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Apparently even the show about nothing could stir up a little bit of something, in the way of behind-the-scenes drama. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus revealed in an interview with the Daily Beast on Tuesday that she approached Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld early in the show's run many times because she wasn't happy with her level of involvement in storylines.
In Louis-Dreyfus' words, “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 and Jerry multiple times and say, ‘Hey, you guys, write me more, I need to be in this show more.' That’s what I just kept doing. And they did.”
Elaine was famously added to the series in the second episode of Seinfeld, after the network determined that the pilot was suffering from the lack of a female viewpoint. Louis-Dreyfus spoke to this as well, striking a more complimentary note: “They [Larry and Jerry] 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.”
Louis-Dreyfus also didn't hold back about her thoughts on the controversial Seinfeld series finale. When asked what she herself thought of the ending, Louis-Dreyfus responded, “Well, I will say that just from a purely emotional point of view, it was really a delight to sit there in that courtroom and watch one guest actor after another parade through.”
However, she also admitted “I understood why people were disappointed. First of all, expectations were ridiculous. But I also understood, because we didn’t do too much in it. Once we had been arrested and in court, it was just us sitting there watching one person after another parade through.”
Seinfeld creator Larry David famously had the mantra on set “No hugging, no learning.” But it seems Julia Louis-Dreyfus actually learned quite a bit from her experience playing Elaine Benes. Yada yada yada, she's still master of her domain.
