Julia Louis-Dreyfus and “Veep”
Return for Final Season
By BERNICE FOX
Special to Circling the News
Brace yourself.
The force — political and otherwise — that is Selina Meyer is about to return. “Veep” starts its seventh and final season March 31 on HBO, starring Palisadian and comic force Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Meyer.
Not quite two years will have passed since the end of season six in June 2017 and the delayed start of season seven. That, of course, is because Louis-Dreyfus was battling breast cancer.
In fall of 2017 — the day after winning her sixth acting Emmy for “Veep,” which is a record for playing the same character, Louis-Dreyfus announced she had breast cancer. January 2018 her two young adult sons posted a video to celebrate the end of chemotherapy treatments. They wildly lip-synched to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” giving two meanings to the song’s title: scram and destroy it.
Speaking via satellite from Austria where she’s filming a movie, Louis-Dreyfus told entertainment reporters who had gathered in Pasadena on Friday that “where our show ends up ultimately is a place I’m very happy about and I think it’ll surprise viewers, too.”
Because this final season of “Veep” only has seven episodes instead of the usual 10, she says “they’re crazy, jam-packed episodes. I think you’ll find that there’s more than 10 episodes worth of material jammed into them.”
She isn’t revealing much about the end of the series.
“I’m not going to say that Selina evolves except to say that she’s truer to herself, as true to herself as she can possibly be by the time this season ends. I’ll leave it for you to determine whether or not that’s a good thing. But I’m not sure that evolution is necessarily her game.”
Filming the final episode of “Veep” was an emotional stew for our star. Not for anything Selina may have been going through.
“I was so overcome with joy and grief, a joy and grief mash-up as this show ended and it really was very surprising to me and I mean I’m an emotional person anyway, but I will say that it really, caught me by surprise. And I think that’s because this show frankly has been my baby for now eight years that I’ve felt fiercely protective of and proud of.”
In so many words, Louis-Dreyfus says the cast and crew of “Veep” have become family.
“We’ve been through a lot as a group with illness and losing people and it’s been an enormous, huge journey but ultimately one that has been extremely powerful for us, just personally to be a part of something this gratifying on a creative level is, you know, it’s not lost on me that that is not something that comes along with frequency. “
So says the actress who had a nine-season run on one of the most popular TV comedies of all time, “Seinfeld,” proving lightning can strike more than once.