‘Borderlands’ star Jamie Lee Curtis channeled Tannis’ ‘object sexuality’ (exclusive)

Jamie Lee Curtis could not quite get into the mindset of her Borderland character Tannis until she arrived on set in Budapest. Sitting in her home in California, she puts on the character’s signature red-tinted goggles, a prop inspired by the video games she brought home from the film, as she recounts the first time she met the entire main cast.

“All the other actors talked about their acting process,” said the Halloween Horror icon and Oscar winner tells Weekly entertainment. “Florian (Munteanu) talked about working with Sly Stallone on one of the boxing films and how Sly required deep character work. Cate (Blanchett) talked about her experiences in the theater. Ben Davis, who is an acting teacher, talked about the different types of acting.”

Curtis not so much. “I’m a girl from Los Angeles who has never taken acting classes and who is intimidated by the intellectuality of acting,” said the Everything everywhere at once The actress continues, “I’m a straight-to-the-heart kind of person. I was listening and bowing my head, and all of a sudden I started crying. Cate said, ‘What’s going on?’ I said, ‘You guys just helped me find Tannis because she wouldn’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.'”

In the Borderland Video Games: Dr. Patricia Tannis is a scientist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of an ancient alien race called the Eridians. She’s also somewhat…unique due to her constant isolation on the planet Pandora. In the film, Tannis is an old friend of our heroine Lilith’s (Blanchet) late mother. She’s one of several wacky characters Blanchett’s red-headed gunslinger encounters when she returns to her homeworld to find the daughter of the most powerful man in the galaxy and track down an ancient vault full of technological treasures.

Curtis did not know exactly how big the Borderland Lore when she signed on for the film during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. She admits she only did so to work with Blanchett. But on the flight to Budapest for filming, with a stopover in Germany, she happened to sit next to Kristy Pitchford, the wife of Randy Pitchford, the co-founder of the game studio Gearbox Software, which develops BorderlandKristy explained to Curtis how she created Tannis and then gave the Hollywood star a crash course in the character.

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“She explained everything,” Curtis recalls. “She explained that Tannis had an object sexuality, that she had autism, that she wasn’t neurotypical, that she had these interesting views. That’s not what it says (in the film). It’s not a film about Tannis, so I didn’t know. It helped me a lot. I know a lot of people who are on the spectrum, and there’s this social divide. It’s just a different maze. Maybe for a more neurotypical person, it’s a clearer line, but for a non-neurotypical person, the spectrum is a maze. It’s beautiful. It’s full of art and interesting ideas, but it’s a maze of emotions.”

Director Eli Roth shot material with Curtis that highlighted this object sexuality (attraction to inanimate objects). “She had a chair that she was in love with and you weren’t allowed to sit on it,” says the actress. “She had a little affair with EchoNet,” she adds, referring to Tannis’ communications system. “They’ve split up, but they still have to work together, which is often a problem in the office.”

None of that made it into the film, but Curtis says, “It helped me as an actor understand who she was and why she was in the story.”

Read more about Borderlandin cinemas on August 9th at Weekly entertainment‘s Comic-Con cover story.

correction: An earlier version of this article quoted Jamie Lee Curtis as referring to Tannis’ “objective sexuality.” The quote has since been corrected to “objectum” sexuality.