COMEDY STAR
Is Julia Louis-Dreyfus the most successful sitcom star ever? Some might argue yes
In 1989, Jerry Seinfeld, a nasally standup whose mundane observations were nightclub gold, and Larry David, a cantankerous comedy writer ending a failed stint at Saturday Night Live, developed an idea for a TV show.
But the pilot for The Seinfeld Chronicles bombed in NBC audience testing.
NBC told them what was missing. The sitcom the duo had devised centred on the daily travails of three guys on New York’s Upper West Side.
“We said, ‘You have to add a girl,’” remembers Warren Littlefield, then a key NBC executive. “We’re not going to tell you a lot, but add a woman.”
So Jerry, George and Kramer got Elaine Benes, a combative, curly-haired serial dater who could give as good as she got. And thus was born the legend of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who would become one of the greatest sitcom stars in modern TV history.
On Sunday, Louis-Dreyfus will receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Since 1998, the Twain Prize has been awarded to writers, standups and talk-show hosts. There have been other TV revolutionaries — Lorne Michaels, Carol Burnett, David Letterman — but as she films the seventh and final season of HBO’s Veep, Louis-Dreyfus’s success is unprecedented. From Seinfeld to The New Adventures of Old Christine to her remarkable portrayal of U.S. Vice-President Selina Meyer, she has earned 11 Emmys, including six in a row. The reason she didn’t win again in September is probably because she wasn’t eligible. Veep had always planned to begin airing its final season after the 2018 qualifying date.
And her influence stretches beyond the screen. Long before #TimesUp, she had pushed hard for creative control in a maledominated industry, particularly by fighting for production credit. By this, Louis-Dreyfus has served as a model for the wave of talented women who emerged over the past decade-plus, including Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling and Amy Poehler.
Even if she didn’t create Seinfeld, her nine seasons on the hit established a new kind of sitcom actress on a new kind of sitcom. Post-Lucille Ball, prime time was packed with airheaded babes (Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie or Suzanne Somers in Three’s Company) or matronly voices of reason (Marion Ross on Happy Days). Roseanne Barr brought a lunch-pail weariness to TV and Mary Tyler Moore managed to be both independent and sharp. But Elaine and Selina are nothing like Mary. They could be as shallow, nasty and dysfunctional as the guys sitting around Jerry’s apartment, as profane and blue as the potty-mouthed male politicians making backroom deals.
“Someone with her intelligence level, matched with an incredibly juvenile infantilism, when those two things come together well, that’s comedy magic,” Seinfeld says.
Louis-Dreyfus, 57, arrives for a lunch interview at a restaurant in the hills of Santa Barbara, Calif. She and her husband, writer and producer Brad Hall, have a house nearby. In person, she is low-key, in jeans, her hair pulled back, recognizable but understated.
It is a busy moment. Veep is filming and Louis-Dreyfus is just starting to feel as though she’s back at full strength. That’s no small thing.
Her surreal nightmare began on a Friday in September 2017. That day, she had a biopsy. On Sunday, she was awarded her latest Emmy for playing Selina. And on Monday morning, the results came back: Stage 2 breast cancer. There would be chemotherapy treatments and surgery. The final season of Veep would have to wait.
“Originally, I had this idea, well, we’ll shoot in between my chemo treatments,” she says. “We could do that. Chemotherapy. What? That’s what sick people get. The whole thing was so astounding. I thought I could muscle through it. And to a certain extent, I did, because we did have table reads of scripts every three weeks. But I got really ill, so I couldn’t have ever shot anything during that period of time.”
Was there ever any thought of just stepping away? Or not coming back to Veep?
“Oh, no,” she says.
“I love making people laugh, and I love making people cry, even, and I find the pursuit of a truthful performance to be deeply satisfying to my core,” Louis-Dreyfus says.
In 1979, after a growing up in New York and Washington D.C., shuttling between divorced parents, she enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago and immediately began auditioning.
There she met Hall, three years older, who had quit school to help found the Practical Theatre Company. In summer 1982, in a 150-seat space in Chicago’s Piper Alley, she, Hall, student performer Paul Kroeger and Paul Barrosse, who also founded the company, put on The Golden 50th Anniversary Jubilee. It was popular, and word travelled east. Dick Ebersol, who was at NBC running SNL during Michaels’ hiatus, came one night with head writer Bob Tischler.
“We were just blown away,” Ebersol remembers. “There aren’t that many opportunities in the comedy business to find anybody that funny or, in her case, that beautiful. She was just brimming with potential.”
What Ebersol saw immediately is a quality hard to describe but easy to identify. It’s a trait that Tyler Moore, Andy Griffith and Cary Grant possessed. Poehler and Tom Hanks have it, as well. Louis-Dreyfus can play vastly different characters, sink deeply into a role, and yet the viewer doesn’t completely forget who she is. That’s part of why her characters feel so true, even when their actions are so outrageous.
But success did not come easily.
At SNL, where Louis-Dreyfus was a cast member from 1982 to 1985, she rates her work as “horrendous.”
She exaggerates. At SNL, she was often on the air, whether playing bit parts, grumpy teen news commentator Patti Lynn Hunnsucker or reviving her Northwestern-born televangelist April May June. Her most memorable turn may have come with Kroeger when they played an incestuous version of Donny and Marie Osmond.
But the atmosphere during those years was toxic, particularly for a woman, she says. She can still feel the bad vibes from the very first time she went to a table read.
Ebersol, excited to show off his new find, asked the Northwestern kids to perform excerpts from Jubilee to a room packed with cast members, writers and producers.
The response? “Sagebrush,” she says. “A disaster.”
Seinfeld may have made her a star, but Veep gave Louis-Dreyfus a chance for a tour-de-force — if she could get the gig. She remembers meeting the show’s director, Armando Iannucci, late in 2010 at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.
“This is going to sound strange but it sounded like really ripe, low-hanging fruit that no one had tried to pick,’ Louis-Dreyfus says. “Of course, a female vicepresident. It’s a perfect metaphor for being a woman and for ambition and everything. It’s conflict built in, and it’s ideal comedically. I couldn’t believe it. I met with Arm, and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I really hope I get this.’”