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Don’t expect Julia Louis-Dreyfus to host a Saturday Night Live reunion any time soon. This weekend, during a discussion with Stephen Colbert at a Montclair Film benefit, the beloved actress opened up about her brief stint at SNL in the mid-1980s. According to NorthJersey.com, Louis-Dreyfus insisted that while she was there, the NBC comedy was “very sexist” and fueled by “crazy drugs,” two factors that quickly made her “miserable.” Added the Veep star, “It was a pretty brutal time.”
On Saturday night, Louis-Dreyfus sat down for an in-depth conversation with Colbert, a fellow Northwester University alum, at the annual Monclair Film Festival fundraiser to discuss her decades-long career. After honing her skills in a college improv group, the actress and comedian left Northwestern and joined SNL in 1982. According to NorthJersey.com, Louis-Dreyfus told Colbert that she was incredibly unprepared for the experience and felt out of place as a 21-year-old woman. “I was incredibly naive,” she said. “I didn’t understand how the dynamics of the place worked.”
“It was very, very sexist,” continued Louis-Dreyfus. “People were doing crazy drugs. I was oblivious; I just thought, ‘Oh, wow, he’s got a lot of energy.'”
Towards the end of her three-year tenure, Louis-Dreyfus met future Seinfeld creator Larry David, who joined SNL as a writer in 1984. The actress told Colbert that they immediately “bonded because he was as miserable as [she] was.” Added Louis-Dreyfus, “He would write these sketches and they would not see the light of day. I would go into his office and cry a lot.”
Despite the “miserable” experience, Louis-Dreyfus learned a valuable lesson from her time at SNL. “It was a pretty brutal time, but it was a very informative time for me. I learned that I wasn’t going to do any more of this showbiz crap unless it was fun,” she told Colbert. “It is important and so basic, but I just felt like, ‘I don’t have to; I don’t have to do this, 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 and I sort of applied that kind of ‘fun meter’ to every job I’ve had since,” she continued. “And it definitely has been very helpful.”
