‘Idea that nothing has to feel too precious keeps her loose’
There is something else Poehler likes to mention. Stars can be difficult, picky lone wolves who need to be coaxed into doing anything unconventional. Louis-Dreyfus is what Poehler calls a “gamer.” She always wants to be part of the joke, whether it’s a sketch, a prank or even a funny bit at an award ceremony. Poehler saw that playfulness at SNL when Louis-Dreyfus came back to host in 2006 and 2007.
She also showed it by signing on, in 2015, for the “Last F---able Day” sketch on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer. The bitingly sarcastic piece featured Fey and actress Patricia Arquette holding a “celebration” to mark the moment LouisDreyfus became too old for Hollywood to recognize her as a sexual object. Other stars had turned down Schumer’s sketch, presumably sensitive to how close to the bone it hit. Louis-Dreyfus was game.
“You meet somebody, and they’re kind of down for the fun or they’re not,” Poehler says. “Whether it’d be me being like, ‘Do you mind if I do this bit when I present this award’ or ‘Can we think of something for here.’ Yeah, sure. The idea that nothing has to feel too precious keeps her loose, and I think it’s what people feel from her.”
Success did not come easily.
At SNL, where Louis-Dreyfus was a cast member from 1982 to 1985, she rates her work as “horrendous.”
“Nothing I did was good,” she says.
That is an exaggeration. During her tenure, LouisDreyfus 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 at SNL during those years was toxic, particularly for a woman, she says. When Louis-Dreyfus thinks of those years, 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.”
“They’re sitting there watching this cabaret show right after lunch, and you could just see on their faces, literally,” Kroeger remembers. “What has happened, why are these people here, this is the new cast? This is the new Chevy Chase, the new Dan Aykroyd, the new Gilda Radner? Are you kidding me?”
“It was like being told, ‘You’re going to see the greatest thing ever,’” remembers former SNL writer Barry Blaustein, who was there. “It was set up to fail.”
Even if Louis-Dreyfus felt stifled at SNL, her time there would change her career.
She met Larry David at SNL, as he fumbled through a season in which only one of his sketches made it on air. She also made herself an important pledge. Louis-Dreyfus would never work on a miserable set again. As she got more clout and began to produce, that became a defining characteristic of her shows.
“No. 1 on the daily call sheet sets the tone for the entire set,” says Andy Richter, the Conan show sidekick who played “Sad Dad” Stan on The New Adventures of Old Christine, the CBS sitcom that ran from 2006 to 2010. “And she is the best No. 1 on the call sheet I have ever worked with, or for. Completely approachable, completely collaborative, warm, friendly, funny, everything you could possibly want your Julia Louis-Dreyfus to be.”
If she was under-utilized on SNL, what came next would seem stunning.
In 1987, Louis-Dreyfus was cast in a small role for a pilot, The Art of Being Nick. That the show centred on Scott Valentine, who played Mallory Keaton’s curly-haired meathead boyfriend on Family Ties, did not seem to bother NBC’s powerful head of entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff. His issue: Louis-Dreyfus. He told NBC casting director Joel Thurm to deliver the news.
“‘We’ve got to do better than this,’ ” Nick director Sam Weisman remembers Thurm telling him. “‘She’s really short; she’s not hot. We really want somebody hot for this.’”
Weisman and producer Gary David Goldberg refused to budge. They knew Tartikoff was wrong. And when Nick didn’t get picked up, Goldberg cast her as the caustic next-door neighbour on the bland sitcom Day by Day. It ran for two seasons, until it was cancelled in 1989.
“The only reason there was a sparkle in Day by Day was because of Julia,” Warren Littlefield says today.
“So, when Seinfeld came around, we were huge Julia fans,” says Lori Openden, who had taken over for Thurm as the network’s head of casting. “In all my time there, that was one of the easiest casting fits.”
Seinfeld may have made her a star, but Veep gave LouisDreyfus a chance for a tourde-force — if she could get the gig. She remembers meeting the show’s director, Armando Iannucci, late in 2010 in L.A.
“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 vice president. 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.’”
Iannucci knew Louis-Dreyfus was funny. What he didn’t realize, until that day, is her personal connection to the part. That she had grown up in D.C. meant she understood that world. That she had spent years as a public figure also helped.
“Knowing what it’s like going into a room, and people are looking at you, and you have to keep smiling even though you have a raging headache,” Iannucci says. “Having to maintain that air of keeping your s--- together. Primarily, it’s a comic instinct. We found this out when we started rehearsing. We’d have a little idea, and she would always have half a dozen suggestions of which way that could go.”
The action in Veep is fast, peppered with profanity, sight gags, misunderstandings and slights. There are moments that demand the acting chops you’d find in a serious drama. Nobody can ping-pong better between emotions than LouisDreyfus, from bitter frustration to beaming smiles.
But Iannucci, who left the show after its fourth season, remembers one of his own favourite moments, when everything seemed to slow down. It came when President Hughes has a health scare, and Selina is briefly put in charge.
“In the stage direction, it says, ‘Selina gives a noise that simultaneously is a groan and a smile, concerned and happiness at the same time,’” Iannucci says. “And she did it. Take 1. It’s the emotional version of a chord, there are five or six notes going on simultaneously. That’s when you realize she’s utterly in a league of her own.”