Julia Louis-Dreyfus Recalls Asking 'Seinfeld' Creators for More Screen Time

Julia Louis-Dreyfus became an iconic comedic actress through her role as Elaine Benes in Seinfeld. Elaine was a rare character who was treated just like one of the guys, revolutionizing how women were written into male-centered comedies. However, the writers initially didn't want to give Elaine as much screen time as Jerry and George.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Louis-Dreyfus was asked about entering the show as the only main female character.

The Veep star responded, "I never really approached it from the perspective of my gender, per se. I wanted to just play ball with everybody. I'm not going to lie, in the beginning, I didn't always have a lot to do in certain episodes. And I would go to Larry [David] and Jerry [Seinfeld] multiple times and say, 'Hey, you guys, write me more, need to be in this show more.' That's what I just kept doing. And they did."

The actress clarified that the writers weren't focused on gender but rather on adding another character to the mix. "They didn't write for me as a woman. They just wrote for me, for this character, as opposed to this gender, which I think is instructive in a lot of ways from a writing point of view," she said.

Louis-Dreyfus also candidly spoke about her Saturday Night Live beginnings pre-Seinfeld. She was cast in SNL in 1982 at 21 years old and left the show in 1985, four years before Seinfeld premiered. The actress recalled that during her stint on SNL, it was difficult to deal with harsh criticism from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Thom Shales, who worked at the Washington Post at the time.

"He said some nasty stuff about me. And my parents lived in that town. So that did hurt my feelings. But he subsequently came around. He has said some nice things since then," she said. When asked if she would do anything differently on SNL looking back, Louis-Dreyfus admitted there is a lot she would change. However, she also acknowledged that it was a toxic environment for her.

"I was very young and inexperienced, so I have to take some ownership here. I didn’t go into that gig with a big bag of characters and accents and stuff that I could sort of pull out. I had this somewhat foolish idea that people would write for me because I was in the cast, but it didn't quite work like that," she explained. "So I came into it very green. It was an incredibly misogynistic, drug-addled atmosphere. And it was really hard for me to navigate."

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