Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus attends the premiere of Downhill in New York. Photo / AP
"Americans are all about putting a good face on things. It's all about selling success," asserts Julia Louis-Dreyfus, scrunching her own face into an expression of deep distaste.
The 59-year-old actress has little need to sell anything, least of all success. Her extraordinary achievements speak for themselves.
The most decorated performer in US television history, she holds a record number of Emmys - eight for acting, including six in a row (2012-17) for her portrayal of Selina Meyer, the vain, morally bankrupt, power-hungry and potty-mouthed sometime-president in HBO's savage political spoof, Veep, and three for producing that show - plus nine Screen Actors Guild awards and a Golden Globe for her role as Elaine Benes in the seminal nineties sitcom Seinfeld.
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And, as Louis-Dreyfus has experienced first-hand, putting a good face on things is not always possible.
The morning after her record-breaking eighth Emmy win in September 2017, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She broke the news on Instagram, to her 1.2 million followers: "One in eight women get breast cancer," she wrote. "Today I'm the one."
She had a double mastectomy and six rounds of chemotherapy, developed sores on her face and inside her mouth, and struggled to keep food down, but she never stopped working, studying scripts for Veep's seventh and final season and attending readings between rounds of chemo.
"Going to work was a very joyful distraction, and I was so pleased to have the strength to do it," she says. "To be creative for a living, to make people laugh or cry, is a f****** gift."
As if producing and starring in Veep while going through chemo were not challenge enough, she was also ushering into existence her passion project, Downhill, an English-language remake of the Swedish director Ruben Östlund's acclaimed 2014 film, Force Majeure. Louis-Dreyfus not only produced it, but stars in it - on skis.
Her task was nothing, she says, compared with the high-jinks of the camera crew.
"You've got your DP [director of photography] skiing backwards with the monitor in his hand, you have the focus puller, who is also skiing backwards, watching the scene and keeping the right distance, and then you have the camera operator with the hydraulic camera on his back ..."
The resorts they filmed in - Ischgl and Fiss in the Austrian Alps - were open to the public at all times.
"That was a little bit tricky when we were doing gondola and chair lift scenes," she laughs.
"There were a lot of people who'd spent a lot of money for their ski vacation and were not so enamoured of Hollywood."
We meet for breakfast in a hotel beside Central Park, a day ahead of the film's New York premiere. Just 36 hours earlier, I'd watched Louis-Dreyfus presenting at the Oscars, with her Downhill co-star Will Ferrell.
"It was terrifying," she says, exhaling hard.
Tiny and toned, Louis-Dreyfus gives consistently dazzling red-carpet glamour, but this morning she is elegantly low-key in a black polo neck and heavy-rimmed glasses. The only hint that her health might have been a recent concern is the enormous ziplock bag of vitamins she fishes out of her handbag to consume along with her coffee, oatmeal and berries.
Downhill was adapted by Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, with whom Louis-Dreyfus had also worked on Veep. She and Ferrell play Billie and Pete, an affluent American couple with young twin sons, on a family ski trip to Austria.
Whereas in Force Majeure the couple were Swedish-Norwegian, in Downhill, they have become an American family in "the Ibiza of the Alps", a party-hard resort, all oompah bands, Jägerbombs and raving in ski boots at 4pm.
"The fish-out-of-water element," says Louis-Dreyfus, "adds another important layer."
During a "controlled" avalanche, Pete flees the scene, abandoning his wife and children. The bleak, black comedy comes not from the incident itself but from the fallout: Billie's rage and disappointment at Pete's dereliction of duty, and his own shame at his cowardice.
She and Ferrell are more than a decade older than the couple in Force Majeure, which adds to Pete's struggle - particularly post-avalanche - with his own feelings of invisibility and irrelevance, especially to women.
I tell Louis-Dreyfus that the film is being described as "another nail in the coffin of the white male ego".
"Really?" she cries, setting down her spoon. "That's fascinating. I think this is a film that is going to spark that kind of conversation, but I don't see it that way at all. In fact, I think that there's a certain vulnerability to Pete that makes him incredibly sympathetic. Yes, it's a terrible thing he did, but everybody makes bad choices in life. We all are capable of such things, it's just a question of how do you recover from that. How do you own it?
"It's about truth-telling - which is very apt today, of course - telling the truth and owning it and facing shame."
How would she react if her own husband, comedian and writer Brad Hall, displayed similar cowardice?
"Well, he wouldn't," she says firmly, resuming spooning oatmeal into her mouth.
