Julia Louis-Dreyfus broke through in Hollywood thanks to her portrayal of Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, but her character wasn’t always given much to do in the early days of the show. In an interview with The Daily Beast, the actor revealed how she regularly advocated for Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld to write more material for Elaine.
“I never really approached it from the perspective of my gender, per se. I wanted to just play ball with everybody,” Louis-Dreyfus said about her attitude toward the role after she was not in the pilot. “I’m not going to lie, in the beginning, I didn’t always have a lot to do in certain episodes. And I would go to Larry and Jerry multiple times and say, ‘Hey, you guys, write me more, I need to be in this show more.’ That’s what I just kept doing. And they did.”
The two-part finale of Seinfeld Season 4, titled “The Pilot,” actually alludes to their difficulty with writing for a woman, but Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t think that was necessarily the case. “But then, you see, they didn’t write for me as a woman,” she said. “They just wrote for me, for this character, as opposed to this gender, which I think is instructive in a lot of ways from a writing point of view.”
In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Louis-Dreyfus recently dismissed the idea of the “Seinfeld curse,” which was used to describe the alleged lack of success for the show’s stars after it ended in 1998. “It was invented by the media. They thought it was clever,” she said. “You don’t need me to prove it wrong, it was ridiculous! It made no sense. I was amazed that it had legs, because it was so moronic.”
Louis-Dreyfus undeniably has had post-Seinfeld success by starring in a pair of Emmy-winning shows: her CBS sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine and the HBO political satire Veep. Her latest film, You Hurt My Feelings, hits theaters on May 26th.
