Julia Louis-Dreyfus is one of the most successful television performers of all time. That’s not a personal opinion—it’s a statistic. She holds not one but two records at the Emmys: the most wins by a single performer, at eight (which she shares with the late Cloris Leachman), and the most consecutive wins for a single role, with her insane six-year run as Veep’s Selina Meyer from 2012 to 2017. She has three additional wins under her belt as a producer from when Veep won Outstanding Comedy Series in 2015, 2016, and 2017, bringing her total count to a whopping 11 statues. She was so comfortable on that stage, in fact, that she even pulled off an entire, clearly rehearsed and very delightful in-character bit for her second Veep win in 2013, featuring cameos from her co-stars Tony Hale and Anna Chlumsky.
Even without all this hardware, Louis-Dreyfus’ television prowess is hard to deny. Selina and Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes are obvious hall of fame characters, both played with that pitch-perfect blend of irreverence and unearned hubris that has become the actor’s signature. But it’s not just those two standouts that have earned Louis-Dreyfus her legendary status. She also nabbed an Emmy for her performance in the 2006 sitcom The New Adventures Of Old Christine, not to mention memorable cameos and shorter arcs in shows like Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and 30 Rock.
This is all to say: Julia Louis-Dreyfus knows how to carry a project like few other actors working today. She knows how to win over audiences and create characters that latch themselves onto the cultural imagination for decades. She’s a star, plain and simple. So why are her movies so consistently terrible?
Louis-Dreyfus’ film catalog is rougher than you probably remember. Her first credit came in John Carl Buechler’s Troll, a very ‘80s monster flick in which she was only on screen for about five minutes and wasn’t given much to do other than play a cookie-cutter pretty woman, even though she had just come off her tenure on Saturday Night Live. The same year, she also played bit parts in Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters (not as one of the sisters) and a movie you’ve probably (hopefully!) never seen called Soul Man, which is about a rich white student who does blackface to secure a scholarship to Harvard. There’s a reason that one wasn’t on her Mark Twain Prize reel.
From there, she went on to play a small but mighty part in one of the only movies that has ever really understood her: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Alongside fellow SNL alum Chevy Chase, Louis-Dreyfus spiced up the goofy holiday romp as a perpetually disgusted yuppie neighbor, constantly put out by the goings-on next door.
Louis-Dreyfus has endured as one of the most memorable aspects of Christmas Vacation because she was finally given a fun role to play with in an equally fun movie. More importantly, her antics worked because, as in Veep and Seinfeld, the rest of the cast quite literally matched her freak—if not exceeded it. Future directors did not learn their lesson. She appeared in a few more films in the ‘90s, including Ivan Reitman’s much-derided Father’s Day and Rob Reiner’s even more derided North, before taking some time away from the big screen in the early aughts. (She did dabble in voice acting for Disney’s A Bug’s Life and Planes in the interim.)
Even though the success of Veep should have precluded her from being in any more poorly written films, Louis-Dreyfus’ 2020s output is, bafflingly, filled with the same sorts of stinkers. She started the decade with Downhill, a clunky, Will Ferrell-led Americanization of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure. For those who weren’t taken in by the viral clip from the original film that made the rounds back in the early days of the pandemic, both movies seek to dissect the intricacies of a failing relationship and the fragile male ego after a father instinctively abandons his family in the face of an oncoming avalanche that—for a moment—seems to mean instant death. But while the original film is known for its incisive and exacting treatment of this psychological parable, even Louis-Dreyfus’ valiant attempt to give the American version some much-needed gravitas couldn’t make up for the overly sentimental holes in its script.
Also in this decade was the unfortunate You People, which saw Louis-Dreyfus tap into Selina and Elaine’s particular narcissism to far less productive effect as an overbearing mother going to war with her son’s fiancé’s overbearing father (Eddie Murphy). You People is a study in clichés, best summed up by A.V. Club reviewer Luke Y. Thompson: “You People is a perfect movie for Netflix because it’s best watched for the first half hour and then turned off, which Netflix will count as a view anyway.”
And then, of course, there’s Tuesday, Louis-Dreyfus’ recent A24 film in which she stars alongside a giant CGI parrot who works as the Grim Reaper and jams to Ice Cube on the side. But while the actress does manage to tap into something different and somehow uglier than anything she’s ever done before here, don’t expect any sort of Adam Sandler-esque indie renaissance quite yet—at least not on this one’s back. Where Louis-Dreyfus’ earlier credits faltered in that they didn’t let her give enough of herself, Tuesday’s greatest sin—at least in regard to the current discussion—is that it didn’t obscure the JLD of it all enough.
In between some genuinely nauseating scenes where she does her best impression of Toni Collette’s character from Hereditary (to mixed success), the script also has her deliver some random japes about sexual harassment, cancel culture, and how much she doesn’t understand Gen Z. All of this would have been far more appropriate in a conversation with Selina’s beleaguered daughter from Veep than the terminally ill child from this film. The effect is a jarring disconnect between the story the film is trying to tell and the reality of watching it; at times, Tuesday feels more like a Louis-Dreyfus character doing a horror film as a very special side project than an esteemed actor fully committing to a part.
There’s only one director who’s ever truly gotten it right with JLD and that’s Nicole Holofcener, who featured Louis-Dreyfus in two of her films: 2013's Enough Said, where she starred opposite the late, great James Gandolfini, and 2023's You Hurt My Feelings, which saw her as an uptight author alongside Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, and Arian Moayed. In these two light-spirited, lovely films, Holofcener figured out the real trick to converting Louis-Dreyfus’ television talent to the silver screen: stop trying so hard to recreate it. Where the majority of Louis-Dreyfus’ TV characters are morally abhorrent people she’s uniquely able to infuse with a little bit of good, her Holofcener characters are generally good people she makes just a tiny bit obnoxious.
In Enough Said, Louis-Dreyfus’ character projects a lot of her own insecurities around weight and body image onto her increasingly fed-up daughter; in You Hurt My Feelings, she refuses to extend the same respect she so desperately craves onto her burnout son. But while both of these children will definitely need some therapy at some point in their lives, they’re probably the only two to ever have Louis-Dreyfus as an onscreen parent and not be immediately entered into the running for Worst Fictional Childhood Ever.
Louis-Dreyfus’ horrible television characters work because audiences are given hours and hours to adjust to their solipsistic worldview and still find the shreds of humanity buried deep within. Films don’t have that luxury. Holofcener instead uses the actor’s Emmy-winning snark as a delicate accent, elevating her deeply human protagonists with unexpected layers of nuance and interiority. Pair that with other legacy performers who can actually keep up and you finally have a formula for a Julia Louis-Dreyfus movie that actually works. Hopefully, Holofcener won’t be the last to discover it.