Jerry Seinfeld didn’t know Seinfeld would be the massive hit it became, but he had an inkling they were onto something when he hired one cast member in particular.
Seinfeld appeared on comedian Sebastian Maniscalco’s new We Got Company podcast on Thursday, where he revealed the moment he had a “sense” things were going in the right direction.
“I knew when we got Julia that it was gonna be good,” he said, referring to his longtime co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “I never thought it would be a hit, but I thought it’ll be good.”
Seinfeld starred in the sitcom, which he created with Larry David, alongside Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards from 1989 to 1998.
The series dominated ratings and pop culture during its nine-season run, and pioneered the “show about nothing” style that influenced other sitcom hits like Friends and Mad About You. Its two-part season finale drew a staggering 76 million viewers. Seinfeld attributed the show’s ultimate success to “luck” on Thursday.
“We were shooting something one night, and there was a bit in the thing where we had to flip a coin, and the coin flipped, and it landed on the kitchen counter and just spun there, and it spun for a few seconds and then stopped, and it was like a miraculous thing,” he recalled, explaining why it seemed like a good omen. “You can’t really get a coin to... You can’t flip a coin and make it land on a counter and spin.”
“And when that happened, I thought, we have luck,” he said. “And we always did. We always did.”
Louis-Dreyfus didn’t always feel so “lucky” on the show, however. Last June, Seinfeld writer Larry Charles told the Daily Beast that she entered the room where David and Seinfeld were brainstorming ideas for the second season and began to “weep” as she explained why she felt she wasn’t “being utilized to her full potential” on the series.
“We just didn’t know, as guys who mostly wrote about guys, how to write a truly great female character,” Charles said.
It wasn’t until some of the anecdotes from David’s life were given to Elaine’s character, rather than David’s avatar, George Costanza (played by Alexander), that she found her footing, he explained.
Louis-Dreyfus told the Daily Beast in 2023 that she never approached the character “from the perspective of my gender.” She explained, “I wanted to just play ball with everybody. I’m not going to lie, in the beginning, I didn’t always have a lot to do in certain episodes. And I would go to Larry and Jerry multiple times and say, ‘Hey, you guys, write me more; I need to be in this show more.’ That’s what I just kept doing. And they did.”
Seinfeld told the host that despite the audience’s continued interest in the show, he has no regrets about when it ended. “I don’t like these comedians that do too long a set,” he said. “Don’t do too long a set. I was very well trained on stage, of... I know when to get off and leave these people feeling good. Leave them feeling like, ‘Oh, that was great.’”
