NEW YORK — Julia Louis-Dreyfus still had tears to shed as she said her official farewell to “Veep.” The only problem is she forgot to bring tissues.
Shooting wrapped for the series in December, but those tearful goodbyes were not enough as she and the cast of the HBO comedy series walked the red carpet for the last time Tuesday.
“No. I suspect there will be more tears this evening. Oh, god. I hope not too many. I didn’t bring any Kleenex,” Louis-Dreyfus said.
The multiple Emmy Award-winner, who plays politician Selina Meyer, shared what fans can expect from her character in the political comedy’s seventh and last season.
“Selina Meyer is going to try to make a run for the presidency, yet again. She’s been veep. She’s been the president. She wants to be the president again. But it’s extreme this season. We definitely push the edge of the envelope, and it’s going to get pretty raucous,” Louis-Dreyfus said.
The final season of “Veep” premieres Sunday night on HBO.
After the show’s sixth season, Louis-Dreyfus announced that she had breast cancer. After a successful round of chemotherapy, she returned to the show.
“It was an absolute godsend to come back to the show, and to be able to focus on making really funny stuff with my dear dearest friends. It was all joy, all the time,” Louis-Dreyfus said.
Showrunner David Mandel called Louis-Dreyfus a fighter, so he had a strong feeling she would return. But it wasn’t until the first day of shooting that he realized everything was back to normal.
“There was that magical moment on our first day on the set. She sort of took a moment and said a couple of things to the cast and crew and we kind of dug into the scene, and the first curse word kind of came flying out of her mouth, and it was like, ‘We’re back!”‘ Madel said.
When the series premiered in 2012, the political landscape was far tamer than it is today, and while the funniest moments centred around true accounts, the storylines were usually not stranger than the reality.
Actors Matt Walsh and Timothy Simons joked about what an episode of “Veep” would be like if something like special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was about to be released.
“Can I describe an episode, what that would be like? Selina would try to burn it,” Walsh said. “She’d probably disappear and get a facelift to create a distraction.”
Simons felt the writers and actors would get a lot of mileage out of the Mueller report.
“I feel that we would probably get a full episode of just people sprinting across Washington to prevent its release, like I feel is going on right now,” he said.