‘I share the nostalgia’: Julia Louis-Dreyfus on life with the ghosts of Elaine and Selina

Julia Louis-Dreyfus met director Nicole Holofcener more than a decade ago, at a lunch set up by their agents, a sort of Hollywood-style platonic speed date. Prior to that meeting, Holofcener has said, she had almost obsessively thought of the film and television actor as Elaine Benes, her character from the iconic TV sitcom Seinfeld.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is used to people thinking she’s the klutzy Elaine or the egotistical Selina Meyer. “It’s been going on for years,” she says. Credit: AP

When the pair finally sat down to lunch, the reality that actor and character were not one and the same immediately became clear. But for Louis-Dreyfus, whose TV credits include Seinfeld and the razor-sharp political satire Veep, it’s not an unfamiliar reaction: people expecting to meet klutzy Elaine or, more recently, Veep’s inept, egotistical Selina Meyer.

“Honestly, I’m so used to people having that kind of reaction, do you know what I mean?” Louis-Dreyfus says. “It’s been going on now for so many years that it’s familiar to me. It’s almost like, I don’t know what the other is. It’s part of the gig. You always get past it, particularly if it’s somebody I’m going to be working with. You get past it once they get to know me.”

Tobias Menzies and Julia Louis-Dreyfus play a husband and wife whose marriage is spinning in You Hurt My Feelings.

And they did. From that lunch sprang the film Enough Said, a gentle comedy about a blossoming romance between Eva (Louis-Dreyfus) and Albert (James Gandolfini, another actor who played a signature role, that of Tony Soprano in The Sopranos), which The New York Times’ A. O. Scott described as “line for line, scene for scene, one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory.”

A decade later the pair are collaborating for a second time, on the film You Hurt My Feelings, a more complex study of a happy marriage which nearly skids off the rails when author Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her unflinchingly supportive husband Don (Tobias Menzies) confess that he dislikes the manuscript for her new book.

That Holofcener is a woman is significant. “I’m happy to get into the gender of it,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “It is an enormous relief to have a female director. There is an ease that I felt. There is a calmness. And I would say this of every female director I’ve worked with, not just Nicole. But specific to Nicole, there is, to quote you, much less bullshit. (Helpfully, I had dropped the expletive as we began our conversation.)

“There is an intimacy between actor and director; it’s personal. You are delving into areas that are private. And you’re doing it hopefully with somebody who understands what the goal is. And I don’t mean to imply that a male director wouldn’t understand the goal. But there is a tenderness that is in place. I don’t know how else to put it.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus (left) and director Nicole Holofcener on the set of You Hurt My Feelings, which is the second film they have made together.

At the heart of the story of You Hurt My Feelings is the notion of intellectual infidelity. Not unfaithfulness to the marriage in the traditional sense of the phrase, but rather a gap created when Don’s admission is caught by Beth, whose faith in herself begins to disintegrate rapidly. It is a betrayal in thought only, but it cuts deep.

“I’ve been using the word infidelity, and I like that you characterise it as intellectual infidelity,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “They have had this incredibly successful marriage for decades, she adores her husband and respects him beyond the beyond. So, this rather bold lie on his part rocks her world in the way an infidelity would rock her world.

“She actually doesn’t know if she can stay with him and I understand that, I get it. She’s fragile, she’s sensitive, she has a background where the support that she grew up with was, shall we say, at best fleeting and not strong support by any means. So, she comes into this relationship with that, she relies on this man, her husband, for all sorts of affirmations, including her worth as a writer.”

With a role that lives so deeply in the everyday – about a successful woman in a creative field, with a happy marriage and children – it’s easy to think the lines are blurring. In Louis-Dreyfus’ real life there is a long and happy marriage to actor and filmmaker Brad Hall, and two sons, Henry and Charlie.

Like Holofcener when she first met Louis-Dreyfus, it’s hard to discern if the symmetry is real or our projection. And not unlike Holofcener and her Elaine Benes moment, I explain to Louis-Dreyfus that I spent some time watching the film wondering how close her performance of the everyday minutiae of marriage was to her real life.

“I’m not sure exactly how to answer that except I’ll say that there’s a lot in this film that I can draw from my own life and apply,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “That’s how I approach work, be it this, be it Veep, really be it any work that I do. I have to find an in. I have to find a place where it is like a portal and through which I can identify. Like, when you’re reading a book, and you start to feel the character’s point of view.”

You Hurt My Feelings was filmed in just 22 days. That’s a tight schedule when you consider principal photography for most feature films is usually three months. (It seems to be a hallmark of Holofcener’s work; Enough Said was filmed over 24 days.)

“Let me tell you, it’s a bitch,” Louis-Dreyfus says, laughing. “You have to be prepared beyond prepared. There’s no room [for anything else]. We still managed to have fun. We still managed to improvise. But you really had to do your homework. You had to come to work knowing what you were doing that day backwards and forwards so that you could dick around with material in the scene or whatever.

