“If Selina had any advice for Kamala, she had best not take it," says Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played fictional Vice President Selina Meyer in Veep. Photo / Chantal Anderson, The New York Times
The comedy queen played an unpopular vice-president who found herself up for the big job. She talks politics and why her new film Tuesday is a tear-jerker.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is considering what advice her alter ego, Selina Meyer — the fictional vice-president who becomes the first female president of the United States after the incumbent stands down for personal reasons — would give to Kamala Harris, the non-fictional vice-president who . . . Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
“Let me just say this,” Louis-Dreyfus begins, sounding so much like a politician that initially I’m unsure if she’s answering as herself or Meyer, whom she played for seven years in the deliciously savage political satire Veep. “If Selina had any advice for Kamala, she had best not take it. I think Kamala is so intelligent she wouldn’t take the call.”
She definitely would. Harris — like everyone else — knows that Veep has an astonishing track record of predicting what will happen in American politics. Antivax panics, vote-rigging conspiracies, an awkward and unpopular vice-president who finds herself up for the big job — Veep coined these storylines years before they became headlines. In 2022 Harris posted a photo of herself with Louis-Dreyfus at a state dinner with the caption, “Great to see you, Madam Vice-President.” What did the women talk about when they met?
“We talked about — how shall I say? — how much Veep got right in terms of the culture of Washington, both behind the curtain and in front of the curtain. She was a big fan of the show.”
Veep won 17 Emmys, but ended in 2019. “We couldn’t satirise anything any more — the Trump presidency was doing a better job.” Another way of putting it is that reality overtook Veep.
“I think in the last few years the culture of politics has become much more venal. So when we started we were pushing against reality, but now less so, certainly in terms of the nastiness of the communication,” she says.
One example of that is JD Vance, Trump’s chosen vice-president, referring to Harris in 2021 as a “childless cat-lady”. What did Louis-Dreyfus make of that? “I thought, You poor f***ing idiot. These guys can’t help it. They can’t help it!” she says with a cackle.
After Harris announced her bid for the presidency — under circumstances not a million miles away from the Veep storyline, in which the president resigns early because of his wife’s health — viewership in the US of the first season of the show shot up more than 350 per cent. Louis-Dreyfus describes herself as “gobsmacked, as you guys would say”. Although she too acknowledges the overlaps between Veep’s fantasy and America’s reality. “My husband and I were talking today about [the Florida congressman] Matt Gaetz and we were saying, ‘He’s very Jonah Ryan.’” And it’s true: the extremely divisive Republican is undeniably reminiscent of the appalling Jonah, who became Meyer’s vice-president.
Yet it’s Meyer whom people are saying is reminiscent of Harris, with her clumsy syntax and mid-speech laughs. Harris’s oft-repeated phrase, “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is pure Meyer. Louis-Dreyfus won the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for a fully deserved six consecutive years for her performance as Meyer (she also won Emmys for her roles in The New Adventures of Old Christine and, of course, Seinfeld). Armando Iannucci, who created Veep, has said that Meyer was not “in any way modelled on Harris”, but conceded that the comparisons “are inevitable”. Louis-Dreyfus insists that any similarities people notice between Meyer and Harris have less to do with Harris and more to do with how women in the public eye are perceived.
“Female candidates are more scrutinised,” she says. “That is the reality and we played into it and used it to our comedic advantage. There is an episode in which a character suggests Selina open a speech with ‘As a woman’ and she said, ‘I can’t identify as a woman! People can’t know that! Men hate that and women who hate women hate that, which I believe is most women.’ So we used that for a lot of fodder.”
Yet surely there will be even more confusion between Meyer and Harris because Louis-Dreyfus says she “will be extra-involved” in the Harris campaign. Immediately after our interview she is recording an advert telling Americans abroad how to vote. Will she be at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this month? She hesitates, wary of revealing a spoiler. “I probably will be, yes,” she says eventually.
