“It’s hard to do anything really well, and it takes a lot of work,” the Emmy winner said of working on the groundbreaking sitcom
Credit: Andrew Eccles/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus admitted there was “tons” of tension on the Seinfeld set during the Tuesday, Sept. 1 episode of Friends Keep Secrets
- “It takes a lot of work, and you’re going to butt heads,” she confessed
- Louis-Dreyfus also noted how the show and its creators still allowed for a lot of freedom on set
Julia Louis-Dreyfus admits the Seinfeld set could get tense.
The 11-time Emmy winner appeared on the Tuesday, Sept. 1 episode of Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco‘s show, Friends Keep Secrets, where she opened up about working on the groundbreaking NBC sitcom, revealing how the Seinfeld set wasn’t immune.
Batalucco, 36, asked the Seinfeld star, 65, if there was “ever any friction” on the set, and Louis-Dreyfus immediately replied, “Of course. Yes. Tons.”
“Oh, really?” Batalucco asked.
“Yeah,” Louis-Dreyfus explained. “I mean, it’s hard to do anything really well, and it takes a lot of work, and you’re going to butt heads.”
Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
She added that despite any creative tension, the energy on set was generally collaborative.
“I mean, sometimes there was an argument,” she confessed about the dynamic of proposing ideas to series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.
Earlier in the interview, she also explained how the making of the show allowed for a lot of “freedom” on set, describing her experience of working with the Seinfeld cast as “just being friends together and just hanging out.”
“That sounds as if it was just hanging out. It was a lot of work to make the show,” she clarified. “But what I mean was we were all, like, kids. And we had our own idea and [the writers] had their own idea of exactly what they wanted to do, which was not the norm at the time in terms of structured television. So I think there was an air of freedom because of that. We had a lot of fun making it.”
As for whether or not she knew the show would be a hit, she says she knew at the time it was “really good.”
“Those first four [ordered episodes], I thought, ‘Wow, this is so unusual, and then I thought, ‘The network is too stupid. They’ll never pick it up,’ ” she recalled. “This was just sort of like odd specific; it’s not so odd now, maybe in retrospect.”
Credit: Friends Keep Secrets/Youtube
The Veep alum also reflected on the show’s longstanding success, saying that it became a bigger show after it ended in 1998.
Lil Dicky, whose real name is David Burd, noted that it was “the biggest show in America when it ended.”
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Louis-Dreyfus confessed that Seinfeld’s impact shocked her.
“I was so surprised at all that attention,” she said, adding that she’s still surprised by how it has endured. “Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?”
All nine seasons of Seinfeld are available to stream on Netflix.
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