I was constantly performing even is a like a really little girl.

I was jumping around and doing dances and all sorts of things for my mom.

There was a moment when I was in third or fourth grade, and I was in some school play and I was playing a queen, and I was supposed to faint.

It was like a dramatic scene.

I fainted and everybody left, and they weren't supposed to laugh.

But I didn't mind that they were laughing.

I remember think that's kind of cool.

So that was sort of an all ha moment.

Hi, I'm Julia Louis Dreyfus, and this is my vanity fair career timeline.

Whatever that means.

Where's my best zit?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Hi, little Kenny.

I was thinking I don't have to go tonight, but I'm willing to go to the problem looking like this if you're willing to go with me.

Hey, Saturday Night Live.

I was going to school at Northwestern University and I was doing a show in downtown Chicago with the Practical Theatre Company between my junior and senior year of college and unbeknownst to me were the producers of SNL in the audience, and after that particular show ended, they came backstage and they offered all of us a job on Saturday Night Live.

So we're like, Yeah, good.

So that was it.

I flew the coop.

The first sketch that I was ever in on SNL was a sketch, actually with Chevy Chase as the shark, but he was doing it remotely.

And so it's sort of like a like a television screen inside the mouth of a shark, and it was one of the candygram kind of thing I was.

It was completely surreal.

I came to SNL at the age of 21.

I was unbelievably naive.

I had really done very little professional theater on Lee Second City, Impractical Theater in Chicago.

I had no idea about this business of show.

It was a very male dominated, male centric environment there, in addition to the fact that everybody was completely high on any drug that they could get their hands on.

And I had no idea.

I learned quick.

It was not exactly what I thought it was gonna be.

Larry, David and I were both at SNL together and he was there my third year.

We were both miserable together, and we bonded over our misery, and we've been miserable ever since.

I came back to host, I think, in 2006 and I was really quite happy to do it.

I mean, it was an interesting experience because I had been there, sort of like It's like going back to high school and being a able to relive certain moments that spin around in your head.

So I knew how the show works.

I knew how to navigate it.

It wasn't unknown to me.

It wasn't.

It was really, really fun.

And furthermore, when I went back, it was being produced by Lauren Michaels on It was very female friendly.

Tina and Amy and Kristen and Maya.

They're old, They're so I had an absolute ball.

My big takeaway from being on SNL was that I was only going to do jobs that were pure fun.

From there on out, a simplistic isn't sounds.

That's not something that so he's so easily attained.

But that was my goal, and I have for the most part, all right, cause dances get it started.

Wow!

Became involved with the Seinfeld Chronicles, as it was called.

Early on, they had made a pilot.

I was not in the pilot.

And then it came to my attention that NBC had picked up this show, The Seinfeld Chronicles, for four episodes.

Larry David was riding it.

Would I be interested?

So I read a couple of the episodes and I thought, Oh, wow, this doesn't sound like anything on television.

It definitely had a different voice, a different rhythm than any sitcom at that period of time.

So I went in, I met with Yair and we got along really well.

And, of course, Larry was an old friend of mine.

And so I signed up to do it.

I remember thinking back when we first started doing the show for those 1st 4 episodes, and I remember thinking this show is so good and the network is gonna be so stupid to cancel it, because I figure they would let it go.

You know, a four order four episode order is hardly a seal of approval from the network.

It felt like they were just burning off a commitment.

I just figured we were goners, but we weren't.

I had lots of thoughts about Elaine, and she was one of four characters, and it was very important to me that she was not just the girl and she wasn't written as the girl.

And so I sort of took that and ran with it.

She was, I don't know.

This is probably not quite right to say that she was one of the guys, except she was a girl.

The Elaine dances from this episode called The Little Kicks, and it was just written that lane dance really badly.

And so the night before the table read, I have the script and frankly, I just stood in front of a mirror and tried to do movements that looked incredibly bad.

And I I had a few of them.

And I remember my mom was staying with with us at the time, and I came downstairs and I sort of auditioned these different different movements for my mom and my husband, and they all voted on the one that that that I did.

So there you go.

People approach me about the dance all the time.

I say, Oh, thank you so much.

No, I'm not going to do it.

I don't have a favorite episode.

I have many episodes that I loved, You know, We did that show for nine years and and it evolved so much over the tongue over that period of time.

So I mean, you know, early on, the episode, the deal, I love the soup Nazi.

I of course I love the little kicks.

I loved the mango episode.

I mean, it goes a Puerto Rican Day parade.

I have a 1,000,000 shows that I'm actually a fan of the show, so I like a lot of the episodes.

Jerry and I are really good friends and still are to this day and just to, you know, sort of harken back to what I learned in SNL.

We were having a really good time on that show all the time.

If it made us laugh, it made it into the show.

So that was true rehearsal.

It was true of the writing process.

It was true of improvising, and we were just trying to make each other laugh.

And that was a really good shall we say equation for a kind of excellence.

I learned so much that I I learned about comedy other and more about timing.

It was just more training in performing and more training in frankly, even producing.

I didn't produce Seinfeld, but I watched so I learned a lot that I took with me moving forward.

