When Julia Louis-Dreyfus faces down a new character, she asks certain questions: What does this character want? What does she want right now? How is she going to get that?
It is a very nice thing, if you can manage it, to sit across from Louis-Dreyfus, 65, on the sun-flooded patio of a coffee shop in Santa Barbara, Calif., and listen to her talk about desire, about appetite. From “Seinfeld,” which earned Louis-Dreyfus her first Emmy Award, to “Veep,” which earned her several more, and the sitcoms and movies in between, she has excelled at playing hungry women: hungry for recognition, power, love, attention, sex, snacks. (In one “Seinfeld” scene, she absolutely houses a Drake’s coffee cake.)
She loves these appetitive women, preferring them to the better behaved ones. “They’re more fun,” she said. “There’s more grit there, pushing against the norms, the rules.” That afternoon, she arrived in a swingy navy linen dress and lavish jewelry — a ruby ring, a gold watch, a gold bracelet, overlapping necklaces of gold, jade, lapis lazuli and ivory. She wore that excess lightly. She is more elegant than most of her characters, certainly more poised. But that valentine face, that slightly feral smile, eyes that go glittery when she talks about what thrills her, these features are shared.
Louis-Dreyfus barely touched her vanilla latte. One of her characters would have downed it in a gulp. As an actress, she specializes in need, so naked and desperate that it makes the women she plays indelible. I can defend almost no choice her characters make. But their wanting is undeniable, as is the demented pleasure she conveys when a want is satisfied.
For a decade or so, Louis-Dreyfus has had a specific personal want: to appear on Broadway. “It’s terrifying,” she said of this particular want. “Really scary.” In these same years, she has endured other scary things. She underwent chemotherapy and surgery to treat cancer. She lost the home in which she raised her two children in last year’s Pacific Palisades fire and relocated to Santa Barbara, where her husband grew up. “I did not see that coming,” she said. She has barely visited the site. “It’s pretty hard,” she said. “I mean, there’s nothing.”
Given these circumstances, she could be forgiven for making safe choices. That isn’t her way. Which is why, after an absence from the stage of more than four decades, she will make her Broadway debut this fall in a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s drama “Other Desert Cities” at the Hudson Theater.
“It’s very delicious for me to consider chomping on,” she said. “I really can’t wait.”
Louis-Dreyfus has had a charmed career, the envy of almost any woman in comedy. She began acting in high school, though she can’t remember the roles exactly: Madame What’s-Her-Face, Nurse What’s-Her-Face. When she was onstage, she felt centered, clear. “It’s what some people meditate to achieve,” she said. “Everything else just goes away.”
While a theater undergraduate at Northwestern University, she began appearing professionally with a company that Brad Hall, who would become her husband, co-founded. These were her last theater credits. Before her senior year, she was hired onto “Saturday Night Live.” Back then, “S.N.L.” was a boys club. She rarely felt welcome. But Louis-Dreyfus, relentless in pursuit of silver linings, welcomed the hardship. “It helped me define what my values were, it helped sharpen the skill set, it helped me know what I was not good at doing,” she said. “My priorities got more clear.”
She left the show after three seasons, and moved with Hall to Los Angeles. A few years later, she booked “Seinfeld,” created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, another “S.N.L.” alum. The show hadn’t originally been conceived with a female co-star, but NBC executives balked at that. As Seinfeld tells it, Louis-Dreyfus was an easy hire. “You have this very attractive woman who’s extremely funny and extremely intelligent,” he said. “When I met her, I saw those things instantly.” To find those characteristics in a single performer is rare, he said. “I don’t know much about gemology, but she’s a blue diamond or something.”
Happily, Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine — peppy, petty, anxious, clever and an epically bad dancer — never felt like an afterthought and she quickly became as awful as any of the men. David Mandel, a writer who joined “Seinfeld” in its later seasons and worked with Louis-Dreyfus again on “Veep,” admired her embrace of unflattering story lines.
“It was no longer three guys and a girl, it was just four idiots,” Mandel said. “She is a pretty woman who is fearless about being ugly, about looking ugly, about acting ugly.”
When “Seinfeld” ended, its stars struggled. Theories of a “Seinfeld curse” swirled. Louis-Dreyfus broke it, first with “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” which won her another Emmy, and then with “Veep,” on which she played Selina Meyer, the venal vice president and eventually the president. Frank Rich, an executive producer on the show and a former New York Times columnist, marveled at her ability to make a difficult character nearly lovable.
“She finds something in herself that makes you sympathize often with characters who can be very demanding, very competitive and very annoying,” Rich said.
Tony Hale, one of Louis-Dreyfus’s “Veep” co-stars, didn’t mince words regarding Selina. “She was an absolute monster,” he said. “The choices that she made were so horrific and the narcissism was so deep.” But watching Louis-Dreyfus play her, he couldn’t keep from smiling. Asked to describe her performance, one word came to mind: “Deliciousness.”
