The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I feel like I have more mountains to climb’
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, most decorated TV star in US history, tells Jane Mulkerrins about her outrageous new movie
‘Americans are all about putting a good face on things. It’s all about selling success,” asserts Julia Louis-Dreyfus, scrunching her own face into an expression of deep distaste.
The 59-year-old actress has little need to sell anything, least of all success. Her extraordinary achievements speak for themselves. The most decorated performer in US television history, she holds a record number of Emmys – eight for acting, including six in a row (2012–17) for her portrayal of Selina Meyer, the vain, morally bankrupt, power-hungry and potty-mouthed sometimepresident in HBO’s savage political spoof, Veep, and three for producing that show – plus nine Screen Actors Guild awards and a Golden Globe for her role as Elaine Benes in the seminal Nineties sitcom Seinfeld.
And, as Louis-Dreyfus has experienced first-hand, putting a good face on things is not always possible. The morning after her record-breaking eighth Emmy win in September 2017, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She broke the news on Instagram, to her 1.2million followers: “One in eight women get breast cancer,” she wrote. “Today I’m the one.”
She had a double mastectomy and six rounds of chemotherapy, developed sores on her face and inside her mouth, and struggled to keep food down, but she never stopped working, studying scripts for Veep’s seventh and final season and attending readings between rounds of chemo. “Going to work was a very joyful distraction, and I was so pleased to have the strength to do it,” she says. “To be creative for a living, to make people laugh or cry, is a f------ gift.”
As if producing and starring in Veep while going through chemo were not challenge enough, she was also ushering into existence her passion project, Downhill, an English-language remake of the Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s acclaimed 2014 film, Force Majeure. Louis-Dreyfus not only produced it, but stars in it – on skis.
Her task was nothing, she says, compared to the high-jinks of the camera crew. “You’ve got your DP [director of photography] skiing backwards with the monitor in his hand, you have the focus puller, who is also skiing backwards, watching the scene and keeping the right distance, and then you have the camera operator with the hydraulic camera on his back…”
The resorts they filmed in – Ischgl and Fiss in the Austrian Alps – were open to the public at all times. “That was a little bit tricky when we were doing gondola and chair lift scenes,” she laughs. “There were a lot of people who’d spent a lot of money for their ski vacation and were not so enamoured of Hollywood.”
We meet for breakfast in a hotel beside Central Park, a day ahead of the film’s New York premiere. Just 36 hours earlier, I’d watched Louis-Dreyfus presenting at the Oscars, with her Downhill co-star Will Ferrell. “It was terrifying,” she says, exhaling hard. Tiny and toned, Louis-Dreyfus gives consistently dazzling red-carpet glamour, but this morning she is elegantly low-key in a black polo neck and heavy-rimmed glasses. The only hint that her health might have been a recent concern is the enormous ziplock bag of vitamins she fishes out of her handbag to consume along with her coffee, oatmeal and berries.
Downhill was adapted by Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, with whom Louis-Dreyfus had also worked on Veep. She and Ferrell play Billie and Pete, an affluent American couple with young twin sons, on a family ski trip to Austria. Whereas in Force Majeure the couple were Swedish-Norwegian, in Downhill, they have become an American family in “the Ibiza of the Alps”, a party-hard resort, all oompah bands, Jägerbombs and raving in ski boots at 4pm. “The fish-out-of-water element,” says Louis-Dreyfus, “adds another important layer.” During a “controlled” avalanche, Pete flees the scene, abandoning his wife and
real-life US politics becoming rapidly more surreal and parodic. “It was hard to compete with that turdfest in the White House right now,” she says. The finale aired in May last year. “From a storytelling point of view, it felt like the right moment to end,” she says. “But I do miss it, and I miss Selina.”
Veep and Downhill, though, have stimulated her appetite to produce. She has multiple projects in development, and a deal inked with Apple TV. Even so, she recently admitted in a radio interview that she didn’t feel like she had “made it”. If not now, will she ever?
“I hope not, because I like having things to aspire to,” she says. “Although it can be quite daunting, I feel like I have more mountains to climb. I want to do a lot more – I really do.” That ambition “definitely” kicked up a gear after cancer, she tells me. “Our time here is limited. Let’s make the very best of it.”