Jamie Lee Curtis is Hollywood royalty: her parents were Janet Leigh, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and Tony Curtis, the matinée idol from “Sweet Smell of Success.” She belongs to a specific class of actors who use their easy entrée into the world of celebrity as an opportunity for scorched-earth storytelling from behind the curtain—think Anjelica Huston in her memoir, “Watch Me,” or Carrie Fisher in her autobiographical novel “Postcards from the Edge.” Curtis was as frank and outspoken as ever when she spoke with me recently, to promote her new film, the murder mystery “Knives Out,” from the writer and director Rian Johnson. Curtis plays Linda Drysdale, the wealthy daughter of a slain mystery novelist who gathers with her family in her father’s Gothic manse to try to get to the bottom of his demise. Was it suicide? Was it foul play? Was it Jamie Lee Curtis? I’ll never tell. And it turns out Curtis is also good at keeping secrets: she’s currently working on a project about her parents, but won’t yet disclose any details. She did speak with me about opiate addiction, Hollywood beauty standards, her foray into writing books for children, and her long-ago stint as Bette Davis’s condo-board president, among other things. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

Do you have any history with whodunnit movies?

No! I am the anti-mystery girl. I don’t like horror films.

Wait. How can that be?

I scare easily—I have since I was a child. Loud noises scare me, suspense music scares me. There’s not a movie that my friends haven’t all said, “Oh, I’m going to go see this movie,” and then they look at me and they say, “But you can’t go.” Including “Parasite,” which all of my friends were telling me is this fantastic movie.

There’s a whole trend of people who read the Wikipedia entry for a scary movie before they see it—they spoil it for themselves.

Well, I’m going to tell you a secret. I was making “My Girl” in Florida, and the makeup man had done “Silence of the Lambs” and it was out in theatres. He wrote me a crib sheet, which I took with me into the theatre with a little flashlight, and I sat in the back row by myself. It read, “When Jodie goes to the storage locker, close your eyes and ears and wait for the second scream,” and I would cover my ears, close my eyes, curl up in a little ball, and sing “Au Clair de la Lune” in my head.

That might be a million-dollar idea for an app—like, you start it at the beginning of a movie and then it will tell you, “Look away now.”

There’s an entire industry built on the fact that people like to be frightened, and I understand it. They pay money—good, after-tax money—to go and buy expensive bad popcorn and sugar drinks just to sit there to be tortured by a filmmaker.

I want to talk a little bit about your costuming in “Knives Out,” because it was beyond. You spend most of the movie in tailored, jewel-toned pantsuits.

I called Jenny Eagan, the costume designer, and I sent her a picture of my friend Patti Röckenwagner. She was wearing this head-to-toe raspberry-sorbet blouse and trouser, and I said, “That’s Linda Drysdale.” She’s a Realtor. She has to dress every day. She’s from money. She’s earned her own money. They live in a poshy apartment in Boston. So elegant, swellegant, with some edge. The pop of color, which I thought would be sensational, knowing that it was a Gothic house.

Rian Johnson put so many references to old mystery films in this movie. Are you interested in Hollywood history?

I lived a little of it. I gave a book to Rian and his wife, Karina, when I first was signed on to “Knives Out,” as a way to sort of say hi. It’s a book that I buy off of eBay all the time, by a man named John Kobal, called “People Will Talk.” Gloria Swanson, Mae West—they’re long interviews, and they go into weird places.

I miss those talk shows where it’s Bette Davis in the nineteen-sixties—

Bette Davis! So, I lived in a building in Los Angeles called the Colonial House, and it was referred to as the Dakota West. Bette Davis lived in the building, along with other filmmakers. At twenty-seven, I became the president of the board. Nobody wanted the job, and I was, like, “I’ll do it.” I’m very organized.

And so, two things. One, Miss Davis would call me in July and August, saying, “I want the heat.” I’d be, like, “I’m so sorry, Miss Davis, it’s not possible, because it’s July, and it’s a hundred and five degrees, and we’re all dying, and I can’t turn on the boilers.” She goes, “I want the heat.” She would lay by the pool in a big black hat and a black maillot bathing suit with high heels, black sunglasses.

Then I was in a TV movie with her, set in Valdosta, Georgia. I played her spunky niece, and she was the Southern matriarch of a family where her brother died and left his estate, his plantation, to his African-American housekeeper. She had a sister in the show, played by Penny Fuller. It was called “As Summers Die.” The dénouement was when Bette Davis was going to testify, and we’re in one of those old Southern courtrooms with the mahogany, and it’s in the nineteen-fifties, and she’s in one of those Victorian wheelchairs. We’re coming in from the back of the courtroom. You can imagine: big, wide shot, full courtroom, people fanning, hot summer day. Halfway down the aisle, Miss Davis reaches up and grabs my hand, which is pushing the wheelchair, and says, “Take me back.” The camera people are going, “What are you doing?” Because we stopped. And I turned her around. I’m looking at everybody, like, “What? I don’t know.” I took her into her little dressing room. The director, the producers, everybody’s running in, like, “What did you do?” I was, like, “I didn’t do anything!” So they go in there for twenty minutes. Finally, the director walks out. He walks up to the front row, where Penny Fuller was sitting, and he whispers in her ear, and Penny Fuller says, “Oh, give me a break. Are you kidding me?” And there’s a flurry of people, and the wardrobe woman comes in with a selection of hats. Penny Fuller had to take off her hat because it was red. Miss Davis felt that it would draw attention away from the fact that it was Bette Davis’s scene.