During Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ cancer battle, she rarely let herself hit rock bottom.
Discussing her recovery in the New Yorker, the 11-time Emmy winner was asked if she ever “succumbed to fear or self-pitying” during her illness.
“Am I gonna be dead tomorrow kind of thing?” Louis-Dreyfus, 57, reflected. “I didn’t let myself go there. Don’t misunderstand: I was to-my-bones terrified. But didn’t let myself – except for a couple of moments – go to a really dark place. I didn’t allow it.”
The “Seinfeld” alumna announced in September 2017 she was fighting breast cancer. She soon underwent chemotherapy and finished treatment in January 2018.
“The old cliché about laughter being the best medicine turns out to be true: when I was getting my hideous chemotherapy, I’d cram a bunch of friends and family into the tiny treatment room with me,” she recalled. “We really did have some great laughs. Of course, I was heavily medicated and slipping in and out of consciousness, so I was a pretty easy audience.”
Louis-Dreyfus says she was able to beat the media to the story with one simple tool.
“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,” she said.
By the summer of 2018, Louis-Dreyfus was back at work shooting the seventh and final season of the award-winning show “Veep.”