“We [got lucky] because Tobias Menzies, who plays my husband, is an incredible actor. Very professional and kind and immediately understood the material. Thank God for that. Michaela Watkins [who plays Beth’s sister, Sarah] I’ve known for years. We have a bond that we could certainly tap into. Everyone was aware that it was a tight shoot, and we just rolled with it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s what we did.”

A glance at the slate suggests that there is a lot more going on in Louis-Dreyfus’s world than simply picking roles to get a face on a movie poster. The work is political in its thinking. And nuanced. In the case of her podcast, Wiser Than Me, it involves curated encounters between the 62-year-old actor and many of her female role models, including Jane Fonda, author Fran Lebowitz and designer Diane von Furstenberg.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus still feels a strong nostalgic pull towards her Veep character Selina Meyer. Credit: HBO

“They are teaching me, thrilling me, about the idea of getting older,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “They are making ageing appealing. These women, they have so much experience under their belts. They’ve been there. They’ve done that. There’s a level, there’s a layer of, again, I’ll use the word bullshit, that just evaporates.

“There’s a no-holds barred angle to these conversations, which I really find pleasing. Let’s just get down to it. An aspect of, I don’t give a shit, let’s just talk about it. I love the honesty of that. It’s very refreshing and it’s very mind-expanding. I find it to be very inspirational. And, really, it was born out of a private desire of mine to have conversations with older women. It’s really blossomed.”

Her collaboration with Holofcener is also compelling. The 63-year-old New York filmmaker is artfully unpredictable, even though she has old-school Hollywood in her DNA. One story suggests when she was in film school, Martin Scorsese was one of her tutors, but she debunked that story recently by pointing out that while it was true, Scorsese had fallen asleep watching one of her short films. Less uncertain is the fact that her stepfather, Charles H. Joffe, produced many of Woody Allen’s films.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus in 1989 with her Seinfeld castmates (from left) Jason Alexander, Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Richards.

And when you look at her films, the Allen connection feels influentially present, particularly in the way she explores the big city and the minutiae of married life, comfortably knotting the two around each other into a sort of Scenes From a Marriage-style mosaic. “I think she certainly was influenced by Woody Allen, but she’s taken it to the next level,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “It has an imprint on it that’s very specific to her.

“She muses on character in a pretty profound way, and she has an extraordinary voice as a writer, unique and sublime. That’s why I’m so drawn to her writing. These are people that I want to inhabit because they ring so true to me. Yes, of course, we’ve all been influenced, God knows. I can understand why, and I can see the making a connection between Woody Allen and Nicole, but then I really think Nicole takes the baton and runs with it.”

The film landed at the Sundance Film Festival and was a hit. Collider said its “low-key, restrained style [made it] feel so special.” The Guardian described it as “a funny and piercing film about honesty in relationships.” It also disproved the modern notion that feature films like it belong on the streaming small screen and not in cinemas, which are better deployed as clearing houses for big-ticket costume hero action movies.

Tony Hale, left, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep.Credit: HBO

“I found it to be very validating because for me, these kinds of films are the films that I enjoy, that I go to personally and that I find intellectually stimulating,” Louis-Dreyfus says of the film’s reaction at Sundance, and its box office success since. “I think about them. And I’m thoroughly entertained by them. It doesn’t mean there’s not a place for the other crazy tent-pole films. One doesn’t exclude the other. A film like this, I’m thrilled that it has received the critical acclaim that it has and that it’s doing well at the box office.”

It is nostalgia, perhaps, for a style of filmmaking and storytelling missing from gloss-obsessed Hollywood movies. Or merely nostalgia for characters written in small notes played loud by an actor as talented as Louis-Dreyfus. It does go some way to explaining the immortality of art. Or, put more simply, why so many people are unwilling to let go of Elaine and Selina.

The former survives because she is one of the great creations of modern comedy, perfectly written, artfully and sharply performed. The latter survives because the chaotic madness of the global political stage seems to beg for the comforting ridicule that another season of Veep would give us.

“I am struck by [the unwillingness to let go],” Louis-Dreyfus says. “I think it certainly speaks to nostalgia. For example, I don’t remember exactly when this happened, but I think within the last 10 years haven’t there been a gazillion reboots of shows? That’s interesting. These are difficult times we’re living in. I think there’s a certain amount of nostalgia about watching these shows.

“I share the nostalgia, I really do. I mean, Seinfeld feels very long ago now. But I’m nostalgic about it. For Veep? My god, I’m hyper-nostalgic about it. That was bittersweet, saying goodbye to that show. Perhaps it has to do with comfort. It has to do with comfort somehow.”

You Hurt My Feelings is released in cinemas on June 15.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.