This Actress Still Has the Most Iconic Emmys Run of All Time – Armessa Movie News

Nominations for the 75th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced last Wednesday, and the nominees for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series are largely unsurprising, with repeat nominations for Christina Applegate, Rachel Brosnahan, Quinta Brunson, and Natasha Lynonne, along with a rather unexpected nomination for Jenna Ortega in Wednesday. The most recent repeat winner in the category was Jean Smart for Hacks in 2021 and 2022, but there was a time not too long ago when one actress dominated the category for the better part of a decade. Julia Louis-Dreyfus won the category six years running, from 2012 to 2017, for her role as Selina Meyer in Veep, making her one of the most prolific Emmy winners in a performance category.

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Julia Louis-Dreyfus Made Emmys History

To this day, Louis-Dreyfus is probably best known for her iconic role as Elaine Benes on the long-running sitcom Seinfeld, for which she was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series seven years in a row, from 1992 to 1998, but took home the award just once in 1996. She won her first Emmy in the Lead Actress category in 2006 for her role as Christine Campbell in the CBS sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine, and would go on to be nominated four more times for the same role. Louis-Dreyfus was nominated for her performances in seven (out of nine) seasons of Seinfeld, and every season of The New Adventures of Old Christine and Veep, but it was only for Veep that she finally saw multiple wins. Her extraordinary run ended in 2019 when she was ultimately beaten out by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Fleabag. In total, Louis-Dreyfus has received 26 Primetime Emmy nominations and won 11, eight for acting, and three as a producer for Veep. She holds the record for most Primetime Emmy wins as an actor for the same role, and is tied with Cloris Leachman for most Emmy wins in an acting category.

Why the Television Academy Loves Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Created by Armando Iannucci, Veep follows the political career of fictional American Vice President Selina Meyer and her comically dysfunctional staff. It’s a razor sharp satire of American politics and had massive success at the Emmys in its own right. In its seven-season run, Veep accumulated 59 Primetime Emmy nominations, winning a total of 17, including Outstanding Comedy Series three years in a row. The show is supported by an exceptional ensemble cast composed of the likes of Reid Scott, Timothy Simons, and Matt Walsh along with Anna Chlumsky, who was nominated six times for her supporting role as chief of staff Amy Brookheimer, and Tony Hale, who took home two Emmys for his performance as Selina’s body man Gary Walsh. Though the extensive supporting cast was integral to the show’s success, Louis-Dreyfus’s performance as Selina is the glue that holds it all together.

Louis-Dreyfus is undoubtedly one of the best comedic actresses alive today, and though it might seem like overkill to award the same actress six times for the same role, any fan of Veep know she deserved every single one. The competition was stiff — she was nominated alongside actresses in career-defining roles like Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation, and Edie Falco as Jackie Peyton in Nurse Jackie, but Louis-Dreyfus monopolized the category for the better part of a decade. She embodies the narcissistic, overconfident, ambitious VP who dreams of the White House despite her incompetence, abusing her staff and fellow politicians with some of the most devastating insults you’ll hear on TV. With her extraordinary, decades long career, it almost seems unfair to say Louis-Dreyfus is at her best in Veep (because when isn’t she?), but as Selina Meyer she’s truly on another level.

Selina Meyer is a timeless character because she represents everything people hate about American politicians and reminds us just how absurd the whole system is in the first place. Selina’s political party is never explicitly stated (though it’s implied she’s a Democrat), but she has all the most aggravating qualities people criticize in leaders across the political spectrum. She’s wishy-washy, spineless, hypocritical, and skilled at saying absolute nonsense disguised as something meaningful and patriotic. She alters her personality and beliefs according to whichever interest or government official she must appeal to on a given day, with little regard for the lives of regular Americans and focused only on winning. She fails upwards in spectacular fashion, inadvertently becoming the fist female president when President Hughes resigns at the end of Season 3 and manages to win the presidency again in the final season despite her family and colleagues practically begging her not to run. Dreyfus nails the physicality of a phony, gaffe-prone politician with an expert fake laugh, and it’s quite easy to draw comparisons between Selina and real American politicians, even the actual current Veep.

In Seinfeld and The New Adventures of Old Christine, two network sitcoms, Louis-Dreyfus was comedically limited by certain FCC rules that regulate the use of profanity on network television, but almost anything goes on HBO, and Louis-Dreyfus gets to drop a wide range of expletives to enhance her performance. Selina’s dialogue includes F-words, C-words, and wildly explicit yet often complex insults and metaphors, like the use of a croissant as a sex toy. It’s a testament to her talent that she’s able to be consistently hilarious with and without the use of profanity, but HBO’s lack of censorship and the creative skills of Iannucci and the rest of Veep‘s writing staff allows Louis-Dreyfus to go big with her acting choices. Selina is a terrible person, and even as she becomes more cartoonishly evil in the later two seasons, Louis-Dreyfus still manages to bring nuance to her character in a way that somehow invokes pity for someone so immoral and transparently desperate for power and admiration. From the pilot episode where she declares the level of incompetence in her office is STAG-GER-ING, to the finale when Selina realizes everyone in her original staff has abandoned her, Louis-Dreyfus brings Selina Meyer to life in a way no other actress could.