You know, I don't even remember
really first starting to act.
I was constantly performing, even as a,
like a really little girl.
I was jumping around and doing dances
and all sorts of things for my mom.
There was a moment when I was in third or fourth grade,
and I was in some school play,
and I was playing a queen,
and I was supposed to faint.
It was like a dramatic scene.
I fainted and everybody laughed.
And they weren't supposed to laugh,
but I didn't mind that they were laughing.
I remember thinking, Oh, that's kind of cool.
So that was sort of an aha moment.
[jazz music]
Hi, I'm Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
and this is my Vanity Fair career timeline.
Whatever that means.
[Jazz Music]
Well, where's my best zit?
[laughter]
Oh my, I'm sorry. Hi.
Look, Kenny, listen I was thinking,
I don't have to go tonight,
but I'm willing to go to the prom looking like this,
if you're willing to go with me.
Hey, hey, hey. No.
[Julia] Saturday Night Live.
I was going to school at Northwestern University,
and I was doing a show in downtown Chicago
with The Practical Theater Company
between my Junior and Senior year of college.
And unbeknownst to me,
were the producers of SNL in the audience.
And after that particular show ended, they came backstage
and they offered all of us a job on Saturday Night Live.
So we're like, Yeah, good.
So that was it, I flew the coop.
The first sketch that I was ever in on SNL was
a sketch actually with Chevy Chase as the shark,
but he was doing it remotely.
And so it was sort of like, like a television screen
inside the mouth of a shark.
And it was one of the, you know, candy-gram kind of thing.
It was completely surreal.
I came to SNL at the age of 21,
I was unbelievable naive.
I had really done very little professional theater.
Only Second City and Practical Theater in Chicago.
I had no idea about this business of show.
It was a very male dominated,
male centric environment there.
In addition to the fact that everybody was completely high
on any drug that they could get their hands on.
And I had no idea.
I learned quick.
It was not exactly what I thought it was going to be.
Larry David and I were both at SNL together,
and he was there my third year.
We were both miserable together,
and we bonded over our misery.
And we've been miserable ever since.
I came back to host I think in 2006,
and I was really quite happy to do it.
I mean it was an interesting experience,
because I had been there.
Sort of like, it's like going back to high school
and being able to relive certain moments
that spin around in your head.
So I knew how the show worked,
I knew how to navigate it.
It wasn't unknown to me, it wasn't,
it was really really fun.
And furthermore when I went back
it was being produced by Lorne Michaels,
and it was very female friendly.
Tina and Amy and Kristen and Maya, they were all there.
So I had an absolute ball.
My big takeaway from being on SNL was that
I was only going to do jobs that were pure fun
from thereon out as simplistic as that sounds.
That's not something that's always so easily attained,
but that was my goal.
And I have for the most part.
[jazz music]
All right who's dancing?
Come on who's dancing?
Do you want me, do you want me to get it started?
I'll get it started.
[guests cheering]
All right, whoo
♪ When you wish upon a star ♪
[audience laughing]
♪ Ya dreams will take if very far yeah ♪
[claps]
Whoo
[Elaine] Come on guys, what's the hold up?
[clap]
♪ Life ain't always- ♪
Sweet fancy Moses. [audience laughing]
I became involved with The Seinfeld Chronicles
as it was called early on.
They had made a pilot, I was not in the pilot.
And then it came to my attention,
that NBC had picked up this show The Seinfeld Chronicles
for four episodes.
Larry David was writing it and, Would I be interested?
So I read a couple of the episodes and I thought,
Oh, wow, this doesn't sound like anything on television.
It definitely had a different voice.
A different rhythm than any sitcom at that period of time.
So I went in and I met with Jer
and we got along really well.
And of course Larry was an old friend of mine.
And so I signed up to do it.
I remember thinking back
when we first started doing the show
for those first four episodes.
And I remember thinking,
This show is so good and the network is going to be
so stupid to cancel it.
Because I figured they would let it go.
You know a four order, four episode order
is hardly a seal of approval from the network.
It felt like they were just burning off a commitment.
I just figured we were goners.
But we weren't.
I had lots of thoughts about Elaine,
and she was one of four characters,
and it was very important to me
that she was not just the girl.
And she wasn't written as the girl.
