MOCKING THE VOTE
JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS ON PLAYING THE VICE PRESIDENT, PRANKING HER CO-STARS AND PERFORMING IN CHICAGO
Here’s a tip for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ costars: Don’t steal her yogurt. She won’t be afraid to call you out — to her 124,000 Twitter followers. That’s what happened recently on the set of the actress’ hit HBO show “Veep,” which debuted its second season April 14. “I brought yogurt to work and put it in the fridge with a Post-it that said my name,” explains Louis-Dreyfus, laughing. “When I went to eat it, it was gone, but the Post-it was still there.”
An indignant Louis-Dreyfus promptly sought justice by playfully posting a photo of the vacant shelf on Twitter. But before the thief could be caught, a member of the “Veep” crew took the joke one step further: “Our first A.D. on the show put Post-its — with my name on them — over everything in the fridge. Then he took everything out, but left the Post-its,” she explains. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
For an actress who’s built a 30-year career around comedy, that’s saying something. But Louis-Dreyfus, who’s spent those years almost exclusively playing women she describes as “ballsy,” isn’t afraid to say it — or anything, for that matter. “I’m direct,” she says. “It’s just who I am.”
Her confidence is well-earned: LouisDreyfus, 52, has won numerous awards, was once the youngest female cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” the only female lead on “Seinfeld” and the star of critically acclaimed CBS sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” “I definitely consider myself a feminist, in that I don’t really think about the fact that I’m a woman,” she says of the roles she’s chosen. “It’s not an obstacle for me when I’m working. I think that’s why I play a lot of women who don’t shy away from themselves.”
Louis-Dreyfus traces that tendency back to her formative years in Chicago, where she attended Northwestern University and worked the city’s comedy circuit during the early ’80s. “It was all improv,” she says. “And my ability to improvise is a huge part of who I am as an actress. It’s a really useful tool when creating a character — not just now, but during ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Christine.’ ”
Her Chicago training has come in particularly handy in her role as selfabsorbed, grandstanding Vice President Selina Meyer on “Veep,” an incisive satire that takes a lighthearted — and foulmouthed — look at politics. Though the show is scripted and rehearsed, “we also have a lot of improvisation that goes on top of the scripts,” says Louis-Dreyfus. “And when it works, sometimes it’s folded into the stories.” Sometimes, it works too well. “Anytime Tony Hale [who plays Selina’s simpering aide Gary] and I are
in a scene together — particularly if [our characters] are getting worked up — we have a hard time not breaking up.”
Case in point: The final moments of the second season’s premiere episode, during which Selina is forced to undergo 27 consecutive morning-show interviews after pulling an all-nighter for a particularly harrowing midterm election. The scene found LouisDreyfus spouting lines like, “Well, we are the United States of America. And we are united. And we are states. And we are of America.”
“We have a ton of bloopers from filming that one,” laughs Louis-Dreyfus. “We might be enjoying the show even more than the audience.”
To say the audience is enjoying “Veep” would be an understatement. The first season — comprised of only eight episodes — earned Louis-Dreyfus another Emmy (the third of her career) last year and nominations for a slew of additional awards, including a Golden Globe. And she’s more complicit in the show’s success than is immediately obvious: She helps write and produce much of the deliciously irreverent material. “It’s a lot of work, there’s no doubt about it,” she says. “I’m very, very emotionally invested in the show, and so I really want it to be its absolute best. And also, of course, because it’s fun.”
What makes it even more fun, according to Louis-Dreyfus, is the tight-knit cast, including Anna Chlumsky (“My Girl”) and Matt Walsh (“Reno 911,” “Hung”), who’ve formed a de facto family offscreen. “When you’re working the hours that we work — I’m talking 15-, 16-, 17-, 18-hour days — you get to know each other very well. And we shoot on location in Baltimore, so we don’t have anyone to go home to. We go out to dinner, we play cards, we go to the movies.”
And occasionally, they rub shoulders with actual politicians — Louis-Dreyfus recently had a real-life lunch date with Joe Biden. “We were doing this bit where he was pretending to give me papers to review as I was sitting at his desk, and I think that really speaks to the great sense of humor that he has,” she says. “He’s just an affable fellow.”
Louis-Dreyfus is adamant, though, that Selina isn’t based on Biden, or on any particular politician. In fact, she says the character is partly based on her own experiences in Hollywood. “Selina is a departure from me as a person, and I like to think I’m not as narcissistic and power-hungry as she is, but I certainly understand her frustration. There are a lot of similarities between politics and showbiz.”
Despite that wry take on the entertainment industry, it seems Louis-Dreyfus always dreamt of stardom. After growing up in New York City and D.C., she moved to Chicago in 1979 at 18 to pursue acting because “it was the perfect place to start my career, both on and off campus,” she says. After dropping out of Northwestern in ’82, where she was studying theater, she toured with The Second City and performed with the Practical Theatre Company, founded by now-husband Brad Hall (when Hall hired her, she says, they “promptly fell in love and had a happy romance in Chicago”). Even then, Louis-Dreyfus says she “felt ready to take on the world.” She quickly got her chance: Her Chicago work led to an invitation to join the cast of “Saturday Night Live” at the age of 21, an opportunity that she has previously described as a “Cinderella-getting-to-go-to-theball experience.”
During her stint at “SNL,” from 198285, she met Larry David, a writer for the late-night show. Five years later, David cast her in a new show he’d created along with comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Over nine seasons playing Elaine Benes, Louis-Dreyfus garnered a Golden Globe, five SAG Awards and an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress.
The “Seinfeld” era continues to make Louis-Dreyfus wistful. “There were so many moments of joy when we were filming,” she says. “So I can’t really watch it, because it’s sort of like going through a high-school yearbook — you get so nostalgic.”
Louis-Dreyfus still keeps in touch with David and Seinfeld, whom she says reached out to her when “Veep” premiered. “I’ve gotten great responses from my buddies,” she says. “And all you want at the end of the day is for your friends and family to be proud of what you do.”
Appropriately enough, Louis-Dreyfus’ sons Henry, 20, and Charles, 16, have recently become fans of “Seinfeld.” “[Henry] has now seen almost every episode. He’ll ask me about specific scenes, and I can’t remember a thing,” she says. “I have a terrible memory. It’s so embarrassing.”
Lucky for audiences, Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t have a problem with embarrassing — she often embraces the opportunity to humiliate herself onscreen. In another recent tweet, she described an upcoming “Veep” scene as follows: “This week on #Veep I filmed the most humiliating scene of my life including #Elainedance. Ur welcome America & possibly the world.” When asked what the scene entails, Louis-Dreyfus laughs. “Oh, that’s coming up in the fourth episode,” she says. “Let’s just say it’s a very square, middleage thing. And there’s singing involved.”