Julia Louis Dreyfus Fakes

Julia Louis Dreyfus Fakes

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First Lady of Comedy wears absolutely nothing but the immortal words of America’s founding fathers on magazine cover

Julia Louis-Dreyfus poses naked for Rolling Stone.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus pulls up to the mouth of the Temescal Canyon hiking trail in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles in her gray Tesla, then jumps out in a flurry. Standing barely five-feet-three and mostly made of muscle mass, with wowee brown eyes, a heart-shaped face and energy as coiled as her hair, it’s hard to believe she’s in her mid-fifties. This is the morning ritual Louis-Dreyfus prefers: a stout hike after rising from bed around 6 a.m.; a sadistic fitness class involving cardio and weights; or, on occasion, a two- to four-mile run. “I love exercising,” she says, tossing a seven-buck parking fee in a brown national park requisition box and zipping up a black Nike windbreaker. “I’m a bit addicted to it. I’d love to do a full marathon, but now I worry about blowing out things, and I don’t want to be fucked forever as a result.”
Though curse words often issue forth from Louis-Dreyfus’ mouth, this energetic 53-year-old is as discreet and demure as can be. She’s a people-pleaser, this one, and several times, as we proceed on the trail, while she points out some of the local oddities, like an oak tree with two trunks, which has a name she can’t recall – “I learned it two days ago, and now I can’t remember it; there endeth the lesson” – she mentions that we should have gone for this hike in Will Rogers State Historic Park instead of this canyon because the ranch there, where Rogers used to live with his polo ponies, is so beautiful. “That was the place!” she says. “Damn it!”
Louis-Dreyfus leads a quiet life here in the Palisades, at her 1920s home retrofitted with solar power and energy-saving measures like compact fluorescent light bulbs. She’s the only woman in her nuclear family of very tall men, including her husband of 27 years, comedian and writer Brad Hall, and their two sons, one of whom is enrolled at Wesleyan University and plays in an indie-rock band called Grand Cousin, and the other, a junior in high school, still at home. All three of the guys are over six feet, and she’s only a “fireplug,” as she likes to call herself. Her younger son, coming up on six feet four, is a star basketball player, and last night she cheered her heart out for him in the state quarterfinals. “There was a big turnout, and it’s been an exciting year – they played phenomenally well,” she says, as brightly as she can manage. “But I’m afraid they didn’t win. Of course, there’s a little disappointment.”
Louis-Dreyfus’ professional life, however, is a lot more hectic than the easy California dream of her home life. Although she has the most interesting acting role of her career right now – the narcissistic, thwarted vice president of the United States on HBO’s political satire Veep – it’s been almost 25 years since she first played Jerry Seinfeld ’s nervy sidekick Elaine Benes on his TV show. “I’m a perfectionist in my work,” she says. “I think I might drive people nuts. I don’t ask them, because I don’t need that bullshit on top of how I’m feeling.” Today, she even canceled an appointment so that she had enough time to put together notes on two new Veep episodes that Armando Iannucci, the show’s creator, sent for her perusal from London, and she’ll spend much of the day in her home office, guzzling down coffee while she types up an e-mail of suggestions for him.
Louis-Dreyfus arrives at an overlook
now, pausing for a moment to take in the Pacific Ocean, Century City and her
neighborhood of mostly gleaming white multimillion-dollar homes set like teeth
on the surrounding hills. It’s a brief stop, though, and she soon bolts off for
another peak, the crisp dirt crunching under her sneakers. “I have a hard
time relaxing,” she says. “I’ve tried meditation, but I always fall
asleep. You have to stay present when you meditate, and I have the worst time
with that I’m just, ‘Forward!'” Then she spots something on the trail, and
jumps over to the side for a moment. “Watch out,” she calls behind
her. “Poop!”
The only cast member to create a satisfying post- Seinfeld professional life, Louis-Dreyfus has been very good throughout her career at not stepping in the poop. She’s been nominated for or won an Emmy 14 times in the past two decades, starring on three TV sitcoms since Seinfeld , including Watching Ellie and The New Adventures of Old Christine , and scored her first major dramatic film role last year, opposite James Gandolfini in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said , a movie about divorced lonely hearts (Gandolfini died several months after they wrapped). Frustrated women are her specialty, ones who shake their fists at a world that doesn’t hand over everything they want, like a nice nuclear family of six-foot-tall guys, a new Tesla or a gorgeous solar-powered home. “I have my share of angst, but I channel it into my acting,” Louis-Dreyfus says, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s a good release.”
