I hope we can all agree that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is really great and lovely and wonderful and all those good things, right? She was great on Seinfeld, she’s great on Veep and she was great on Saturday Night Live back in the ’80s… she just didn’t love that last one too much. Lots of women on the cast have felt similarly, but let’s just let Julia have her say, shall we?
From SiriusXM Town Hall:
“I did not adapt well,” she acknowledged. “I was pretty miserable. It was a very difficult time of my life.
“I went into that place green as green could be. I came out of a theatre background [and an] improv background that was very [much] ensemble and, ‘We’re doing this together! And we’re in it together!’ Which is great, but that’s not necessarily the culture at SNL when I was there at all.
“It was very dog eat dog. I didn’t have a bag of characters that I could start pulling from. I didn’t have a writer that wrote for me. I wasn’t a stand-up. I was just this actress hoping to get material that I could then make funnier. I didn’t know how to work the system at all. Plus, there were a lot of drugs and I didn’t realize everyone was on drugs… I was a little bit naive.”
Yeah, that sounds pretty shitty – though obviously it wasn’t all bad since that’s where she met Larry David, who was writing on the show at the time. SNL still has a bit of a lady problem (but an even bigger black person problem), but that’s nothing new. That’s showbiz, I guess.
She still got to do more than Larry David. They only used one of the sketches he wrote the whole year he was there.
Well, I guess she can take solace in the fact that she’s still worth $3 BILLION.