Julia Louis-Dreyfus said her father’s disapproval during her first season of “Saturday Night Live” still stings decades later.
Louis-Dreyfus was a 21-year-old freshman at Northwestern University when he made his show business debut in 1982. He had no live television experience.
Hoping for her father’s encouragement following his sketch appearance on the hit series, financier Gerard Louis-Dreyfus delivered anything but, his daughter told Variety. (He declined to reveal the specific performance.)
“I remember him saying something really negative to me. He didn’t do well and he wasn’t nice. His complaint was that I was too big, too loose. I was devastated by it,” she said in an interview published Tuesday.
He wasn’t going to validate his assessment, true or not.
“He was so narcissistic, I didn’t even think about it,” she said with a laugh. “And I say that with love in my heart.”
Mike Pont via Getty Images
His father died in 2016. Louis-Dreyfus enjoyed comedy despite the snobbery.
Dreyfus left “SNL” in 1985 and established career-defining roles as Elaine Benes on “Seinfeld” (1989-1998) and Selina Meyer on “Veep” (2012-2019).
She also recently appeared in the hit movie ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’.
In the Variety article, she also discussed her experience with breast cancer after being diagnosed in 2017. She is in remission.
“No one has ever been happier to get back to work,” he said. “It confirmed to me the fundamental importance of my friendship with the people I work with and of course the love of my family and friends. It distilled what was most important to me in my life.