What do we do?

Uh oh, don't tell me.

I know it.

I know it.

What way?

Realize a bug's life.

My friends at Pixar invited me to come in and they wanted me to.

They wanted to hear my voice.

I want to say it was for a different character if I'm remembering this correctly and we were just sort of playing around and then all of a sudden they asked me to read these lines of added an, and the next thing I know, they were asked me to do one of the lead voices, which I was delighted to.

Dio, I haven't really ever done voiceover work before.

I hesitate to think what it sounds like.

I don't know if it was good or not, because it was all new to me, but it was certainly a great deal of fun.

It's entirely different being on camera.

Well, for starters, you can come in your sweat pants you have to wear any makeup, but you have no other tool but your voice.

So your voice has to inform everything, which is a very different way of performing than any other kind of performing.

It has to tell the full story your voice.

So it means you have to sort of explore things vocally that you might not do otherwise.

What I love most about Princess Atta was that she was strong.

She was aggressive.

She was a fighter.

She wasn't just looking for Prince, which I liked clear the guy came.

I got an estimate and it's gonna cost 500 bucks to fix that table.

The ring I Yes, you did.

Come on, man.

Yes, you did.

Please don't play this game with me.

I would tell you if I left it.

I respect wood.

I revere wood.

I'm considerate of wood.

I got involved with Kerr because Lair just called and said, Would you do it?

And I said, Yeah, sure.

I did a number of episodes as myself.

And then later we sort of did this kind of our version of a Seinfeld reunion within the the structure of curb.

That was crazy fund because we all got back together again.

They rebuilt the set and sort of Jerry rigged it.

Thio, Terry Rig.

That's funny.

It was sort of a modern version of the Seinfeld apartment, and that was fun.

It was really a great time for all of us and, you know, to be able to play Elaine and then also to play me working on playing Elaine.

That was kind of bizarre and kind of meta but cool.

It's kind of like what I'm doing right now.

Talk to the camera.

This is a version of myself, but it's not the real me.

One of my most favorite memories of that time during Curb was Bob Einstein played the character of Marty Funkhouser, and I remember that you came on to set and he told the most foul joke, and it was so hilarious, and it got, by the way, completely folded into the show.

I think it's a cut.

I was doubled over laughing.

It was so inappropriate and wonderful.

I encourage all of you going crime.

Find that and see how offended you might become way.

Have Your Honor.

Yes, Maggie was the most feared prosecutor in all of Orange County and therefore I would like to bring your attention to exhibit.

Mitch Hurwitz reached out to me.

He said he was writing this character named Maggie Leiser, who was pretending that she was blind.

So already it was like, Oh, that sounds super interesting.

And I was a fan of the show, so I said, Great, I'll do it.

So I went and did a number of episodes.

I had a ball.

It was harder to do than you might think, because I did it with my eyes crossed the whole time.

And believe it or not, when you're not actually looking at someone and talking to them in this scene because you can't really see because you're eyes across it makes it much harder.

Toe learn lines at least did for me.

But maybe I'm just not that intelligent, and that's a possibility.

But Superfund years later, when I was doing deep and people came up to me into Tony hounds and oh, you guys were both arrested together, did you have seen together?

And both Tony and I said, No, we did, and we never got a chance to work together.

Well, guess what?

We did work together and we have both forgotten it.

Somebody showed us a picture.

We had a scene together.

Neither of us remembered it.

So you can see we needed extraordinarily positive impression on one another.

I'm done here.

Are you okay?

What happened to you, Theo?

Guy I picked up at the wedding was an immigration officer trying to ship me back to the Bahamas.

Oh, that's horrible.

I had a bad time to Christine.

Script was sent to me by Warner Brothers, and I liked it very much.

I met with Carrie Leiser, who wrote and created the show.

She and I got along right away and, uh, yeah, and so off we went to to make this Siri's for five years.

And with lots of wonderful actors on the show, including one to Sykes and Clark, Gregg and Hamish Linklater.

And the show itself was run by a bunch of women, which was very refreshing.

Huge number of female writers and a lot of female producers myself included, and a lot of working mothers.

I will point that out too.

So we got done with work.

Always early.

Everybody got home in time to be dinner, carpool, work on homework.

You know, whatever it was, I like the dysfunction of old Christine.

I'd like to dysfunction of the family relationship and, uh, the premise of her ex husband going out with a woman with the same name who was younger and living with her brother.

It just saw felt kind of messy and people trying to do the right thing.

But screwing up constantly, the idea of a mother who was constantly screwing up was appealing to me.

I want a kiss.

Yeah, I became involved with Enough said, because I met with Nicole Hall of Center.

I had read the script, loved it.

I met with her.

We talked.

We gnashed really well.

And then she offered me this part.

And so I was sort of where I was the first person cast in the movie.

We got along really well.

I realized I haven't talked in a while and you talk to her because she's a confession of mine.

But I love that woman and then Jim down.

Jim Gandolfini wanted to do the movie, and there we go off.

We went to this this heartbreaking film, which I think it is, actually, and Jim was utterly charming, surprisingly lacked a lot of confidence, which was was very surprising to me.