Luckily, she had Brad by her side. From their early days working together, Julia was taken with him. "He was gorgeous," she said. "He looked like Björn Borg or something. I remember thinking early on that this was the guy for me, but I didn't dare tell anyone, for fear they would say, 'That's ridiculous. You're so young—you don't know what you're talking about.' So I kept that little secret close to my heart."
After two years working on the show together, however, Brad was let go and Julia began feeling even more isolated than before. The lone bright spot? A writer she'd developed a friendship with by the name of Larry David. "He was as miserable as I was," she said. "I'd hang out in his office and bitch and moan."
When Dick left the show in 1985 after her third season and Lorne returned, she wasn't invited back.
Soon, she and Brad headed out west to Los Angeles, where she began exploring a career that progressed in stops and starts, with roles in pilots that went nowhere or shows that were very short-lived. In 1987, the couple tied the knot. And then, a few years later and following the disappointment of a failed Warner Bros. development deal, a call came that changed everything.
"A couple of days later, I get a call from my agent," she said. "Larry David's written this script with a comedian, Jerry Seinfeld—I hadn't really heard of him—and they're adding a girl." Their pilot, titled The Seinfeld Chronicles, bombed and the network insisted that a female be added into the mix. And thus, Elaine Benes was born.
Larry and Jerry had already auditioned the likes of Rosie O'Donnell, Patricia Heaton, and Megan Mullally when Julia came in to read for the role. But though she liked the unique sensibility of the material, she wasn't entirely sold on the character. "In two out of the four scripts, I had some kind of meaty stuff to do—in the other two, less so," she said. "And this was coming off of developing my own thing, so I thought, Gee, I don't know."
After her audition, Larry chased her into the parking lot and asked her what she thought. And she still didn't know. But despite reservations over whether it was the right move for her, she signed on that weekend. "I had a feeling about Seinfeld, like I had a feeling about ‘Mee-Ow,'" Julia recalled. "I'm sitting on top of a great treasure, and no one knows it."
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