‘Stardom is not a worthy pursuit’: Julia LouisDreyfus on sexism, ageing and fighting fascism
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener trusted each other immediately. In the early 2010s, they met to discuss whether Louis-Dreyfus would star in the indie director’s next film, the offbeat romantic comedy Enough Said. “We got along so well that I was kind of baffled we hadn’t met until then,” says Louis-Dreyfus. She signed up.
At the first table read, Holofcener remembers her horseplay with the actor who played Seinfeld’s infamous Elaine Benes all but overshadowing the co-lead, James Gandolfini: “We could finish each other’s sentences – she so got the materials, she so got me. She would jump in with ideas that were generally fantastic. And we would laugh until we peed. Jim would look at us like: ‘Boy, am I in a chick flick or what?’”
Released in 2013, Enough Said was a critical success (and Gandolfini’s last role). Holofcener wrote her next film with Louis-Dreyfus in mind. On set for their new movie, You Hurt My Feelings, they were “very direct with one another”, says Louis-Dreyfus. “She will say: ‘No, it doesn’t work, I don’t like it.’ I will say the same. There’s something wonderfully fresh about her. I trust her so deeply and I think she trusts me as well in such a way that a course-correction, creatively, isn’t hurtful.”
Their forthright, secure relationship couldn’t be in starker contrast to the rattled bond depicted in You Hurt My Feelings. Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a memoir writer worried that her first novel is a dud. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), reassures her that he loves it. Then she overhears him telling his brother-in-law that he hates it. “If I say the slightest thing, she falls apart,” he says. Moments later, Beth is dryheaving on the streets of Manhattan.
It is classic Holofcener: petty, narcissistic and pitiable, yet hilarious and relatable. Louis-Dreyfus knew she could trust Holofcener because of that unique perspective: “There’s an honesty and authenticity in her writing that makes me comfortable with her point of view.”
It’s early morning for Louis-Dreyfus, who dials in from her home in California (before the Sag-Aftra strike). She keeps her webcam off, but her brisk intellect gives her real presence nonetheless.
She accessed Eva, her character in Enough Said, through their shared experience of having a son leave for college. For Beth, there were multiple entry points. Both are in long marriages – Louis-Dreyfus has been married to Brad Hall since 1987. Both have adult sons and strong sisterly relationships.
And both have creative minds. “I have an understanding of what it means to be putting yourself out there,” she says. “And Beth is dealing with an undercurrent of low-level insecurity. That is ever-present. God knows, who doesn’t have that?”
Louis-Dreyfus is 62. With age, she says, it has become easier to untangle self-worth from work, although not entirely: “It’s tricky. We actors are in a business where you’re selling your brand and you have to bring a truthfulness to what you do.” Has she ever wished someone had been more honest with her about her work, as Don fails to be? “Gosh,” she says. “Actually, no, I don’t think so.”
Fair enough: from the outside, it’s difficult to identify any missteps across her 40-year career. Having played the self-serving vice-president Selina Meyer in Veep from 2012 to 2019, LouisDreyfus is as beloved today as she was in the early 90s, when she incarnated Seinfeld’s self-serving, big-haired shover. She is the most garlanded Primetime Emmy and Screen Actors Guild award-winner in history; in 2018, she received the Mark Twain prize for American Humor.
Louis-Dreyfus’s appeal, agree Holofcener and Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep, is her hunger to stray beyond the pale. With the hapless Selina, says Iannucci, “she was always the first pushing it further in terms of her having no principles. She’s put in charge of a healthy eating project, one of the pathetic things presidents give their vice-presidents to keep them busy. And Julia was quite keen to push the fact that Selina cannot abide anyone who’s overweight, in a slightly uneasy way. She’s quite happy for the audience to be appalled by her character.”
At the same time, says Iannucci, “there’s a genuineness there as well. You can see why those characters might have arrived at that point psychologically.”
If Louis-Dreyfus did have anything close to a misstep, it was her dispiriting spell at Saturday Night Live, from 1982 to 1985. She had a hard time as the youngest female cast member in what she has characterised as a druggy boys’ club. (She did, though, forge a bond with an equally miserable Larry David, who would later co-create Seinfeld.) But even that cultivated a guiding presence of mind: when she got the boot, she resolved that she would only keep acting if it was fun.
Most young actors would cut off a limb to make it. Why not LouisDreyfus? “Maybe because I was so fundamentally unhappy for those three years,” she says. She knew it didn’t have to be like this from her time in the Chicago improv troupes the Second City and the Practical Theatre Company. “I really enjoyed doing work with my friends that was thrilling and collaborative and ensemble-y. And so I knew from having fun, right?”
SNL wasn’t “the most wretched experience of my life”, she concedes. “But it was very challenging. I knew I couldn’t keep that going. And if this was what it meant to be in showbusiness, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had this feeling: if I can’t find the fun again, I can walk away from this.”