And so I sort of took that and ran with it.
She was, I don't know if this is,
probably not quite right to say,
but she was one of the guys, except she was a girl.
The Elaine dance is from this episode
called The Little Kicks.
And, um, it was just written that,
Elaine danced really badly.
And so, the night before the table read I had the script
and frankly, I just stood in front of the mirror,
and tried to do movements that looked incredibly bad.
And I had a few of them,
and I remember my mom was staying with us at the time
and I came downstairs and I sort of auditioned these
different [laughs]
different movements for my mom and my husband.
And they all voted on the one that, that uh, that I did.
So there you go.
People approach me about the dance all the time.
I say, Oh thank you so much, no I'm not gonna do it.
[laughing off screen]
I don't have a favorite episode,
I had many episodes that I loved.
You know, we did that show for nine years
and it evolved so much over the time,
over that period of time.
So I mean, you know, early on, the episode The Deal,
I loved The Soup Nazi,
I of course I loved The Little Kicks,
I loved The Mango episode,
I mean it goes, Puerto Rican Day Parade.
I have a million shows that,
I mean I'm actually a fan of the show.
So I like a lot of the episodes, yeah.
Jerry and I are really good friends.
And still are to this day.
And just to sort of harken back to what I learned at SNL,
we were having a really good time on that show all the time.
If it made us laugh, it made it into the show.
So that was true of rehearsal,
it was true of the writing process,
it was true of improvising.
And we were just trying to make each other laugh.
And that was a really good,
shall we say, equation for a kind of excellence.
I learned so much that I, I learned about comedy,
I learned more about timing.
It was just more training in performing.
And more training in frankly even producing.
I didn't produce Seinfeld, but I watched.
So I learned a lot that I took with me moving forward.
[Queen Ant] Now what do we do?
[Princess Atta] Oh don't tell me, I know it, I know it.
What is it?
We relax.
[laughs] Right.
Oh--
[Julia] A Bugs Life
My friends at Pixar invited me to come in,
and they wanted me to, they wanted to hear my voice.
I wanna say it was for a different character,
if I'm remembering this correctly.
And we were just sort of playing around
and then all of a sudden they asked me to read
these lines of Atta Ant,
and the next thing I know they were asked me to do
the one of the lead voices.
Which I was delighted to do.
I haven't really ever done voice overwork before.
I hesitate to think what it sounds like,
I don't know if it was good or not.
'Cause it was all new to me.
But it was certainly a great deal of fun.
It's entirely different from being on camera.
Well for starters you can come in your sweat pants
and you don't have to wear any makeup.
But you have no other tool but your voice.
So your voice has to inform everything,
which is a very different way of performing
than any other kind of performing.
It has to tell the full story, your voice.
So it means you have to sort of explore things
vocally that you might not do otherwise.
What I love most about Princess Atta,
was that she was strong, she was aggressive,
she was a fighter, she wasn't just looking for a prince.
Which I liked.
[piano music]
Lar, the guy came,
I got an estimate and it's gonna cost 500 bucks
to fix that table, the ring.
I--
Yes you did.
Come one man, yes you did.
Please don't play this game with me.
I would tell you if I left it.
I respect wood, I revere wood.
I'm considerate of wood.
Oh, I got involved with Curbed
because Lar just called and said, Would ya do it?
And I said, Yeah sure.
[laughs]
I did a number of episodes, um, as myself.
And then, later we sort of did this kind of,
our version of a Seinfeld reunion,
within the structure of Curbed.
That was crazy fun.
'Cause we all got back together again,
they rebuilt the set.
And sort of jerry-rigged it to,
Jerry-rigged, ha, that's funny.
It was sort of a modern version of the Seinfeld apartment.
And that was fun, it was really a great time for all of us.
And to be able to play Elaine,
and then to also play me, working on playing Elaine.
That was kind of bizarre and kind of meta, but cool.
It's kind of what I'm doing right now, talking to camera.
This is a version of myself, but it's not the real me.
One of my most favorite memories
of that time during Curbed
was Bob Einstein played the character of Marty Funkhouser.
And I remember [laughs] that he came on to set
and he told the most foul joke.
And it was so hilarious and it got, by the way,
completely folded into the show.
I think it's in the cut.