In fact, it’s hard to think of an actress other than Louis-Dreyfus who could play Veep ‘s Vice President Selina Meyer, toggling between political facade and Lady Macbeth-level ambition as she issues irrational demands and acid insults, cutting everyone around her down to the size of toy dolls. (Disses fly around her office: A West Wing statistician is a “man who can’t take a leak without polling his balls”; a position as the secretary for the VP is a job so meaningless, it’s “like being Garfunkel’s roadie”; a particularly unpleasant and lanky presidential aide is “Jolly Green Jizz-Face.”) The HBO show, in its third season, has become a secret guilty pleasure in Washington. “ Veep is way more realistic than House of Cards , which people on the Hill tend to hate-watch,” says a Senate aide. “ Veep is really sharp satire, and like all satire, it works because it’s revealing truths.”
Like many of Washington’s political animals, Meyer is blinded by her desire for the presidency, a job “she’s been trying to get to for her whole fucking life,” as Louis-Dreyfus puts it, and considers the vice president’s realm, as one of FDR’s vice presidents said, worth little more than a bucket of warm piss (“Sometimes I think A Bucket of Warm Piss might have been a good title for the show,” Louis-Dreyfus has said). Meyer is supposed to be a relatively sophisticated politician, but she still consistently misreads situations and gets caught in embarrassing incidents like looking at her BlackBerry while supposedly directing the rescue of American hostages. Says Louis-Dreyfus, “Selina is playing the game, and she knows how to play the game. There are a lot of parallels between political life and life in show business, so there’s plenty for me to draw from. And it’s great fun to play around with a character who, when anything goes wrong, thinks it isn’t her fault.”
Veep ‘s creator, Iannucci, a contemplative British baby boomer who dropped out of a literature Ph.D. at Oxford University when he was in his twenties, hatched the idea for the show after he was contacted by HBO in 2010 – they had been looking to develop a series set in Washington, D.C., but hadn’t hit on the right man for the job. By this point, he was a cult icon in the U.K. for his earlier work, including The Thick of It , a political farce for the BBC, and In the Loop , a film about the fakery promulgated by the Americans and Brits in the run-up to the Iraq War. Iannucci’s brand of black humor is defiantly nonpartisan, and in his earlier comedies, his characters never mention real-life politicians like President George W. Bush or Prime Minister Tony Blair. Iannucci uses the same trick in Veep , in which political parties are ignored, and no one ever actually sees the president, though his presence looms over all things. “Armando has an outsider’s eye for Washington that’s sharp and knowing,” says New York magazine columnist Frank Rich, a creative consultant for HBO who is intimately involved with Veep as an executive producer. “Most treatments of Washington tend to be romanticized even when they’re muckraking. The idea here was to do a show about what it’s like in the trenches.”
The day-to-day life of American politicians fascinated Iannucci, and he considered setting Veep in a congressman’s or a Cabinet secretary’s office, before hitting on the vice president, a position where there is a lot of power and yet at the same time none at all (according to the Constitution, the vice president has hardly any responsibilities – he or she only needs to break a tie in the Senate, and take over if the president is incapacitated). For Iannucci, the veep’s life perfectly encapsulated the boredom of most politicians, who are nevertheless thought of by the American public as celebrities – and regard themselves that way, too. “In the U.K., we don’t hold political office in high regard the way you do in America,” he says. “We’re much less formal with our politicians. It’s very unusual to have a politician mingle with short-listers, whereas in the U.S., if you’ve arrived, you’ve arrived, and you spend your time mingling with anyone else who’s arrived. You have the feeling that politicians even envy the glamour of Hollywood.”
With his fatalistic, scabrous sense of humor – Iannucci is mostly responsible for the cutting dialogue on Veep , like calling the notion that senators would vote for Senate reform “persuading a guy to fist himself” – it seems as though he and Louis-Dreyfus may not come from similar comedy bloodlines, but they’ve seen eye to eye for the most part on Veep . The show wasn’t written with Louis-Dreyfus in mind, but after a single meeting between the two of them, the casting was decided. “As far as I know, there was never another serious contender,” says Rich. Veep is 95 percent pre-written and five percent ad-libbed, estimates Iannucci. “Julia’s not just a natural comedic performer – she’s a natural comedic brain,” he continues. “Once we have a script, she likes to go away and have a real think on what her character would do to react to the reality of every situation, if it would be funny to have her twitch, or to be thirsty, or if her mind was on something else. Julia brings all the behavioral expertise of what the character would do.”
Louis-Dreyfus, who usually watches The Colbert Report or The Daily Show before tucking herself into bed, isn’t a political junkie, but she keeps up with current events. She’s also a political force in her own right, and has been an activist for environmental causes for more than 20 years, along with her husband, who grew up in Santa Barbara and was disturbed as a teenager when an oil-derrick explosion covered his beach with black sludge. Today, Louis-Dreyfus mostly works with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Heal the Bay, a Santa Monica-based charity that addresses water-quality issues in Southern California (she also worked on the successful campaign to ban plastic bags from Los Angeles), and is full of ideas about marketing environmentalism, like car manufacturers should have launched a hybrid vehicle after 9/11 called Patriot, and painted it red, white and blue, as she once suggested. “An actor is an actor, and you don’t have to speak out because you’re well-known – it’s not your responsibility,” she says. “I do it because I feel responsible. I am guilt-ridden, therefore I act.”
Through her political work, as well as being a Hollywood star – or, perhaps, the irresistible combination of the two – Louis-Dreyfus has met several vice presidents, including Al Gore, “who did win, by the way,” she says, raising a finger. Joe Biden even recently seated her next to him at a White House state dinner. “He loves to tell stories, and I’m a good listener,” she says. “I loved that dinner. There was no cynicism, just a very earnest jubilation about being there. I got to meet Madame Christine Lagarde, Supreme Court Justice Kagan, Nancy Pelosi, Valerie Jarrett – you know, the list goes on.” She smiles. “Dr. Jill Biden was also at my table, and she had this great idea. As soon as everyone sat down, she said, ‘Let’s each take the menu, get a pen, and we’ll sign them.’ So by the time we were done, everyone had a menu with everybody’s name. Isn’t that cool?” Her eyes sparkle. “Totally gonna sell that on eBay.”
Louis-Dreyfus is right when she describes herself as a good listener: Conversation flows when she asks questions instead of answers them. “Julia is not a class cutup,” says Rich. “She’s very much in human scale offstage: a centered, direct person who cares about quality.” In many ways, Louis-Dreyfus is a quiet woman, an observer, a polite thank-you-note writer and a sender of flower bouquets on special occasions. From watching her play Elaine on Seinfeld for so many years, I just assumed she liked being teased, but the one tense moment in our conversation occurs when she talks about the 11-page essay that she wrote to get into college, and says, “I can only imagine it must have been so self-important and so self-serious,” and then I joke, “Maybe you said, ‘I want to be a celebrity and use my good for the environment,'” and she says, without pause, “No, that would not have been what I would have said.”
Louis-Dreyfus grew up elegantly between New York and D.C. as the daughter of a Frenchman running his family firm, the Louis Dreyfus corporation, a conglomerate that has had holdings in energy, soybean-crushing plants and real estate, though today, her father is a poet (as is her mother). She was wealthy, but not quite as wealthy as readers who have Googled her name may think. She says there have been misunderstandings over how much money her family has, because reporters have confused her father’s personal wealth with the fact that the family business has been valued in the billions. “I’ve been attached to that,” she says. “It’s unbelievable, because whatever I do, people just assume it’s true. Welcome to the fuckin’ Internet.”
Isn’t it a good thing, being perceived as a billionaire? Louis-Dreyfus shakes her head. “No, no, it’s not good,” she says. “Money and finances are so private, and I was raised not to talk about them. The whole thing is just bizarre. And of course I didn’t grow up poverty-stricken, so it’s not like I can say, ‘Hey, leave me alone, I’m poverty-stricken.'” She says there’s also a widespread assumption that if she’s not a billionaire by way of an inherited fortune, Seinfeld must have allowed her to bathe in money. “And of course I made a lot of money on Seinfeld – but I don’t own Seinfeld , OK?” she says. “It’s sort of the same thing.” She looks at me with a hint of despair. “Plea
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