The versatile and talented Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been responsible for some of the funniest television most of us have seen in our lifetimes. You can watch her incredible work as Elanie on Seinfeld if you have a Netflix subscription. She continued to dominate the comedic airwaves in the HBO series Veep, but also shows off her range by stretching into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where she has played the mysterious Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in a handful of recent features. But it will always be her comedic work that resonates with me, which is why this one scene from Louis-Dreyfus’s new movie You Hurt My Feelings will end up being the funniest scene I’ll see in a movie this year.
You Hurt My Feelings played at this year’s Sundance film festival, where it gained attention of critics ahead of its May opening (the film is playing in limited release right now). In it, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays an author who is coming off a moderately successful memoir and is trying her hand at fiction. Only, she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) admitting to a friend that he doesn’t like the book, sending her into a spiral. It’s rich material that Louis-Dreyfus explores with writer-director Nicole Holofcener, but one specific moment was improvised. And it was hysterical.
In the moment, Louis-Dreyfus and her on-screen sister (played by Michaela Watkins) are visiting their mother, who’s the quietly judgmental type. They don’t really want to be there, and the mom is kind of fed up with their attitudes. But in one beat, Louis-Dreyfus picks up a Playbill for the Broadway version of Beetlejuice, which was lying on the counter. And none of it was planned. In a recent interview, Watkins told us:
That’s not in the script. Julia sees it sitting there as a prop, and she says to Nicole, ‘Is this cleared? Can I do something with this?’ And (the mom) is like, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ And she goes, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see what happens!’ The number one rule of improv is ‘Yes, and…’ My favorite thing is (the mom) just goes, ‘What? I don’t know. I don’t know what that is! I’ve never seen it before!’ Which then begs the question, ‘How did this Playbill get here?’ (laughs) And then the whole scene becomes about ‘Is our mother losing it? Did she not see the show?’
Kudos to Julia Louis-Dreyfus for recognizing the potential in something as basic as a Playbill or a show that her mother likely wouldn’t attend. When we brought the moment up to the Seinfeld alum, she elaborated:
We were trying to come in to our mom’s apartment the way you would if it was your mom’s apartment. Where you start going through things, eating things off the counter. There’s a familiarity with the place, so that all of a sudden, if there’s a Playbill there … we were playing around with the familiarity between the characters, and the dynamics of family. And we did that, not only there, but also when we were seated around the table. And it was just gobs of fun.
Movies like You Hurt My Feelings make me wish Julia Louis-Dreyfus only did indie comedies, though we know that the pay is much better when she’s part of Marvel’s The Thunderbolts, even though that film has been delayed by the writer’s strike. Still, keep your eye on the list of upcoming 2023 movies to find gems such as You Hurt My Feelings, tucked into theaters between the blockbusters.
