![]() ![]() “I’m so glad that he liked ‘Veep,’ ” she managed, “because his opinion was the one that really mattered.”Ī year later, on the Friday before the 2017 Emmys, Louis-Dreyfus went to see a radiologist about a lump she had noticed in her breast. She won the award, and during her acceptance speech her voice cracked as she dedicated it to his memory. In the fall of 2016, on the Friday before the Emmys, Louis-Dreyfus’s father died. “I had a rough couple of years, actually.” That’s what it felt like: I was just holding on tight.” Then she rolled her eyes and said, “I’ve had a really rough year, blah, blah, blah-you know, we’re getting through it.” She thought about it for a second. “I felt like I had really tight reins on myself. “You know if you get on a horse and you have really tight reins and the horse is galloping?” she said. “ ‘My point is that laughter is a basic human need along with’-oh, fuck!” she said, crying harder but also sort of laughing, “ ‘along with love, and an HBO subscription.’ That would have worked better if I weren’t weeping.”Īfter the shoot that day, Louis-Dreyfus described her recent state of mind. Of course, I was heavily medicated and slipping in and out of consciousness, so I was a pretty easy audience.’ ” She wiped her eyes. She shook her head in self-rebuke, then continued, “ ‘We really did have some great laughs. “ ‘The old cliché about laughter being the best medicine turns out to be true: when I was getting my hideous chemotherapy, I’d cram a bunch of friends and family into the tiny treatment room with me . . .’ Gosh, as I’m saying this I’m going to cry,” she said, and started to. In the section of thank-yous, the speech turned fractionally more serious, and Louis-Dreyfus wound her way toward her health. “ ‘Then I reread the e-mail and I realized-it’s me! They’re giving it to me! And I get the prize! And my attitude about the whole thing changed, it really did.’ ” I have to go all the way to Washington, D.C.-which, no offense, is a nightmare-and get a dress and all that crap, and make up flowery things to say about how funny someone else is? No effing way.’ ” The writers tittered. “ ‘When Mark Twain first e-mailed me about the prize, I totally misunderstood: I assumed that I was being asked to honor somebody else, and I thought, Oh, my God, what a hassle. “O.K., should we hear this thing and see how bad it is?” she asked, and began to read. Asked how it was, she replied, “Punitive.”) She leafed through a printout of the speech. (Mountains of dumplings from Din Tai Fung for the writers, and a spinach salad for Louis-Dreyfus, which her assistant handed her in a Tupperware. Later that day, she sat with the showrunner of “Veep,” David Mandel, in a small conference room in the Hilton, surrounded by a dozen writers and assistants, who were helping Louis-Dreyfus fine-tune her speech over lunch. She’d decided to address her illness and recovery at the Twain prize, but, as she put it, “I don’t want it to be ‘The Cancer Show at the Kennedy Center.’ ” These days, it is also “blasted by chemotherapy and still growing out,” after six rounds of treatment that Louis-Dreyfus underwent last year for breast cancer. Her real hair is explosively curly, when it hasn’t been coaxed into sleekness for an event. When the makeup was finished, a stylist ran a curling iron through Louis-Dreyfus’s shiny brown bob, one of several wigs she’s worn while making “Veep,” in order to minimize her preparation time. She was sitting in a white bathrobe, having her makeup done, in a room at the Glendale Hilton, where she was shooting an episode of her HBO series, “ Veep.” Louis-Dreyfus has nine Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, and she shares with Cloris Leachman the record for the most Emmys accumulated by an actor: one for playing Elaine Benes, on “Seinfeld,” the role that made her a star one for her performance in “ The New Adventures of Old Christine” and six for playing Selina Meyer, on “Veep.” But the Twain prize felt different. “It’s, like, ‘If you’re so fucking funny, get up onstage and prove it!’ ” she said one morning in Los Angeles. In a few weeks, she would be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a televised ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and she was anxious about her speech. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was not feeling relaxed.
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