Louis-Dreyfus can’t defend Selina’s choices, or the choices of most of her characters, but she loves making them. “Those women entertain me,” she said. “They suit me. They get me where I live.” She isn’t vain in her performances and she’s unconcerned with being nice, with being liked.
“I am trying to be truthful,” she said. “Big difference.”
Louis-Dreyfus was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 while filming the final season of “Veep.” After receiving treatment, she returned to filming. In the years since that show ended, she has gravitated to film, taking on mature themes: marital strife in 2023’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” grief and death in 2024’s “Tuesday.” Even her voice-over work, in “Tangles” and “The Sheep Detectives,” has skewed a little dark. (Less dark: a recurring role in several Marvel projects.) And in 2023, she debuted the podcast “Wiser Than Me,” in which she interviews trailblazing women a generation up.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs, the executive leader of Lemonada, which produces the podcast, recognized Louis-Dreyfus as a gifted interviewer, a genuinely curious person and a good listener. “And obviously just being the funniest person ever to exist is helpful,” Wittels Wachs said. But Louis-Dreyfus wasn’t only jokey. “There’s so much depth and wisdom to her,” Wittels Wachs said.
In looking for a stage play, Louis-Dreyfus wanted it all, the comedy and the depth. “My ambition is to find really juicy, tasty material for me to play with,” she said. A longtime theatergoer, she had decided that she wanted to aim for Broadway, a return, in elevated form, to the community she’d enjoyed in her student days. “I want to have that connection, with not only the actors, but also with an audience, which feels like an opportunity for a very intimate, creative, not-to-be-repeated experience,” she said. “I was craving it.”
Her agent sent her “Other Desert Cities,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2011 before transferring to Broadway later that year. Louis-Dreyfus would play Polly, whom the stage directions describe as “elegant and forthright and whip smart.” A former writer and hostess, Polly has retired with her husband, a former actor and GOP regional chairman, to Palm Springs after a scandal involving their eldest son pushed them from political life. Now a memoir written by their daughter (Lily Rabe) threatens to dredge that up again. Louis-Dreyfus responded to the play’s moral preoccupations, its mix of light and dark. “It’s deeply funny and it’s deeply sad,” she said. What does Polly want? Everything.
In December, John Benjamin Hickey, the play’s director, held a reading to hear Louis-Dreyfus in the part. Her future Broadway castmates Ed Harris, Allison Janney and Joe Keery, fresh off “Stranger Things,” also participated. Hickey knew that she would shine in the play’s funnier scenes. And he had a hunch that she could handle the drama, too. “Because she’s such an authoritative presence but she’s so human,” he said.
Watching her read it, he found that she never had to reach for the drama, the emotion, he said. “She hasn’t had a chance to show much of that in her career, she’s really hungry for that challenge.”
David Mandel had noted this, decades ago. As good as she was on “Seinfeld,” and again on “Veep,” he always knew she could do more. “She’s an incredible actor and she has a real desire to grab at a part and just suck the marrow out of it,” he said.
This won’t exactly be Louis-Dreyfus’s first time in front of a live audience since her school days. “S.N.L.” was of course shot live as were most of her sitcom episodes, but she has never been asked to dig so deep, so publicly.
Louis-Dreyfus has always been a somewhat private person. She didn’t welcome having to speak publicly about having cancer. (That it delayed the final season of “Veep” necessitated that disclosure.) While she is more open on her podcast, she was understandably reluctant to discuss the loss of her home, moving tables so that she would not be overheard. “Yeah,” she said, “We’ve had kind of a [expletive] time.” But even here she found an upside.
She has worked hard for the life she has, for the family she has. “I’ve been fiercely protective and proud of that,” she said. “So when aspects of that are at risk, with my health, with losing our home of 33 years, in a weird way it’s a way into understanding.”
Will those experiences color the role? “How could they not?” she asked. “If you’re doing your job right, it’s intimate. It doesn’t translate, it’s not a direct line. But you’re bringing your own life experience, you’re bringing it to bear to bring some truth to this thing, so you do feel that connection.”
Polly is also protective of her family, and she too, has experienced great loss. Yes, she and Louis-Dreyfus, who has been outspoken in her support of Democratic candidates, are political opposites. And hopefully she does not subject her family to Polly’s emotional terrorism. But they share an interest in justice, in righteousness.
“That doesn’t mean she’s going to be a hero, necessarily,” Louis-Dreyfus said, smiling. That smile was a little greedy. “Or a nice lady. We don’t play nice ladies here.”
Last month, Louis-Dreyfus flew to New York to begin rehearsals. In a phone call after the first week, she described the experience as “thrilling and arduous and deeply fun and deeply exhausting.”
Was it as frightening as she’d feared? Yes, though she tried not to let herself think about it. Was it glorious? Also yes. Each day had felt like sitting for a multi-hour examination, and yet she couldn’t wait to go back. “It’s exalted,” she said of the process of making theater. She sounded hungry for more.
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