I was doubled over laughing,
it was so inappropriate and wonderful.
I encourage all of you to go and try to find that
and see how offended you might become.
[cheerful music]
We have your Honor
[funky music]
We've got Lizer.
[Narrator] Yes, Maggie was the most feared prosecutor
in all of Orange County.
And therefore I would like
to bring your attention to exhibit A.
Mitch Hurwitz reached out to me,
he said he was writing this character named Maggie Lizer,
who was pretending that she was blind.
So already it was like, Oh, that sounds super interesting.
And I was a fan of the show.
So I said, Great, I'll do it.
So I went and did a number of episodes.
I had a ball.
It was harder to do than you might think.
Because I did it with my eyes crossed the whole time,
and believe it or not
when your not actually looking at someone
and talking to them in the scene,
because you can't really see 'em,
'cause your eyes are crossed.
It makes it much harder to learn lines.
At least it did for me.
But maybe I'm just not that intelligent.
And that's a possibility.
But it was super fun.
Years later when I was doing Veep
and people came up to me and to Tony Hale
and said, Oh, you guys were both on Arrested together,
did you have scenes together?
And both Tony and I said, No we didn't,
we never got a chance to work together.
Well guess what?
We did work together.
And we had both forgotten it.
Somebody showed us a picture, we had a scene together.
Neither of us remembered it.
So you can see we made a extraordinarily positive
impression on one another.
[laughing off screen]
[audience laughing]
[crying noises]
I'm done here.
No, no wait, Barb, oh my god.
Are you okay, what happened to you?
The guy I picked up at the wedding
was an immigration officer.
He's trying to ship me back to the Bahamas.
Oh, that's horrible.
I had a bad time too.
[audience laughing]
The Old Christine script was sent to me
by Warner Brothers and I liked it very much.
I met with Kari Lizer who wrote and created the show.
She and I got along right away,
and yeah, and so off we went
to make this series for five years.
And we had lots of wonderful actors on the show
including Wanda Sykes and Clark Gregg and Hamish Linklater.
And the show itself was run by a bunch of women.
Which was very refreshing.
Huge number of uh, female writers
and a lot of female producers.
Uh, myself included.
And a lot of working mothers, I will point that out too.
So we got done with work always early,
everybody got home in time to make dinner,
drive carpool, work on homework, you know whatever it was.
I liked the disfunction of Old Christine.
I liked the disfunction of the family relationships,
and uh, the premise of her ex-husband
going out with a woman with the same name, who is younger.
And living with her brother.
It just all felt kind of messy.
And people trying to do the right thing,
but screwing up constantly.
The idea of a mother who was constantly screwing up
was appealing to me.
[soft music]
Wanna kiss?
Yeah.
[soft music]
I became involved with Enough Said,
because I met with Nicole Holofcener.
I had read the script, loved it.
I met with her, we talked, we meshed really well.
And then she offered me this part.
And um, so I was sort of,
or I was the first person cast in the movie.
We got along really well,
I realized I haven't talked to her in a while,
I need to talk to her because she's a good friend of mine.
But I love that woman.
And then uh, Jim Gandolfini wanted to do the movie.
And there we go,
off we went to this heartbreaking film.
Which I think it is actually.
And Jim was utterly charming.
Surprisingly lacked a lot of confidence.
Which was very surprising to me.
This huge impressive person,
he was a little bit shy.
And a little bit tentative doing comedy.
So that was fun to work with him on it
and sort of you know,
kick him in the ass to get him going.
And that was really fun, we had a good time.
Very labor intensive and it took a lot of emotional stuff.
But it was stuff I liked doing.
Nevada's my state, I'm gonna be president
I'm gonna be the first elected lady president.
I'm gonna have a lovely inauguration.
Billy Joel is gonna sing.
My agent told me they were developing a show
over at HBO about a female, unhappy vice-president.
And I was like, Bam, were do I sign up?
That was all I needed to hear.
And that Armando Iannucci was writing and creating it.
This was all, this was his brain child.
And I knew his work from The Loop In the Loop.
Which is a movie I had seen staring James Gandolfini
that Armando had done.
And was nominated for an Academy Award for
as a matter of fact.
And so, I met with Armando,
we were supposed to meet for about 45 minutes
to talk about it.