Fun and practicality seem to be the cornerstones of Louis-Dreyfus’s attitude. In 1989, David and Jerry Seinfeld signed her up to play Elaine. A recent New York Times article marking 25 years since the Seinfeld finale posited that it still resonates because the characters “flouted societal conventions and the rules of traditional adulthood”, constructs increasingly inaccessible to younger viewers. LouisDreyfus isn’t sure. “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to draw a conclusion like that,” she says. “At the end of the day, it was just fucking funny, and that holds up.”
She declined to capitalise on her status as one of the 90s’ biggest television stars, turning down movies to raise her two sons, who were born during Seinfeld’s run (although she says the rumour that she passed on playing Mia in Pulp Fiction is untrue). Iannucci recalls her prioritising home life during the filming of Veep: “She’s very much a family-oriented person, and that seems to be her rootedness.”
Louis-Dreyfus grew up mostly in Washington DC with her mother, who divorced her father, a French-American billionaire, when Louis-Dreyfus was an infant. She attended the same high school as the daughter of the president, Gerald Ford, so she knew the culture of the city when it came to making Veep (which followed the short-lived Watching Ellie and the more successful The New Adventures of Old Christine).
She has become friends with Joe Biden, who presented her with the National Medal of Arts in March. She is optimistic about the 2024 election, “because [the US] is just a better place to be”, she says. “Of course, I have valid concerns about the health of our democracy, but I do feel hopeful, for all sorts of reasons. I think the American electorate has, to a certain extent, been awakened to what’s at stake.” The overturning of Roe v Wade “was a wake-up call. It’s obviously a disaster. But I think it’s galvanised the electorate.”
In 2017, while shooting Veep, LouisDreyfus was diagnosed with breast cancer, suspending filming for a year. She was treated and underwent a double reconstruction (and has campaigned for all women get the same opportunity, regardless of financial ability). The producer of You Hurt My Feelings recently remarked on her and Holofcener’s wonder at human narcissism. That hasn’t changed since her brush with mortality, she says: “The bullshit is always there and I love exploring it. I’m very interested in the warts and all of human beings and their interactions with each other.”
Holofcener and Iannucci attest to the value of Louis-Dreyfus’s outlook: how freeing her willingness to make a fool of herself is; how supportive she is of everyone from bit-part actors to directors. While shooting Enough Said, Gandolfini would sometimes push back on Holofcener. “Things that made him feel like a ‘bitch in the kitchen’, is what he said,” the director says. “And Julia would smack him on the arm and say: ‘Do what she says, she’s smart.’ She was there for me.”
Every day on Veep, says Iannucci, “she would turn up with five different suggestions about how to play it, each as funny as the next. She takes each project as if it’s an opportunity to do something new.”
Louis-Dreyfus has ample opportunity for newness. She straddles the cinematic spectrum, with You Hurt My Feelings at one end and the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the other (she played the shady Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). Beyond cinema, she has made the inevitable celebrity foray into podcasting.
In Wiser Than Me, Louis-Dreyfus interviews older women, from Amy Tan to Jane Fonda, about their life experiences. Fonda’s documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts inspired the idea. “I was completely stunned by the scope of her life, and that I didn’t really fully understand everything that she had done, accomplished, experienced,” she says. “It led me to the next thought: what about all the other older women out there who have had a lot of life? I want to hear from them, too. There’s enormous value in speaking to women who have been there, done that and can give you the sage advice.”
Fonda told her that she regretted getting cosmetic surgery. Last year, Holofcener told this paper that virtually every female actor over 50 had “distorted their own face” with surgery. Louis-Dreyfus’s stance is that people should do what they want: “I’m not making any judgment whatsoever of anyone who does it. Having said that, I have not had any plastic surgery. It’s not something I’m keen on doing – as, you know, demonstrated by my face in the movie.”
Louis-Dreyfus’s expressive elasticity is vital, says Holofcener: “There are actors I would like to work with, but I just don’t think I could, as they look so different and not natural.” (The character of Don, an unremarkable therapist, has his own anxieties; worried that he looks old, he considers surgery. Several actors declined the part because of that aspect. “They were very uncomfortable with the age thing,” says Holofcener. “It came from actors who look older than they are, trust me.”)
In the podcast, Louis-Dreyfus asks her guests how old they feel. Today, she pinpoints herself as “about 30, in terms of my energy, my ambition”. She doesn’t relate to Beth’s fear that she is “an old voice”, as the character tells her agent. “I recognise that I’ve gotten older and it is a very strange thing,” she says. “There are moments where, if a video comes up of me 30 years ago, I’m like: holy crap, I really have gotten older. But I still feel physically that I am the same person, except I have more experience now. So I don’t think of ageing as a negative – I’m actually delighted to be the