"He just wouldn't. That's my view and I'm sticking to it."
There is a delightful scene in Downhill where Charlotte (Miranda Otto), the hyper-sexed middle-aged resort rep, challenges Billie's views on fidelity before fixing her up for a ski lesson with a stereotypically hot, hairy instructor half her age. When a calf rub leads to a clinch, Billie is the one who shuts it down.
The scene is all the more subversive when you remember that, five years ago, Louis-Dreyfus appeared on the comedy series Inside Amy Schumer in the sketch "Last F***able Day", picnicking with fellow middle-aged actresses Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey to celebrate the final moment that Hollywood would consider her attractive.
Louis-Dreyfus turns 60 next year.
"I'm actually looking forward to it, although I really don't think that number applies to me - I'm rather shocked by it," she laughs.
"I'm thinking I'm going to have a big dance party," she muses. "I'm very glad to be here, so I'm embracing it. I have a newfound attitude towards birthdays now."
Louis-Dreyfus was born in New York City, the daughter of French-born businessman Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who is frequently cited as a billionaire, much to his daughter's chagrin.
"He had an energy company that was worth maybe $2 billion [NZ$3.2b], which is obviously a lot of money, but he didn't own the whole f****** company," she sighs.
"Someone printed something to that effect years ago, and now, in the age of the internet, it's everywhere. I'd love to have that kind of money, but I don't."
Gérard and her mother, Judith, a writer and special-needs teacher, divorced when Julia was just a year old, and her mother went on to marry L Thompson Bowles, the dean of a medical school in Washington DC, who took the family with him on aid projects abroad, living in Sri Lanka, Colombia and Tunisia for months at a time.
Both her parents' households were places of wit, she says.
"It's not like everyone was cracking jokes all the time, but my mother and I share a dark sense of humour, and my father could be very ribald."
While studying drama at Chicago's Northwestern University, she joined Second City, the improvisational theatre troupe whose alumni include Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and Amy Poehler. From there, aged 21, she was asked, in 1982, to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.
"I had grown up as a teenager watching SNL, and so then all of a sudden to be in the cast was head-spinning," she says.
But it was not a happy fit.
"It was so misogynistic and not female-friendly whatsoever. The go-to funny role would be a male role, and the female role would be in support of that. But I think that was across the board in entertainment."
At Northwestern, she also began dating Hall, with whom she moved "kicking and screaming" from New York to Los Angeles in 1985. She was adamant that they would never raise a family there, but they stayed, and they did. She and Hall have now been married for 33 years, and their sons, Henry, 27, and Charlie, 22, were born, grew up and now live in LA. Henry is a musician, while Charlie is an actor, starring in his own web series Sorry, Charlie, living with his parents.
"If they weren't in LA, I'd move," says Louis-Dreyfus plainly. "They don't have to live with me, but I need them near me."
The miserable experience that was SNL became a bond between Louis-Dreyfus and Larry David, who had been a staff writer on the show. Four years later, David cast her in Seinfeld to play Elaine, Jerry Seinfeld's ex-girlfriend, a character that comedian Amy Schumer has called "revolutionary".
Louis-Dreyfus agrees, though she had to fight to make that revolution happen.
"I had to lobby for myself, particularly in the beginning, to get a little more meat on the bone to play. Larry said to the writers, 'Don't think of her as a woman. Just write her as one of the guys so that you're not applying some sort of gender bias to what she can do.'
"It's not groundbreaking at all now, but for a woman to be making jokes about masturbating on prime-time television - back then - was groundbreaking."
In Veep, created by Armando Iannucci, Louis-Dreyfus spent seven seasons mercilessly lampooning politicians and political staffers - a trickier task for the final two seasons, with real-life US politics becoming rapidly more surreal and parodic.
"It was hard to compete with that turdfest in the White House right now," she says.
The finale aired in May last year. "From a storytelling point of view, it felt like the right moment to end," she says. "But I do miss it, and I miss Selina."
Veep and Downhill, though, have stimulated her appetite to produce. She has multiple projects in development, and a deal inked with Apple TV. Even so, she recently admitted in a radio interview that she didn't feel like she had "made it". If not now, will she ever?
"I hope not, because I like having things to aspire to," she says.
"Although it can be quite daunting, I feel like I have more mountains to climb. I want to do a lot more - I really do."
That ambition "definitely" kicked up a gear after cancer, she tells me.
"Our time here is limited. Let's make the very best of it."
New York Times: The actor has tried, and succeeded, at a variety of creative projects.