Louis-Dreyfus is active on social media, posting her (liberal-Hollywood) support for candidates and causes: Sally Yates, Stacey Abrams, her fellow Holton-Arms alumna Christine Blasey Ford. She also used it to keep her fans up to date on her cancer treatments. “There were people with long lenses trying to get pictures of me looking ill, and I think I kind of burst the bubble on a lot of it because of my social-media presence,” Louis-Dreyfus said, with satisfaction.
I asked if she had ever succumbed to fear or self-pity during her illness. She thought for a minute and then replied, “ ‘Am I gonna be dead tomorrow’ kind of thing? I didn’t let myself go there.” She paused. “Don’t misunderstand: I was to-my-bones terrified. But I didn’t let myself—except for a couple of moments—go to a really dark place. I didn’t allow it.”
(VEEP showrunner, David) Mandel, who has known Louis-Dreyfus for some thirty years, described his own reaction when he heard that she had cancer: “I had the sense of the walls closing in on me, and I was racked with guilt and other weird Jewishness, and I was a goddam wreck. She seemed great. Then we watched her go through the chemo and you could see its effects on her. She got thinner and thinner. We couldn’t hug her, because we were afraid to get her sick. It was the first time that—all of a sudden—she looked her age and seemed human and vulnerable.”