Though she did not grow up with parents in the entertainment business — her father was a businessman in commodities, while her mother worked as a teacher — Julia Louis-Dreyfus wanted to be a performer from “the earliest age” — as in very early.
“I would even perform during nap time in nursery school, so I remember very vividly standing on top of my blanket and dancing and hoping people were going to be watching — and they were, by the way,” she recalled.
Louis-Dreyfus has had eyes on her ever since, and countless more are focused on the legendary actress this week as she’s just touched down in Cannes for the world premiere of her festival selection, Tangles, an animated film that she stars in and produced alongside Seth Rogen and wife Lauren Miller Rogen. Ahead of the world premiere on Thursday night, Louis-Dreyfus sat for an exclusive conversation Thursday morning with The Hollywood Reporter’s executive awards editor Scott Feinberg for his award-winning podcast, Awards Chatter, recorded live at Meta House inside the Majestic Hotel in Cannes.
As is always the case on Awards Chatter, Louis-Dreyfus participated in a career-spanning chat that opened with talk of her time in nursery school and finished with the emotional reason she’s here in Cannes. Highlights in between included her time at Northwestern, becoming the youngest female talent ever to book a spot on Saturday Night Live, making history again with the iconic sitcom Seinfeld, cementing her legacy with beloved shows like The New Adventures of Old Christine and Veep followed by dramatic turns in Nicole Holofcener films and ultimately becoming a blockbuster star by way of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
The event kicked off with brief remarks from Meta’s head of global creative strategy Ricky Van Veen. “We’ve unofficially been involved in film for a while, of course, through conversations happening on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp about film and emerging filmmakers putting their work on the platforms. It’s nice to make it official this year. We’re really honored to host this conversation at Meta House. I’m personally very excited for it,” he said of his company’s high-profile impact this year at Cannes.
Then it was Feinberg’s turn to get things going by welcoming Louis-Dreyfus to the spotlight in the blue-colored room complemented by an array of Ray-Ban Meta glasses and VIP guests from the international film community and industry insiders.
Speaking about her time at Northwestern, Louis-Dreyfus noted how she was still focused on becoming a performer, but she wanted to study at a university that had more to offer. “It was an opportunity to get a liberal arts education at the same time as studying theater and acting. But, ironically, all I focused on was the theater and the acting and then ultimately left after three years because I got a job to be on Saturday Night Live. So I was like, ‘I’m out of here,’” she joked.
Her jump to SNL was quite the leap, in many ways. “With my then-boyfriend and now husband, but still boyfriend [Brad Hall], we were doing a show that was a huge hit in Chicago actually, with sold-out shows every night. The producers of SNL were told to check this show out, and they did,” she recalled. “It was like one of those things that really feels like a fantasy, doesn’t feel like it would happen in real life where they came backstage after the show and said, ‘We want you to all come to New York and be on Saturday Night Live.’ We didn’t even audition. We just were offered this opportunity. It was pretty jaw-dropping.”
In another stunner, Feinberg pointed out that Louis-Dreyfus, who was 21 at the time, was a member of the cast alongside soon-to-be comedy greats Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and more. But it wasn’t an easy tenure. She said it was an “incredibly competitive” environment where actors were “always scrambling to be seen, to be heard” on a “very male-centric” staff. Oh, and lots of extracurricular activities going on behind-the-scenes.
“There were a ton of drugs going on. I was so naive that I did not realize this. We’d have the table read and one sketch would be 17 pages long, which is too long for a sketch, and the writers who wrote it were going like [grinding teeth]. And I’m like, ‘Wow, they have a lot of energy.’ It was a topsy-turvy time,” she said.
She found company, however, in future Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who joined the staff during her third year. “So we spent a lot of time happily being miserable together.”
A few years later, after moving to Los Angeles and working on a couple of network shows, she read a script David had written called The Seinfeld Chronicles. “[Elaine Benes] was not in the pilot and NBC didn’t want to do the show, but then a guy named Rick Ludwin, who ran special programming at NBC, decided to somehow keep this show afloat and put the late-night programming budget into these four episodes. God love Rick Ludwin, he’s passed away, but he was an incredibly wonderful guy, and we really have him to thank,” she pointed out.
