![]() ![]() And at the centre of it all is Louis-Dreyfus, swearing her head off. (She's certainly not a little girl any more, not with that mouth: "Maybe I'll name my kid after you – yeah, I'll call it Fuckweasel.") Tony Hale, the idiot's idiot from Arrested Development, is Meyer's personal assistant, while Matt Walsh plays Mike McClintock, her balding, mostly useless communications director, who dodges the scorn of everyone around him, from lanky White House liaison Jonah Ryan ( Timothy Simons: "Matt, blink if you can understand me!") to Meyer's witheringly sardonic appointments secretary, Sue Wilson (Sufe Bradshaw). Selina Meyer's beady-eyed chief of staff Amy Brookheimer is played by Anna Chlumsky, who in another life was My Girl, opposite the pubescent Macaulay Culkin, and who appeared in In The Loop. Iannucci and his team put together a tightly disciplined cast of energetic improvisers to portray the back-stabbing, internecine world of US politics. And it didn't hurt that I spent part of my childhood and teenage years in Washington DC." Things that keep you awake at night? "Exactly, but also all the behavioural stuff – ridiculous political behaviour I've noticed. He talked about his ideas and I talked about my impressions of politics and the system, things that I've observed as an actress and a citizen." It was only the baldest concept at that point, and the pilot hadn't yet been written. "I wasn't familiar with The Thick Of It," she says, "but when they told me he did In The Loop, I thought, fabulous. ![]() When Louis-Dreyfus first met Iannucci, he was a relatively unknown figure in the US. A second season of Veep has already been commissioned. Filmed in the style of his acclaimed British political comedy The Thick Of It (an American version of which failed to make it past the pilot stage) and its spin-off movie In The Loop, Veep seems also to have done away with any lingering suggestion that Louis-Dreyfus's career was suffering from the famous Seinfeld curse, which saw its central characters struggle to recreate the success they enjoyed on the hit comedy. The comedy, in which she stars as gaffe-prone vice-president Selina Meyer, has been seen as a personal triumph for Louis-Dreyfus, as well as a stateside vindication for the comic method of its creator, Armando Iannucci. The debut season of Veep, the American political satire which has just ended in the US and is about to appear in the UK, has been rapturously received. Louis-Dreyfus, 51, has reason to be cheerful. Neatly dressed in a blue tunic, white shirt and dark trousers, with good hair and in an affable mood, she looks like what she actually is when the cameras are off: a suburban mother who might have just dropped the kids at school. Poached eggs, toast and jam are cheerfully ordered without recourse to a menu, and we're away. ![]() Julia Louis-Dreyfus walks unnoticed up a quiet street in the posh Pacific Palisades neighbourhood where she lives, spots me at a table outside a French restaurant, gives that huge wide smile and a little waggle-fingered wave, and grabs a seat. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |