Unsurprisingly, Curtis’ comments drew a wide range of reactions online. Some lauded the actor for appearing to express empathy toward someone with vastly different political views than her own, People notes, while others were horrified to see her say anything positive about someone whose vitriolic rhetoric often targeted marginalized groups, including the transgender community. (One of Curtis’ daughters, Ruby, is trans.) But while listeners in either camp heard her emotional response to Kirk’s death verbatim on the podcast, Curtis now claims the segment “mistranslated” her true feelings.
“An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying as I wished him well—like I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t,” she said, addressing her comments for the first time in a recent interview with Variety. “I was simply talking about his faith in God. And so it was a mistranslation, which is a pun, but not.” It’s unclear what pun she could be talking about, but she didn’t stop to explain before using the incident to make a larger point about the state of society. “In the binary world today, 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,” she went on. “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 characterized the backlash to her comments as “threatening,” a feeling she still seems to carry, as she reportedly “[sat] up straight and glare[d]” at her Variety interviewer when the latter commented that being a public figure, Curtis must have to be careful with her words. “I don’t have to be careful,” Curtis answered “sharply,” in Variety‘s words. “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?’” She then closed that part of the conversation with a pearl of wisdom: “I can’t not be who I am in the moment I am.”
