Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, the mother of a terminally ill teenager, in Tuesday.Photo Credit: Kevin Baker/Courtesy of A24
There’s a Julia Louis-Dreyfus moment in Veep, episode 205, that’s a touchstone for me. Selina Meyer, the Vice-President of the U.S., has just been groped by the husband of the Finnish Prime Minister. Lighting a cigarette, Selina confers with her staff about how to react. Amy, her chief adviser, counsels her to say nothing: “Being fondled by a Finn would be all you’d be remembered for. You can’t build a statue on that.”
“Nobody can know about this,” Selina announces – especially her slippery strategist, Kent. “Because he’s going to use it against me. Because he’s a man.” She leans into Amy, enunciating every syllable. “Because this is a man’s world that we live in.” She inhales, and lets the cigarette dangle from her mouth. “Because,” she says, cigarette jouncing, “of the axis of dick.”
At 61, Louis-Dreyfus has been navigating that axis throughout her career: in the boys’ club that was 1980s Saturday Night Live. As practically the only woman on Seinfeld who wasn’t a girlfriend or mother. As the ex-wife of a plainly unremarkable man who still managed to land a younger model on The New Adventures of Old Christine. (Don’t yell at me; that’s how he was written.) As an ambitious politician whose powerlessness was ground into her again and again on Veep. (“Did the president call?” “No.”) She’s been our highly singular Everywoman, fighting the fight for the rest of us – and winning more Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards than any other performer.
In April, 2023, she launched her award-winning podcast, Wiser Than Me, in which she talks frankly to older women – many of whom have also battled the axis, including Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King. In her recent films Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, she’s edged away from the axis to explore questions of betrayal and forgiveness. (The Veep episode I mentioned was also directed by a woman, Becky Martin.) But in her latest film, Tuesday – written and directed by Daina O. Pusic, Croatian-born, London-based and making her feature directorial debut – Louis-Dreyfus comes fully into her own. (It opens Friday in select cinemas.)
Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is a teenager dying, painfully, of a terminal illness. (She’s based on a friend Pusic lost in her own teenagehood.) Her mother Zora (Louis-Dreyfus), overwhelmed by helplessness, tries to hide from it: She waits by the window for the caregiver to arrive; she pretends to go to work, then whiles away hours in coffee shops and parks. When Death arrives, in the form of a regal talking macaw (Arinze Kene, who acted in every scene, and then was drawn over by animators), Tuesday convinces him to wait until her mother gets home. Zora’s ferocious reaction sets off a chain of world-altering events, and her anger, grief, sheepishness and finally, heart-tearing love and acceptance, use every molecule of Louis-Dreyfus’s elastic talent.
“I was looking for something dramatic to sink my teeth into,” Louis-Dreyfus said in a video call last week. She speaks more thoughtfully, somberly, than most of her characters, and admits she’s prone to anxiety: “I have to do a lot of work to keep anxiousness at bay.” But now and then she hits a signature JL-D note. She didn’t just love the film Pan’s Labyrinth, for example – she LOVE-D it, giving that D its own syllable. She’s been married to the comedian and filmmaker Brad Hall since 1987, and they have two children.
“There sure was pain in playing Zora,” she continues. “But her hiding, her denial – I understood that completely. To me that made sense. Parenting is not all roses and chocolate, even under the best of circumstances. If you’re in a crisis, I can see how you might make decisions you’re shy about being honest about. It’s human. This is why I was so drawn to the script – it’s off the beaten path of storytelling.”
“I could ask Julia to do nuanced drama, deep tragedy and absurdist comedy, sometimes in the same scene, sometimes in the same moment,” Pusic said in a separate video call. “At such a high level. And it seemed effortless for her. It’s a rare thing for someone of her calibre to have the gumption, the adventurousness, to put herself in such an unfamiliar role, with a first-time director.”
In the film, Death can grow to the size of a building or shrink to snuggle in a tear duct, and eventually Zora can, too. When Death needed to be tiny, Kene would shoot on a separate set and appear on a monitor; for a scene where Zora accidentally expands to fill her living room – sitting hunched over, chin on knees, head pressed against the ceiling, a mixture of, panic, embarrassment and irritation on her face – Pusic built the set in a box and crammed her actress into it.
Throughout, Louis-Dreyfus was “such a rock for me,” Pusic says. “There were a lot of moments where I was finding it difficult, but she made sure to reassure me, to remind me of what we were creating and why. It wasn’t gratuitous, it was always honest and came at the right time. Including that living room scene. There she was, bent double, going, ‘You’re doing great.’ ”
Pusic hopes that filmgoers feel “lighter at the end, more connected to and forgiving of the people they love. Less burdened by their own flaws.” (What a gorgeous phrase.) Louis-Dreyfus agrees: “I’m more open now to having conversations about subjects that are hard, sad, painful. Conversations that can lighten the load we all carry, help people not to be isolated in their sadness. In our culture, we act like you have to ‘get past’ grief. But there’s great value in talking about it.”
Speaking of valuable conversations: In Wiser Than Me, Louis-Dreyfus speaks with her subjects over Zoom, but records only audio. “Once you do hair and makeup, you’re looking at and judging yourself, and the content of the conversation changes,” she says. Not being self-conscious “frees up these women, so we speak honestly with one another.”
What has she learned? “All of them talk about the freedom that aging has given them. Which, in our culture, is a new idea.” She exhales a wry “hah.” “They let go of a lot of crap. They’re much more comfortable in their own skin. Fascinating. They know who they are.”
For my last question, I ask if there’s anything Louis-Dreyfus wanted to discuss that I hadn’t mentioned. “I would like to say what a pleasure it was to tell this story with a female director,” she replies. “The more women in positions of leadership in the entertainment business will be better for the entertainment business.” Let’s build a statue to that.
Special to The Globe and Mail