Actress, activist, and podcaster Jameela Jamil has always been coy about her friendship with Larry David, to whom she is close enough that she served as the officiant at his wedding to second wife Ashley Underwood, 46, in 2020.
But as she revealed in a new episode of The Last Laugh podcast, she initially got in the curmudgeonly Seinfeld creator’s good graces by having no idea who he was.
“Yes, I officiated Larry David’s wedding and I would like to be very minimal in how much I talk about that, but he’s a friend of mine,” Jamil said. “I met him because I was at a dinner and I genuinely thought he was a Bernie Sanders impersonator. Because I hadn’t seen Curb Your Enthusiasm and I didn’t know he wrote Seinfeld and I hadn’t seen Seinfeld.”
That first meeting was just after David had gone viral for playing Sanders in a debate sketch opposite Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live, so Jamil recognized him from that but nothing else.
The pair ended up having an hour long conversation during which Jamil, whose first-ever acting job was in the main ensemble of NBC’s The Good Place and now hosts her own podcast about failure called Wrong Turns, asked David questions about what he did for a living without having any idea he was one of the most successful TV creators of all time.
Asked if she thinks her obliviousness about his fame is what endeared her to him, Jamil says, “Totally.” If she had known who he was, she says she “would have been too intimidated to speak to him,” recalling a prior experience when she met Jim Carrey and became a “complete mute.”
“So I’m so glad that I saw Curb like two years after becoming friends with him,” she says, “and then struggled with the feeling of, oh no, what happens when you become in awe of someone who is already your friend?”
David, who turned 78 this month, met Underwood, also a TV producer, at a birthday party for mutual friend Sacha Baron Cohen in 2017, where they were intentionally seated next to each other as a set up. “Much to her surprise I left before dessert,” David told The New York Times. “I was doing so well, banter-wise, I didn’t want to risk staying too long and blowing the good impression.”
They were married three years later at a private ceremony in Southern California. David shares two daughters, Cazzie, 31, and Romy, 29, with ex-wife Laurie David, an environmental activist and Oscar-winning producer of the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Jamil first revealed she had officiated the wedding during an interview with The Telegraph last year. Calling it her “best celebrity encounter,” Jamil joked, “I got qualified on the internet in the state of California and I’m allowed to conduct weddings, but not circumcisions. They’re very strict on that.”
By 2022, Jamil was a big enough fan of David’s work that she cited the Curb Your Enthusiasm music as the “theme song” for her life in a discussion with Vogue.
“It’s the one that plays most in my head as I wish I was cooler, sexier, and smoother,” she said at the time. “But I think I might just be South Asian Larry David.”
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