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Julia Louis-Dreyfus spent much of her childhood in and around Washington, D.C. But when she returned last September to shoot HBO's new comedy "Veep," in which she plays Vice President Selina Meyer, decked out in a power bob and important-Washington-lady stockings, she got used to something new about the city: traveling by motorcade. She also noticed some curious overlaps between her life as a highly recognizable celebrity and the lives of highly recognizable politicians. Occasionally, for instance, a group of people on the street would see her emerging from the motorcade and react to her; she'd respond in character as Vice President Meyer, pantomiming the exaggerated greeting a famous actress might bestow upon fans. "It was worlds colliding in ways I hadn't anticipated," she says.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
By CARINA CHOCANO
Published: April 12, 2012
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Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York Times
This interplay between politics and show business has grown increasingly strange and tangled. There has been a profusion lately of celebrities portraying real-life female politicians, from Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live" to Julianne Moore's more sober (or, rather, sobering) treatment of Palin in "Game Change," to Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady." As for Louis-Dreyfus as Meyer, the pairing of her sex and her office might seem like yet another allusion to Palin. But Meyer is an entirely fictional, even chimerical, creation. The central joke of "Veep," in fact, is that Meyer, whose party affiliation is never revealed, is far from an ideologue; rather, she is a political animal struggling for survival in an alternately hostile and indifferent environment. Unlike Palin, who seemed to come out of nowhere, the very point of Meyer is that she's a consummate insider. She knows exactly how the Washington sausage is made. She knows because she is the sausage.
There's something about Selina that's also inescapably familiar. It has to do with her combination of intelligence and petulance, self-confidence and neuroticism, narcissism and charm. In many ways, Selina is the quintessential Julia Louise-Dreyfus character: a power-suited version of Elaine from "Seinfeld."
Louis-Dreyfus, however, turns out to be distinctly un-Elaine-like in person. Not only is she much more stylish than the characters she usually plays, but she's also considerably sunnier. And unlike her perennially single or prolifically divorced characters, she has been married to the same person for the past 25 years, the writer-producer Brad Hall (with whom she has two sons, Henry, 19, and Charlie, 14).
There is one way in which Louis-Dreyfus is like her new character: She curses like a sailor. "I'm a big swearer in my life," she says. She sees it as a way of keeping the private self separate from the public, and of releasing some of the tension that builds from being constantly on display. The proclivity comes in handy for "Veep," where characters' frustrations tend to culminate in soaring arias of profanity so ardent and genuine and unguarded that they can only be described as life-affirming. What better way to purge the phoniness from your system, Louis-Dreyfus says, "before you end up eating your own arm off, you know?"
Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. "The West Wing" gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the '00s, "24" offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.
"Veep," by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If "The West Wing" was a fantasy of hyper-competence, "Veep" is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it's hilarious.
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Carina Chocano is a writer in Los Angeles. She last wrote for the magazine about '' Downton Abbey .''
EDITOR: Adam Sternbergh
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