She also noted how unique the script was for its time. “The comedies on television had a familiar rhythm to them and this I’m not saying anything negative, it’s just was the case. This show did not. This show was sort of almost an anti-joke in a way,” she explained. “ I recognized the difference on the page, and I thought, wow, this is wild. It’s like my friends have gotten into the system and fooled everyone.”
Louis-Dreyfus detailed one particular fight that came out with a 1991 episode titled “The Deal,” saying, “There was a big fat argument on set about that because Jerry and Elaine sleep together in that episode and they sort of make a deal about it. There was tension between creatives — actually, it was Castle Rock and Larry — about whether or not to turn this into a will they, won’t they? Larry was livid. He did not want anything to do with the idea of romance, the cute, the sexy.”
Feinberg then asked Louis-Dreyfus about how she processed the show’s end after nine seasons and 180 episodes. “I was pretty grief-stricken. When you’ve given your life and your brain and your heart to a project for a long period of time, to say goodbye to it, even if the timing is right to say goodbye, which it was, there’s a deep sadness and loss,” she said. “I’ve actually felt it with any long-term project that I’ve happily worked on. But I was also a young mother at the time. I had a 5-year-old and a 10-month-old. And so it was a real big juggling act making the show and having these babies at the same time and as any working outside the house mother knows. And so I was eager to just get home.”
Louis-Dreyfus found success on CBS with The New Adventures of Old Christine, a show that ran for five seasons and 80 episodes on what Feinberg pointed out was “a pretty male-centric network,” to which she replied, “I think it still is.” The network pulled to plug before it reached the milestone 100 episodes, which made it ripe for syndication, and Louis-Dreyfus has previously said they weren’t treated well by CBS. “Like shit,” she added today. “They screwed us.”
Louis-Dreyfus then made her way to HBO in a partnership with Armando Iannucci on Veep, playing vice president Selina Meyer. Feinberg asked how growing up in Washington, D.C. helped inform the choice.
“In Hollywood and show business, you’re selling a brand. The brand is yourself and you’re trying to stay relevant as time goes on. For example, I’m here with you right now trying to stay relevant,” she quipped. “And in politics, exactly the same is true. That I could relate to and as a woman who’s getting older in the business or getting older in the world of Washington, D.C., it all seemed to make a lot of sense.”
She added: “I’d also done a lot of political work and have subsequently and continue to do so — behind the scenes and meeting politicians and so on — and I grew up in Washington D.C., or I spent part of my childhood there. The inner workings, as I say, inside the beltway and the culture there, certainly that I understood in my bones.”
Something new to her bones was blockbuster work in the MCU in such films as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thunderbolts*.
“Never seen anything like it. It’s quite the machine,” she said. “What’s so thrilling about being a part of that universe is to see it in action, to see the prop department, the skills that come to bear, the care and the intelligence that is needed to really do this work perfectly well … the amount of people that they employ and find to work on these films is mind-blowing.”
It also requires a lot of signatures, she said. “You’re signing an NDA every three and a half minutes. It’s like working for the CIA or something.”
To close the conversation, Feinberg and Louis-Dreyfus turned their attention to the Leah Nelson-directed Tangles. The story follows a young woman who is forced to return to the conservative small town where her bizarre family lives to take care of her mother as she battles Alzheimer’s disease. The voice cast includes Louis-Dreyfus, Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein, Sarah Silverman, Abbi Jacobson, Samira Wiley, Wanda Sykes, Adam Shapiro and Bowen Yang.
Turns out the subject matter hits close to home for Louis-Dreyfus.
“Lauren Rogen sent it to me, and there’s Alzheimer’s in my family. My grandmother died of it and my mother-in-law is currently suffering with it and I understand the disease well and the toll that the disease can take on a family. I’m living that as we speak,” she said. “I was immediately intrigued by this project too because it was based on this extraordinary graphic novel and the idea of tackling this subject through animation geared towards adults was so intriguing to me.”
Asked what she hopes audiences take away from the film, Louis-Dreyfus said its a message that is both timely and urgent. “Ultimately, this movie is certainly about communication and being in community and the value of family. All of that is sorely needed right now, certainly in our country, and globally, you could argue. I’m hopeful that this film, when people see it, they might take away a new way of approaching those they love during difficult moments.”
Stay tuned to Awards Chatter for the full conversation, and see an exclusive clip of the Tangles here.
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