And it turned into a three hour work session,
it couldn't have been more fun.
Pitching ideas, talking about you know,
I grew up part of my life in Washington, D.C.
So a huge part of my childhood was spent there.
So I really, there's an understanding that I have
of inside the beltway, as we call it, of D.C.
that I sort of could bring to the conversation.
In addition to the fact
that I've done a lot of political work,
and so I've sort of seen behind the curtain a lot.
And that was very useful too.
So we had a great time.
I immediately thought he was a genius,
which of course he is.
And uh, off we went.
And we made it um, over at HBO,
which was like a dream for me.
Really nice to get away from network television,
truth be told and have more creative freedom.
My god, it was incredible.
It's been the most incredible ride of my life.
We did so much research to prepare for the show.
I mean in addition to meeting vice-presidents,
we met with lobbyists, we met with congressmen
and congresswomen, and senators, and chiefs of staff,
and secretary of this, secretary of that, schedulers.
I mean across the board we met so many people.
And got to tour the Eisenhower Building,
spent time in the actual White House,
and the Oval Office in fact.
I mean we did a ton of behind the scenes work.
Which really really reaped many rewards.
The thing that I'll miss most about playing Selina
is she really was a toddler trapped
in a middle-aged woman's body.
And there was something, very fabulous about that
because how a toddler thinks the world revolves around them
and how a toddler has a tantrum every couple times a day
when they don't get their way.
Well that's how Selina behaved.
And it was accepted by everybody who worked for her.
And she blamed everybody for her faults.
Also that was accepted.
So that was from a comedic point of view.
That was just so ripe with opportunity.
And so I will miss that actually.
I will miss playing that kind of character
who was reckless, uh emotionally.
I was very happy with our finale.
I think we kind of,
I hope we gave the fans what they wanted.
We certainly worked hard and blood, sweat, tears
and more tears were poured into that finale.
I think that it worked out really well.
Um in the sense that
Selina got what she though she wanted.
In so doing, she
gives up things,
people, not things, people,
who are the most important to her.
And she's left with that.
And that felt exactly right.
My point is, is that laughter is a basic human need,
along with love, and food and an HBO subscription.
[audience laughter]
There's no situation, none,
that isn't improved with a couple of laughs.
Everybody needs laughs.
So the fact that I have had the opportunity
to make people laugh for a living
is one of the many blessings
that I have received in my life.
When I first was notified about the Mark Twain Prize
I thought that they were emailing me to present it
to another person.
And I was like, Oh, my God, I can't fly all the way to D.C.
I'm in the middle of production,
I don't, to present an award.
And then I realized they were actually asking me
if I wanted to receive the award.
And I was like, Oh, my God, I can't believe it,
of course I wanna take that award.
And it was a incredibly lovely night,
I will say there was a lot of pressure,
because when they give you an award such as that for comedy,
then you're asked to make a, you know, 10, 15 minute speech.
So it's like they give you the award,
and then it's now like, prove it, prove you can really,
you're really deserving of this trophy.
So there was a lot of, you know,
God Almighty, I worked so hard on that speech
and I was very nervous about it.
But it was a very warm room,
it was surprisingly emotional.
I had a lot of really good friends show up,
to make speeches and so on.
And it was, it was just,
it was a night I will never ever forget.
But there's one person who was happier about that night
than anybody else in the whole world.
And that was my mother.
My mother was so out of her mind, she was just beaming.
And she actually told me afterwards,
it was the happiest night of her life. [laughs]
and no offense to Mark Twain, but you know,
other things have happened in her life.
But she really, she really had a good time [laughter]
[woman mumbles offscreen]
She did, she told me, I was like, Mom, come on.
The comedy that I've done
has been just sort of a happy accident.
Because I'm an actress, I'm not a comedian per se.
When looking back at my career choices,
would I change anything?
Of course I would change things,
but I'm not gonna delve into that,
I'm not gonna delve into a list of regrets.
Yeah, there's tons I would change,
but I'm very happy with where I am right now.
I consider myself to be very lucky.
We'll just leave it at that.
I hope this interview goes on for 20 more years.
I wanna be on this apple box 20 years from now,
answering more questions about myself. [laughs]
[woman mumbles offscreen]
