Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Feeling Choosy

Thanks to the fame and fortune Seinfeld gave her, Julia Louis-Dreyfus can afford to be selective as she eyes her movie options. And for her first post-_Seinfeld_ film, she's chosen to play... an ant.

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"C'mon, admit it," Julia Louis-Dreyfus implores. "I have a big head, right? It's too big for my body--you were probably thinking that yourself, weren't you?"

Trust me, I wasn't. But now that she mentions it, her head is a little big. But beautiful, what with that cascading hair and those great teeth and that killer smile.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has brought up this big head business to illustrate why she is the perfect actress to play an ant in the new computer-animated film, A Bug's Life, which is being done by the people who made Toy Story.

"My father always said that everybody has an animal that they look like," continues Louis-Dreyfus, sitting in the back of an L.A. restaurant sipping iced tea. "You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out everybody's animal. I think that mine is an ant. You can see it, right? My head is flat and wide and I wouldn't look that strange with little antennae sticking up." She sticks her two index fingers above her head and wiggles them seductively.

I'm tempted to tell her that this sounds like the beginning of a Seinfeld episode, but I only saw Seinfeld a couple of times in its nine years, so beyond the fact that Louis-Dreyfus played the sarcastic, sometimes demented Elaine Benes, I don't know anything about what's made her famous.

"That's refreshing," Louis-Dreyfus says without any sarcasm when I explain this. "Because I've been playing this character for so long, people think they know me. But I'm not Elaine, really I'm not--although I'll probably go to my grave denying it. Elaine's single; I'm married. Elaine's neurotic; I'm, well, less neurotic. Elaine's a pain in the ass; I am never, ever a pain in the ass."

At this, Louis-Dreyfus lets loose with one of her laughs, and a woman who looks to be in her late 70s comes ambling over to us from another table. She holds two fingers up in the air as if she's smoking an imaginary cigarette. We both stare at her. She moves the two fingers to her mouth and blows Louis-Dreyfus a kiss. "I just want to say thank you for all the good times," she croaks out. "Hope to see you around." Then she turns around and walks away.

Louis-Dreyfus looks genuinely taken aback. "That was sweet, huh?" she asks, and actually dabs a napkin near her eyes as she takes a sip of tea.

"As long as we're talking about your head," I say, "can we talk about the blow job you gave Richard Benjamin in Deconstructing Harry?"

Louis-Dreyfus spits her tea back into her glass. The look on her face is one of pure shock.

"Well," I say in defense of myself, "it was truly one of the sickest, most offensive sex scenes I've ever seen. And believe me, I'm not easily offended. I'm not sure what was so vile about it--that you were having sex with your sister's husband, that the husband was Richard Benjamin, or that your blind grandmother walks in on it..."

"Are you asking me to figure it out?" Louis-Dreyfus asks incredulously.

"Nah, I figure it was just the combination of all three of those things. I just want to know how Woody Allen got you to do it."

"I get this call that Woody wants me to do this cameo in his next movie. And oh, that's exciting. But it's during my Seinfeld season, and so I don't think it's going to work. And then he figures out when my hiatus break is, and reschedules it to accommodate me, and would I please consider? Wow, it's a Woody Allen movie! I mean, how could I not do it? I remember that before I got the script I said to [my husband] Brad, 'Well, at least I won't have to hmmm-hmmm-hmmm.' If you know what I mean." Louis-Dreyfus's eyes arch so high that she can only be talking about sex, "And then I get the pages, and sure enough, I have to hmmm-hmmm-hmmm. I remember when I read the pages, I didn't believe what I was reading."

"I think the thing that was so shocking," I say, "is that Woody had always played such a schlub, a seducer of women on an intellectual level. But in Deconstructing Harry, he was really pissed off, and his anger was directed right at women. He didn't hold back."

"No, not at all," agrees Louis-Dreyfus. "And he played a bad man. My first reaction was, No, I'm not going to do it. I mean, how could I do this? A lot of what was on those pages didn't make it into the film, thank God. Because it was basically just dirty talk. I called and I talked to Woody, and I may have said something like, 'I've got to tell you, I read this and I wonder if you've gone nuts.' Now bear in mind that I did not have the rest of the script, and I didn't know how the story unfolded. But we talked about how part of the film was in reality and part wasn't, and that my character was in the unreality part. Woody told me there would be no nudity. And that if there were specific lines that I was uncomfortable with, I didn't have to say them. He was very reassuring with me on the phone, and I thought, OK, let's do it. And when I saw the movie, I felt very relieved."

"You did? I can't remember people having such a visceral, negative reaction to a sex scene in a long time ..."

"Oh, calm down," Louis-Dreyfus says, reminding me that we're only talking about movies here. "I mean that I felt relieved because it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I certainly made the decision to play it broad. This was not in any way, shape or form a realistic sex scene. It was bawdy, it was raunchy, it was vaudeville. It was easier for me to watch than if I'd played it straight. Actually, I liked it and felt good about it."

Comments like this make it easy to forget that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the daughter of an award-winning writer mother and a father who runs a billion-dollar financial firm. Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and by the time she was five, they had both remarried. She says she felt like she had two families, although she doesn't make light of what divorce does to kids. She met her future husband, writer/producer Brad Hall (_The Single Guy_), while at Northwestern University, and they've been together ever since. (They now have two young sons, Henry and Charles.) They were both tapped to costar on Saturday Night Live back in 1982. Louis-Dreyfus says that her three seasons there were pure hell, mostly because she didn't have a clue what she was doing. But that eventually led to a two-year stint on the sitcom Day by Day, which led to her role on Seinfeld, not to mention a fat contract with Clairol's Nice 'n Easy. Along the way, Louis-Dreyfus also made a series of forgettable movies. And she made Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, which wasn't forgettable, though her role was.

"If you blinked during Hannah, you would have missed me, because I was only there for a second. In the beginning of the movie, Woody Allen works on a comedy show and I'm his assistant. I was supposed to walk in front of him while he said his line. So I do it and he says, 'Wait a minute, stop, stop.' And I stop. Only that's Woody's line, not a direction to me. We kept having to do it over and over. I was dying."

"Let's talk about North," I say. Here we're talking forgettable. "I remember reading a piece where you talked about how excited you were by that film." Louis-Dreyfus gives a major shoulder shrug. "The best part was that Jason [Alexander, her costar on Seinfeld] and I were on that movie together. And that was fun because it was like going to camp with your best friend. No, camp isn't quite right. More like going to a new school with your best friend. And we worked with Jon Lovitz, who is just hilarious. So we had a wonderful time. I was just surprised that North didn't do better."

"You felt that after you finished shooting, or after you saw it?"

"After I made it," she admits reluctantly.

"But when you saw it, you had to admit that it sucked, right?"

Louis-Dreyfus draws up to her full five-foot-three height with indignation. "No, I don't have to admit that. But I will say it didn't hold together as well as I hoped. But the experience is still something I think of fondly."

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