Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Empress of Comedy, has a new profile in The Times to promote the UK theatrical release of her indie film Tuesday (it’s currently available to stream in North America, but not for free). Tuesday sees Julia star as a mother caring for her terminally-ill teenage daughter, and Death shows up in the form of a giant, talking macaw. If you’re waiting for the punchline, there is none. This is a dramatic turn for Julia that sounds more like a punch to the gut, albeit one with its own macabre sense of fantasy. The timing of the film’s UK release has turned out to be quite fortuitous, as Veep viewership has skyrocketed since VP Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee. While the article starts out heavy on Veep and present-day politics, it also covers the span of Julia’s career, including some old tea on why Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine Benes never hooked up. A few highlights:

On what advice Selina Meyer would give Kamala Harris: “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.”

Veep could no longer outdo reality: “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.

Women candidates are more scrutinized: 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.”

She likes the unlikeable roles: 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.

NBC wanted Jerry & Elaine to hook up: To have created one TV character who becomes a cultural reference point — Selina Meyer — would be impressive. But Louis-Dreyfus 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 may be related to the Dreyfus affair?! 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.

[From The Times]

I don’t care if maybe it isn’t true, I find it fascinating that lore suggests Julia mayhaps be descended from Alfred Dreyfus! (Wikipedia says she’s his fifth cousin four times removed, fwiw.) Can you imagine what Monsieur Dreyfus would think, looking at Julia today? She comes from wealth and (possibly) quasi highbrow lineage… and all the gal wants to do is play viscerally unlikeable characters who say things so vulgar that we’re left howling with laughter. “But you’re besmirching the family name! J’Accuse!”

The Times interviewer was a bit too intent on making VP Harris out to be the non-fiction carbon copy of Selina Meyer, for my taste — a trend I see cropping up from political pundits. I don’t understand how you can look at Kamala Harris’s character, achievements, and work ethic and find a throughline to Selina Meyer, in fact I find it quite offensive. But Julia answered that question with more class than I would have, chalking it up to how women in the public are judged at large. You know what I would’ve clapped back with? Say it with me now: J’Accuse! (History nerd here; désolé, pas désolé.)

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