Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls ‘SNL’ environment ‘very sexist’ during her time

PTI, Dec 9, 2019, 3:02 PM IST

Los Angeles: “Veep” star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has opened up about her time at “Saturday Night Live”, which she says was very sexist, brutal but informative.

Louis-Dreyfus says being miserable on the comedy show taught her to value the “fun-meter” of her subsequent jobs and that helped her a lot in navigating her showbiz career, reported Entertainment Weekly.

“I was unbelievably naive and I didn’t really understand how the dynamics of the place worked. It was very sexist, very sexist. People were doing crazy drugs at the time. I was oblivious. I just thought, Oh wow. He’s got a lot of energy’,” she told Stephen Colbert during a Q&A at the Montclair Film Festival held in Montclair, New Jersey.

Louis-Dreyfus joined the variety show in 1982, becoming SNL’s youngest female cast member at that time. She went on to share the stage with the likes of Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, and Billy Crystal.

“It was a pretty brutal time, but it was a very informative time for me,” she said.

“I learned I wasn’t going to do any more of this show-business crap unless it was fun. I don’t have to walk and crawl through this kind of nasty glass if it’s not ultimately going to be fulfilling, and so that’s how I sort of moved forward from that moment. I sort of applied that fun-meter’ to every job I’ve had since and that has been very helpful,” she added.

Interestingly, her time on SNL helped her land one of the most iconic comedy shows of all time.

A few years after she left the show, writer Larry David sent her a script for a show titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles”.

“Jerry’s laughing the whole time. I mean he can’t act at all and so he’s got a huge smile on his face when anyone is saying anything. And if I looked at him and saw him doing that, then I would [crack] up. Anyway, it took a long time to shoot those things because I was ruining all the takes. And so that was my favorite thing,” she recalled.