For reference, she showed Iannucci a photograph of himself, taken some months earlier, standing in front of that awning in the looming company of Reggie Love, who was then President Barack Obama’s special assistant, or body man. A production designer showed him photographs of places that could later stand in for the West Wing’s west entrance, where a white awning stretches over the sidewalk, in an oddly restaurant-like way. Iannucci himself does not curse that way, and, as he waited for cars and people to find their places, amid cries of “Secret Service, stand by!,” he seemed calm almost to the point of diffidence. That morning, Louis-Dreyfus was about to shoot a scene in which she refers to a senator as a “real hog-fucker,” in a conversation with her chief of staff, her head of communications, and a devoted personal aide-a group that, in a later episode, she refers to as her “Keystone Cunts.” Although “Veep” doesn’t have the swearing intensity of Iannucci’s British work, the show’s scripts still use “fuck,” and its variants, nearly two hundred and fifty times in the first eight episodes. Where are the American comedy writers?” She got into the habit, during readings and rehearsals, of making a teasing, crooked face to alert Iannucci to such errors. “It gave me pause in the beginning,” Louis-Dreyfus said later. congressman Iannucci, who was not in charge of that production, says that the experience left him feeling “slightly soiled.”Īt HBO, Iannucci made sure that he was the showrunner, and one result is that even late drafts of “Veep” scripts were dotted with Britishisms-characters ring each other on the phone and threaten to strip down to their pants. The first, an ABC pilot made in 2007, transposed the action to the office of a goofily innocent U.S. “Veep” is the second attempt to bring Iannucci’s political satire to American television. ![]() Meyer’s dominant mood-panic blunted by exhaustion, as she attempts, cursing, to outrun a political shit storm-will be familiar to viewers of “The Thick of It,” Iannucci’s fine BBC sitcom about British ministerial life, or “In the Loop,” a companion film that used some of the same actors to tell a darker story of Anglo-American ineptness and bad faith in the prelude to an Iraq-style war. Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice-President Selina Meyer, who is neither corrupt nor politically extreme but harried, maddened by her job’s taunting combination of power and powerlessness, and forever at risk of public embarrassment. ![]() She was wearing a wig that looked much like her real hair-a strategy that eliminates delays for styling. In recent years, he has become best known in Britain for creating characters who, when they hear a knock at the door, are likely to say, “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off,” instead of “Hello.”Įarly one morning last fall, Iannucci was on location in Washington, D.C., directing a scene for “Veep,” an HBO comedy about American politics written wholly by British men, including one whom Iannucci has described as his “swearing consultant.” A motorcade of five limousines and two motorcycle outriders was parked by the side entrance of a neoclassical building not far from the White House, and beside it stood Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the former “Seinfeld” star. A scholar of John Milton, he is a former classical-music columnist for Gramophone. He has a soft Scottish accent and a demure, bookish manner. Armando Iannucci, the British comedy writer and director, is short and slight, and, at forty-eight, he is going bald in the old-fashioned, uncropped way, with tufts of hair here and there.
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