Jamie Lee Curtis and Téa Leoni Confess What They Got “Very Competitive” About on the ‘Newlyweds’ Set
Taylor Gates is an Indiana native who earned her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Evansville. She fell in love with entertainment by watching shows about chaotic families like Full House, The Nanny, Gilmore Girls, and The Fosters.
After college, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a writer, editor, and filmmaker. Today, she’s a sucker for dramedies — especially coming-of-age stories centering around complex female and LGBTQ+ characters. She has been with Collider since May 2022.
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Summary
- During an interview with Collider, Téa Leoni, Tim Daly, and Jamie Lee Curtis discuss what it was like to play pickleball in front of a live audience.
- The trio talks about working with legendary director Pamela Fryman and costume designer Michelle Cole.
- The three also share the skills they’d like to learn.
Over a decade after they first met (and fell in love!) on political drama Madam Secretary, Téa Leoni and Tim Daly are reuniting once again — this time, for a more comedic project in the form of Newlyweds, where they play eccentric widow Jeanie and pragmatic divorcee James who marry after a whirlwind romance. Leoni is best known for projects in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, including Bad Boys, Jurassic Park III, and Family Man, the latter of which won her a Saturn Award, while Daly’s resume includes everything from the sitcom Wings to guest-starring in The Sopranos — a performance which earned him an Emmy nomination.
Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the most prolific and acclaimed actors working today, with everything from classics like Halloween and True Lies to modern masterpieces like Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Bear under her belt. Curtis not only co-created Newlyweds but also stars as James’ overbearing yet fabulous ex-wife Claudia, who meddles in his new relationship whenever possible.
Collider got the chance to speak to the trio about their work on the show. During the conversation, they discussed whether they’re more of a butterfly like Jeanie or a gopher like James, playing pickleball in front of a live studio audience, how working with legendary directors and costume designers elevates the show, and more.
The ‘Newlyweds’ Cast Talks Playing Pickleball in Front of a Live Studio Audience
“Somebody went to John Gardiner's tennis ranch.”
COLLIDER: I feel like, after this show, I'm gonna start categorizing everyone into gophers versus butterflies, so I'm curious, which would each of you categorize yourself as and why?
TÉA LEONI: I think I'm a gopher with butterfly wings.
TIM DALY: I’m trying to combine them like a butterfer, gopherfly. Same thing. Yeah, both.
LEONI: Little bit of both.
JAMIE LEE CURTIS: And I’m butterfly — total butterfly. If I see a page with too many words on it, I say TLDR. I have big ideas. This show was born from a big idea. I'm the ideas person, but the fine print? I'm just like, “Yeah, too much information. Too many words. Too many words.”
I want to talk about the pickleball scenes. I feel like pickleball is difficult enough as it is, let alone in front of a live studio audience. What was it like to shoot that?
DALY: So much fun! It was really fun.
CURTIS: Somebody got competitive. [Looks at Leoni] You! We're pointing at you.
DALY: Can you tell our pickleball story without offending anyone? The first time we tried?
CURTIS: Please, tell it.
LEONI: Yeah, you can tell it — just don’t name any names.
DALY: Tell it.
LEONI: No, you tell it.
DALY: So, Téa and I were asked by some friends if we wanted to play pickleball, and they had, like, outfits, paddles where you unzip the thing. And we reached into this bucket of damp, wet, moldy paddles. The hardest part about pickleball is the rules, which I still can't even describe.
LEONI: Yeah, the score.
CURTIS: The kitchen.
DALY: But after a game and a half, we were kind of kicking their ass, and we felt a little guilty because they were so turbo about it. I can’t remember if we let them win. I don’t think so. So apparently, we have a little bit of an aptitude for pickleball — as does Jamie, by the way.
CURTIS: Yeah, but somebody went to John Gardiner's tennis ranch.
LEONI: You went to John Gardiner's?! Oh my god!
CURTIS: Of course! It’s where I learned how to play bridge. They taught you how to play contract bridge at summer camp. Don't even start with me. Anyway, I'm digressing.
The ‘Newlyweds’ Cast on Working With Director Pamela Fryman and Costume Designer Michelle Cole
“She's really open to play.”
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: Confidence.
CURTIS: That's a great answer.
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.
DALY: No, I hadn't.
LEONI: [To Curtis] Had you?
CURTIS: No.
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.
DALY: We can play safely.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
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.
Harry & Sally
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.
Love & Basketball
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.
Heated Rivalry
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.
Titanic
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.
CURTIS: That would be me.
Definitely Claudia.
LEONI: Jeannie has yet to wear anything new.
CURTIS: There’s a lot of vintage.
LEONI: There's nothing new.
CURTIS: It's all 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.
DALY: They’re coming!
The ‘Newlyweds’ Cast Reveals the Skills They’d Love to Learn
“Honestly, I would really love to be a pool shark.”
I feel like Jeannie's list of Things That Would Be Awesome to Know is so sweet. What is one thing on your own list of Things That Would Be Awesome to Know?
CURTIS: Shorthand.
LEONI: What? What do you mean, shorthand?
CURTIS: Shorthand! I would love to be able to write in shorthand. It’s a job. People do that. Reporters.
DALY: I thought about this, but when you said that, I just thought, be able to speak another language. Or American Sign Language, ASL.
CURTIS: I would also like to know.
LEONI: ASL would be great. I did three days of that. The first three days of COVID. Remember when we thought it was gonna be, like, two weeks? I cut bangs, and I started with ASL, and both were a flop for me. I gotta get back. Shorthand and another language… I mean, honestly, I would really love to be a pool shark.
CURTIS: Okay!
LEONI: I would so love to walk in and just rope a dope. I’d be like [giggles] and then just clean the table. I would like to do that.
DALY: HI, nice to meet you — I'm Tim. [Shakes Leoni’s hand]
LEONI: Hey.
DALY: We’re still discovering things about each other.
LEONI: Are you really good, though?
DALY: No, I’m terrible.
CURTIS: Should I leave? Let them start making out on national television?
Newlyweds airs Fridays at 8:30 p.m. ET.
- Release Date
- October 23, 2026
- Network
- NBC
- Showrunner
- Bruce Helford
- Directors
- Pamela Fryman
- Writers
- Jamie Lee Curtis, Gail Lerner
Cast
-
Tea Leoni
Jeanie
-
Tim Daly
James
-
Emma Meisel
Poppy
-
Ignacio Diaz-Silverio
Lolo
- Main Genre
- Comedy
- Seasons
- 1
- Producers
- Jamie Lee Curtis, Tea Leoni
- Creator(s)
- Gail Lerner, Jamie Lee Curtis
- Executive Producer(s)
- Bruce Helford, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gail Lerner, Scott Schwartz, Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, Jason Wang, Pamela Fryman
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.