With the holidays rapidly approaching, you’ll soon be hearing familiar platitudes like, “Season’s greetings,” “May your days be merry and bright,” and “God bless us, every one.” Here’s one more popular Christmas saying to toss on your yule log: “And why is the carpet all wet, Todd?”
So sayeth Margo Chester, one-half of the Grinch-like yuppie couple unlucky enough to live next door to Chevy Chase‘s mishap-prone Clark Griswold in the 1989 holiday movie staple National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. While Margo and her hapless husband Todd are small parts of that film, they’re played by actors who went on to have Rockefeller Center tree-sized careers. Voiceover icon Nicholas Guest — brother of Christopher Guest — played Todd, while Emmy royalty Julia Louis-Dreyfus expressed her distaste for wet carpets as Margo.
“That line does come up quite a lot,” Louis-Dreyfus confirms to Gold Derby. “But people usually start quoting it to me at Halloween, not Christmas.”
“That movie was a long goddamn time ago, but it’s had legs,” the star of beloved TV comedies like Veep, Seinfeld, and The New Adventures of Old Christine adds with a laugh. “People still enjoy it, which gives me enormous pleasure.”
Louis-Dreyfus has two new gifts for audiences this particular holiday season besides their annual Christmas Vacation rewatch. Her voice can soon be heard in movie theaters in the Oscar-contending animated film Tangles, which will have a limited release starting Nov. 27 and then return to screens for a wider rollout in January. The black-and-white Canadian-produced film is one of several international animated titles competing for a spot in the Best Animated Feature race, and Tangles is currently occupying the all-important fifth spot on several Gold Derby leaderboards.
Oh, and if you’re making like Kevin McCallister and visiting New York for Christmas, you can see the actress live on Broadway in a revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, provided you can score a hard-to-find ticket thanks to an A-list cast that also includes Ed Harris, Lily Rabe, Joe Keery, and Allison Janney. “I’m loving it to death — I couldn’t be having more fun,” Louis-Dreyfus says of her Broadway debut, which could offer her the opportunity to bring home a Tony statuette that can keep her multiple Emmys company.
You may not be able to see them in the flesh, but Tangles also boasts a star-powered vocal cast that includes Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, Pamela Adlon, Samira Wiley, and Seth Rogen, who also produced the film alongside his wife, Laura Miller Rogen, and Louis-Dreyfus. The movie is based on a 2010 graphic novel by illustrator Sarah Leavitt (voiced by Jacobson in the film), who chronicled her mother Midge’s decline and eventual death following a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Louis-Dreyfus voices Midge in the film, and her story is one that the actress has a personal connection to.
“I drew on my own familial experience with my grandmother, and my mother-in-law who just died recently from Alzheimer’s,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “We were taking care of her, so I knew firsthand what it’s like to be in the throes of that and the impact it has on both the person and the family at large. The grief almost feels never-ending, because you keep losing more and more of somebody.”
Louis-Dreyfus also had her own health battle to use as reference. in 2017, she publicly announced that she had been diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer, forcing a year-long postponement of Veep‘s seventh and final season. “I did have that sense of what it was like to be met by a health crisis, although mine was quite different,” she says. “But our experience with my mother-in-law is really what I drew on. A lot of people are grappling with this disease one way or another, and it can be very isolating. What I love about this film is that it punctures that balloon of isolation.”
Leavitt’s graphic novel reconstructs Midge’s final years as filtered through the author’s own notes and drawings from that time. But Louis-Dreyfus always viewed the character on the page as a complete person, and not an amalgamation of her daughter’s memories, and brought that into her portrayal. “She’s her own person who doesn’t exist inside someone else’s brain,” she observes. “What’s interesting is that she’s initially depicted as a very powerful woman and a good mom, and then you start to see all those things crumble away, which is very upsetting.
“The fact that this is a graphic novel that’s come to animated life makes the story even more meaningful,” Louis-Dreyfus continues, adding that she deliberately didn’t ask Leavitt for any video or audio footage of Midge. “You’re able to tell the story in such a way that you can get inside Sarah’s head and really experience this journey with her. And what was unusual about the recording process was that we did it in group settings; Abbi, Bryan, and I were often together, and that gives the movie more of a humanistic feel and tone. We talked over each other like people do in real life, and the film reaps the benefits of that.”
Asked about her favorite scenes to record with Jacobson, Louis-Dreyfus singles out two moments that speak to the movie’s deft blend of humor and pathos. “One scene features Sarah as a little girl, and Midge is helping her through getting scared at night; she’s there to protect, defend, and give courage to her daughter. I also love a fantasy sequence from later in the film where she imagines that Midge’s diagnosis is all a ruse by the CIA; that scene is particularly touching because we all fantasize about having things be otherwise, and you certainly do that when you’re grappling with this disease.”
Mother-daughter drama is also at the center of Other Desert Cities, where Louis-Dreyfus and Harris play Polly and Lyman Wyeth, two upper-crust Republicans enjoying their Palm Springs retirement. The duo’s adult children, author Brooke (Rabe) and TV producer Trip (Keery), are home for the holidays when Brooke drops a bomb on the clan — she’s written a tell-all memoir that exposes their dirty laundry, starting with the death of her elder brother years earlier.
That sets off a round of recriminations, and Polly makes it clear to her daughter that she doesn’t recognize the person she’s being portrayed as in the book. That only causes Brooke to dig her heels in, even though it pushes the family’s bonds to the breaking point.
“Polly’s a very different character than Midge,” Louis-Dreyfus notes. “And on the outside, I wouldn’t say she’s as sympathetic a character, although ultimately I think she is sympathetic and, of course, I play her with sympathy. But in the play, the idea of telling the truth is abhorrent to Polly, and I would think that the idea of telling the truth from Midge’s point of view is acceptable.”
Other Desert Cities builds to a climactic reveal that puts the cast through the emotional wringer. At the performance that Gold Derby attended, the audience grew hushed as the play approached its dramatic endgame, and Baitz’s climactic reveal inspired audible gasps as we collectively processed what it meant for Polly in particular. Working up to that moment each night — plus matinees — is a skill that Louis-Dreyfus developed during the rehearsal process.
“It’s hard work, and demands an enormous amount of concentration,” she says. “We worked really hard as a group on this in terms of our scene works and discussions about our characters — all of that is the backbone of the play.”
“And of course, there’s Jon’s words themselves,” Louis-Dreyfus adds. “The actual text of the play is informative to say the least. There’s no question that it’s a very demanding role, and I’m giving it my all — that’s for sure.”
