JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS IS A COMEDIAN IN HER OWN LEAGUE.
In 1989, Jerry Seinfeld, a nasally standup who could turn mundane observations into nightclub gold, and Larry David, a cantankerous comedy writer coming off a failed stint at Saturday Night Live, developed an idea for a TV show.
But the pilot for The Seinfeld Chronicles bombed when NBC tested it with audiences.
The network told the producers what was missing. The sitcom, as devised by the duo, 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 executive at NBC. “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 television history.
This past Sunday, LouisDreyfus received this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Since 1998, the Twain Prize has been awarded to writers, stand-ups and talkshow hosts. There have been other television 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 Vice President Selina Meyer, Louis-Dreyfus has earned 11 Emmys, including six in a row. The reason she didn’t win again last month is probably because she wasn’t eligible. Veep had always planned to begin airing its final season after the 2018 qualifying date.
What’s more, the comedian’s influence stretches beyond the screen. Long before #TimesUp, she pushed hard for creative control in a maledominated industry, particularly by fighting for production credit. In that way, 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.
“Julia was always just really funny, and that inspired me, her straight-up talent and timing and the way she performs,” says Poehler, who followed her own SNL tenure by producing and starring in Parks and Recreation. “But also what I like is that she feels like a person who was also in control and has a voice and uses it.”
Even if Louis-Dreyfus 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 Jeanie or Suzanne Somers on Three’s Company) or matronly voices-of-reason (Marion Ross on Happy Days). Roseanne Barr brought a lunchpail weariness to television, and Mary Tyler Moore managed to be both independent and sharp. But Elaine and Selina were 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 pottymouthed 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.
On a warm day in September, 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, Louis-Dreyfus 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, LouisDreyfus 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 said. “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.”
Did getting sick change her perspective on life?
“You know what, I can’t quite answer that, because I feel like I’m still a little bit in the throes of it,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “Except what I would say about the fragility of life, as tropey as that sounds — I really do feel like, I guess people die. You go through life not considering the eventual reality that you’re going to bite the dust, and so is everybody around you.” “You’re 47?” she asks. Yes.
“So with any luck, you’ll live another 40 years. Sorry to have to tell you.”
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.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers first taking the stage in fourth grade.
“I was in some silly show, and I was supposed to faint. I was a queen, and it wasn’t meant to be funny, but I fainted, and everybody laughed, and I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t know why they laughed but I liked how they laughed,’ ” she says.
Judith and Gérard LouisDreyfus divorced when their daughter was just 3, so Julia spent much of her childhood shuttling between her father, who lived in New York, and her mother, who lived in the District of Columbia. And in that neighbourhood, just a skip from American University, Louis-Dreyfus and her friends organized their own theatre group. They called themselves the University Players — named after their street — and would often perform in Louis-Dreyfus’ basement.
The group included nextdoor neighbour Margaret Edson, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999 for her play Wit.
“We just lost ourselves in these improvised plays and the performances,” Edson says. “We had a game called town, and it would all be people in the town, and we had an inside game called office, and it would be people in the office, and we would just stay in it for hours, and I think it’s just because she was so good.”
In 1979, Louis-Dreyfus enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago and immediately began auditioning. She was cast as a freshman in the comedy revue The MeeOw Show.
Gary Kroeger, an older student and performer, remembers seeing the performance.
“She was the most organically talented person I’d ever seen onstage,” he says. “She was just magical in how she could go in and out of characters, and her timing was like nothing I’d ever seen.”
At Northwestern, LouisDreyfus met Hall, who was three years older and 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, 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, back at NBC to run Saturday Night Live during Lorne 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.”
He hired away the four Practical Theatre players. Instead of starting her senior year, the 21-year-old LouisDreyfus headed to New York to become part of an SNL cast led by Eddie Murphy.
What Ebersol saw immediately is a quality hard to describe but easy to identify. It’s a trait that Mary Tyler Moore, Andy Griffith and Cary Grant possessed. Poehler and Tom Hanks have it, as well. LouisDreyfus 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.
“She approaches things from a very organic, honest, Julia place first,” Hall says. “She’s not going to do things on screen to get laughs that aren’t based somewhere in her personality or her fantasy personality of herself. As she’s accumulated work, she’s gotten more and more confident in beginning to play things that are closer and closer to herself, so she’s able to be very believable and yet really, really funny, because she’s got the confidence to take the chances that are necessary to make choices that are funny.”
That “Julia place” begins with her likability. That protects her characters, even when they’re on their worst behaviour.
“There is something about Julia’s innate sort of niceness,” says David Mandel, Veep’s showrunner and executive producer. “Women like her. Men like her. On Veep, we use it to let her do really horrible things. When people tell me that they wish Selina was president, that’s not what they mean. They wish Julia LouisDreyfus was president.”
The timing. The laugh. The willingness to go deeply blue if it will make the comedy work. There are the elements that make Louis-Dreyfus, as her friend Larry David says, “a natural.”
“She’s born with it,” he says. “If she was a basketball player, she’d have a million moves.”