen Wiig.)

But legacy sequels come for us all, and by “us” I mean “those of us who starred in a hit movie at some point.” Curtis revisited Halloween again, this time 40 years later, and hoping to do better by her character Laurie – who had a heroic face-off with Michael Myers back in H20, only to be killed off in the opening moments of yet another sequel, and in the inauspicious Halloween Resurrection, no less! This time, David Gordon Green and his co-writers crafted a whole sequel trilogy for Laurie, the first installment of which was a massive hit. (The other two, ever more David Gordon Green-ish in their idiosyncrasies, did worse, but the trilogy made a ton of cash in aggregate.) Now she’s starring in another 20-plus-years-later sequel with Freakier Friday, which she lobbied into a theatrical release. Oh, and in between these revisitations, she won an Oscar.

Honestly, even for the Jamie Lee faithful, that last part is a little baffling. Curtis’s work in Everything Everywhere All At Once as an IRS agent vexing Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her family doesn’t really match the depth of feeling afforded her fellow Everything Oscar winners Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. In the Best Supporting Actress category for 2022, she was up against Kerry Condon, beautifully playing a crucial part in The Banshees of Inisherin; Angela Bassett doing the thing in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; Hong Chau giving her movie’s best performance opposite Best Actor winner Brendan Fraser in The Whale; and Curtis’s co-star Stephanie Hsu, playing a more nuanced and important part in Everything Everywhere. By some reckonings – by almost any calculation I can figure, actually – Curtis’s performance was the least impressive of the bunch. Which is all to say that people must really love Curtis, especially in her later-period renaissance. Her big win came off her first nomination ever.

So what is it about an older Curtis that has reignited the affection of audiences and peers alike? Despite her genre-hopping, she’s never been the most stunningly range-y performer; part of her appeal is her straightforwardness. Laurie Strode may be the most sensible of her teenage friends, but she doesn’t project roiling emotions beneath her surface. Even when she’s playing an outright con artist in A Fish Called Wanda, the arc of the movie is about her Wanda gradually dropping a semi-sham relationship with Otto (Kevin Kline) and succumbing to the charms of Archie (John Cleese), who she starts to seduce as a tactic but quickly comes to genuinely love. For that matter, her “playing” of Lindsay Lohan’s teenage character in the body-swap section of the original Freaky Friday is funny enough, but not exactly a close study of complicated teenage emotions.

She’s similarly broad in Freakier Friday, this time playing a different teenager inhabiting her older body; it’s the kind of performance about which you can cheerfully praise her commitment without really going to bat for its virtuosity, beyond maybe some fun slapstick where she dives around a record store trying to do a Cyrano routine with Lohan (who, this time around, is also playing a teenager in her now-adult body). That may be what ultimately makes Curtis such a beloved figure in her sixties, weirdly also something that probably helped with that Activia gig: Her unembarrassed gameness.

That’s been consistent throughout her career but feels more pronounced as she ages into veteran status. Though she’s said to be finally done with Halloween (and has spoken about feeling unable to break out of the genre box early in her career), she doesn’t shun her horror roots. In fact, Halloween Ends, where Laurie Strode makes a good-faith attempt to ditch her doomsday-prepper-style readiness for another Michael Myers attack and tries her hand at being a sweetly meddling grandma, features some of her best work ever. She doesn’t just agree to do a Freaky Friday sequel; she pushes for it to be greenlit and released in theaters. Even the reason her Everything Everywhere Oscar feels a little weird – it’s arguably the least nuanced and most thankless major part in the film – speaks well of her willingness to do it in the first place. If some of her post-Oscar work has felt a little hammy (if you haven’t seen her guest spot in the TV series The Sticky, well, don’t), well, that’s going to be a side effect of performing with such gusto and obvious love for her profession. She’s become the rare nepo baby that it’s nearly impossible to begrudge.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.