Louis-Dreyfus: ‘Veep’ was ‘lifesaver’ in cancer fight
NEW YORK – After seven seasons of vulgar insults and razorsharp satire, Julia Louis-Drefyus and Tony Hale have become a lot like the incompetent politicos they play on “Veep.” ❚ “I still carry her purse,” jokes Hale, whose Gary Walsh is the unflappably loyal personal aide to abrasive ex-president Selina Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus), who’s back in the running for POTUS when the series returns for a seven-episode final season Sunday (10:30 EDT/PDT).
“I swear more now,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “I’m very comfortable with the worst of the words in a way that I never was before. It’s gone to a different level.”
When “Veep” picks up, Selina and her team of sardonic idiots are in the throes of her presidential campaign, which finds her running against smarmy former White House aide Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) and onand-off-again flame Tom James (Hugh
Laurie). The timely comedy continues to spoof the ineptitude of modern politicians: Selina tries to capitalize on a mass shooting to boost her campaign, and Jonah becomes the face of the fictionalized #NotMe movement, involving women coming forward to say they sleep with him.
But even with new speed bumps on
Selina’s road back to the White House, executive producer David Mandel concedes the show is running out of gas, which sparked the decision to end it on a creative high.
“We’re constantly trying to throw challenges at the character, but at some point, the challenges didn’t necessarily seem new,” Mandel says. “This whole season, in general, was a real opportunity to address how much politics has changed in the last two years. Old episodes of ‘Veep’ look quaint now. I mean, we did an episode where she tweeted and it was a whole to-do, and now that just seems like, ‘Is this from the 1800s?’ ”
The choice to make this season the last also was influenced by Louis-Dreyfus’ breast cancer diagnosis, which she announced in 2017, a day after winning her sixth consecutive lead-actress Emmy for the show. (She won two Emmys for her work in “Seinfeld” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”)
She shared a note on social media explaining how one in eight women get breast cancer, urging lawmakers to “make universal healthcare a reality.”
“I’m a very private person, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me to have gone public with any of this,” says Louis-Dreyfus, 58, who revealed in October that she was cancer-free. “But my hand was kind of forced by virtue of the fact that we were about to start production, and I had 150 or 200 people waiting to get going on this show. So I thought, ‘OK, let’s make a virtue, if you can, of such a horrible moment.’
Production on Season 7 was delayed by a year as Louis-Dreyfus sought treatment. During that time, she would come in for script readings every few weeks (usually the day before chemotherapy), but couldn’t hug or touch her co-stars.
“I can’t speak for her, but she had a rough chemo,” Mandel says. “We’d do a read and come back three weeks later to do another, and she’d be that much more emaciated and gaunt. If anybody coughed, we banned them from the building like three days before. God forbid we got her sick.”
Anna Chlumsky, who plays Selina’s high-strung adviser Amy Brookheimer, remembers crying when she read an email to the cast about Louis-Dreyfus’ diagnosis, “but none of us really talked about it. It was just, ‘Take care of Julia,’ ” she says. “It helped that we already were a family.”
For Louis-Dreyfus, working and laughing with her friends proved to be some of the best medicine.
“It was a very strong reminder of this light that was there at the end of this crazy dark tunnel,” she says. “It was a tonic to know that was waiting on the other side. And it was such a wonderful way to make a living. Don’t tell HBO this, but they wouldn’t have even had to pay me to do this – I would have done this for free. I just loved every second of it. So in many ways, it was a lifesaver.”