April 20--"Veep" star Julia Louis-Dreyfus said it was "mind-blowing, just (expletive) unbelievable" being discovered by a "Saturday Night Live" producer as a Northwestern University student.
Louis-Dreyfus, 55, landed a role in Northwestern's longtime Mee-Ow sketch/improv show as a freshman and joined the Practical Theatre Company, a Chicago comedy troupe co-founded by her now-husband Brad Hall. An "SNL" producer saw the group perform and immediately offered them jobs.
She joined the NBC show in 1982, after her junior year, and her inexperience quickly showed.
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"Here we were coming in as these stupid (expletive) new kids who had not a clue doing our goofy Chicago sketch comedy in front of a bunch of kiss-off, more experienced, bitter people," Louis-Dreyfus told The Hollywood Reporter in an article posted online Wednesday. "And so we go to that Wednesday table read, and it really did not go over well. ... There was no noise coming from anybody. It was (expletive) bad."
Louis-Dreyfus spent three years working on "SNL." She recalled the culture there as "not friendly, very dog-eat-dog."
"It was this very chauvinistic situation back then: very few women, lots of sexism, issues of sexual harassment and some really big-time drugs," she said. "Of course, I was so oblivious. I just thought, 'That's so weird that that guy's sketch is 17 pages long and at the table read he's howling laughing.'"
During her time with the show, Louis-Dreyfus met "SNL" writer Larry David, which turned into a role on "Seinfeld." She went on to play the lead on the CBS sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine" and the HBO political comedy "Veep," which returns for its fifth season Sunday.
She returned to the "SNL" stage Saturday when she took her third turn as show host. She reprised her "Seinfeld" character Elaine Benes for an election sketch and starred in a memorable ad for heroin.
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