Louis-Dreyfus, 63, is talking to me from her home in Los Angeles. She is surrounded by photos of her two now-adult sons and her husband, Brad Hall, an actor and film-maker whom she met at university. Her life appears gloriously stable, unlike the often very unstable characters she plays. We’re talking today because she has a film coming out, a tear-jerker called Tuesday in which she plays the mother of a teenager (Lola Petticrew) with a fatal illness. Initially, Louis-Dreyfus’s character, Zora, is in such denial about the situation that she avoids her daughter and naps outside the house. Despite being a dramatic role, Zora fits in with Louis-Dreyfus’s stable of self-deluding characters, from Meyer to Elaine in Seinfeld to Eva in the 2013 Nicole Holofcener film Enough Said, a character who constantly lies to her boyfriend (James Gandolfini, in his final performance). Louis-Dreyfus has never feared playing unlikeable characters.
“God, no. I base my career on it. Fallibility is always good for drama or comedy. And with Tuesday, to have that kind of conflict is phenomenal for storytelling,” she says.
When Holofcener called her in 2015 to ask if she would star in a skit on Amy Schumer’s sketch show, Inside Amy Schumer, about how actresses over a certain age are no longer considered attractive, Louis-Dreyfus instantly said yes. “It just seemed to me so cuckoo bananas and something I could really sink my teeth into,” she says.
In the sketch, called Last F***able Day, which immediately went viral, Louis-Dreyfus, who was 54 at the time, Patricia Arquette, 47, and Tina Fey, 45, celebrate no longer being seen as f***able. Yet in Tuesday Louis-Dreyfus is playing a woman at least a decade younger than she is; in Veep she always wore tight dresses and high heels; and she’s just finished filming her fourth Marvel project, Thunderbolts. Hollywood still clearly sees you as f***able, I say.
“Thank you,” she says and laughs again. “It is a weird thing to watch yourself age on camera, like when I see old clips of Seinfeld and I was — Jesus Christ, was I in my twenties? Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, it’s jarring for sure. So I know I’m older, but I feel young. I’m not going to play the 25-year-old ingenue, but I never did play those roles, so it’s fine.”
To have created one TV character who becomes a cultural reference point — Selina Meyer — would be impressive. But Louis-Dreyfus has created two; her first was the peerless Elaine Benes. One of the smartest things about Seinfeld is that Jerry and Elaine never become a couple — they are just friends.
“Oh, the network wanted it! They wanted a will-they, won’t-they, all that crap. But Larry [David, the show’s co-writer] was just immovable on that point. The show was built on doing things that were outside the norm, so doing something stereotypical would have been atypical of the show.”
She was the one woman in Seinfeld, and it was largely written by men. Did it feel like a boys’ club? “Yeah, it was very male, but that felt familiar to me so I knew how to navigate it,” she says. “When I started out in showbusiness in the 1980s, there was no awareness about trying to … I was going to say diversify, as if adding women is a diversification, but it is. But now there is awareness, and that’s a good thing.”
Louis-Dreyfus grew up in Washington DC. Her mother was a writer and her father was a Jewish French-American businessman who escaped the Holocaust as a child, and whose father fought in the French resistance. It was thought the family were descended from Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer who was wrongly convicted of a crime in one of the most notorious antisemitic scandals in the 19th century, but Louis-Dreyfus isn’t sure that’s true. Given her family history, what does she think of the rise of antisemitism in the US? “I’m very worried about it, and I’m very worried about fascism, and I think it looms,” she says.
Her earliest comedy influence was Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family — the American version of Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) in Till Death Us Do Part. “He got in my bones, and you watch it now and his character is just heinous. And yet it’s funny.”
It’s hard to imagine the racist Bunker — or Garnett — on TV today. Jerry Seinfeld recently faced criticism for saying that the “extreme left” and “PC crap” are ruining comedy. What does Louis-Dreyfus think? “My feeling is that being sensitive is ultimately a good thing, from a cultural and societal point of view,” she says, sounding a little like a politician again.
But presumably Seinfeld was talking about how people can be banished for a mistake when it’s put online, I say. For example, Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, experienced that in 2006 when someone filmed him at a comedy club calling hecklers the n-word.
“I don’t know if he was trying to say that, so I really can’t comment on what he was trying to say. But I do think we created a monster with social media and at some point we’re going to have to reconcile that,” she says. Meyer — and Harris — can only aspire to pull off such a smooth political pivot.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
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