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[This story contains spoilers from the sixth episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12.] Curb Your Enthusiasm is known for inviting guest actors onto the HBO improv comedy series to play versions of themselves and go toe-to-toe with Larry David’s onscreen persona. The latest actress to do so was Lori Loughlin, who came on the […]
[This story contains spoilers from the sixth episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12.]
Curb Your Enthusiasm is known for inviting guest actors onto the HBO improv comedy series to play versions of themselves and go toe-to-toe with Larry David’s onscreen persona.
The latest actress to do so was Lori Loughlin, who came on the sixth episode of the 12th and final season to confront her post-college admissions scandal reputation in Hollywood. The setup was that Loughlin, who loves to play golf, was being black-balled from L.A. country clubs due to her role in the 2019 scandal. (Loughlin and husband Mossimo Giannulli were among the high-profile parents charged with paying fixers to get their children into top U.S. universities, nicknamed Operation Varsity Blues by the FBI.)
So Loughlin needs a sponsor, and who better than Larry — someone who has gotten so many second chances himself? “You know I’m a champion of the underdog,” he says.
“On the show, Larry has had an infinite number of chances,” Jeff Schaffer tells The Hollywood Reporter when speaking about the episode. “How the Greenes let him back in their house is a mystery. Yet when Susie [played by Susie Essman] has a dinner party, there he is! Larry is an uncancellable Blarney Stone. Maybe by rubbing Larry, it works for everyone else.”
Larry ends up getting Loughlin approved for a membership, after a motivational speech inspired by the Gettysburg Address (more on that later). But he quickly notices that Loughlin lives up to her reputation. She cheats on the golf course, lies to get handicap privileges and flirts (or, another f-word?) her way to getting the best tee times. She’s unapologetically competitive, and it’s funny to watch. By leaning into this arc, Loughlin not only seems to have a good sense of humor about herself, she’s also in on the joke.
And the Curb executive producer says she was on board to parody herself right from the pitch.
“This was an idea that we loved from a writer named Teddy Bressman. But it’s not going to be funny with some sort of thinly veiled surrogate. It only works if we get Lori,” says Schaffer of how the story came together. “So we called her manager up, who loved it, and who then talked to Lori, and she said: ‘I’m in, I’m totally game.’ And she was. She was so great. Everything we threw at her, she was game to do. She makes the episode. I’m so glad she wanted to do it.”
He then quotes one of her lines with a chuckle, “I have Epstein Barr — one hematologist thinks so.”
Schaffer and David plotted this episode with Loughlin in mind, a practice they have done before. Viewers will recall the entire ninth season revolving around Fatwa! The Musical being directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the major casting get when Trump whistleblower Alexander Vindman appeared in the season 11 finale. In both of those instances, Schaffer says they came up with the story before knowing if Miranda or Vindman were game, or even available to come guest star on the series.
This time, he says they approached things differently.
“We had a lot of ideas we wanted to do, but we asked Lori first,” he says. “We pitched the general concept of: ‘You get into the club, and then we find out how ultra-competitive you are, and how you’re willing to bend the rules or break them.’ And then once she agreed, we really started hammering out the details of the script. This time, we finally learned our lesson. We didn’t want to go write the entire episode, and then have to throw it away.”
He continues, “I guess as comedy writers we just naively thought, ‘It’s so funny, who wouldn’t want to do this?’ Well, maybe the person it’s about! But she saw how funny it was and was into it immediately.”
The former Full House star was released from prison in December 2020 after serving almost two months of her sentence. She has since returned to TV by reprising her role in the GAC Family series When Hope Calls, but her Curb appearance feels like a different kind of comeback.
“It’s great to be able to laugh at yourself. It’s a great way to put the past behind you,” says Schaffer of Loughlin. “I hope it helps her career. She was great, and she should work. She was really funny and wonderful to work with. People should see, ‘Oh, she’s really funny. She’s great in this stuff.’ So yeah, I hope she does get to work because she deserves to.”
Loughlin ends her Curb run with this episode, but there are other setups this week that are sure to rear their heads before the series signs off for good. Below, Schaffer goes behind the scenes of the “The Gettysburg Address” episode, including that Loughlin-inspired Seinfeld finale jab. (Also, read words of tribute from Schaffer on the late Richard Lewis).
Two episodes ago, Schaffer confirmed the real-life inspiration for Larry’s country club meals: David brings his own eggs and bread to the table. This week, the bit about Larry using his bathroom time productively to memorize the Gettysburg Address was also inspired by the real David.
“Larry already had the Gettysburg Address memorized, and I’ll tell you why,” Schaffer explains. “So, bathroom multitasking is not a novel concept. I bet half the people reading this article on their phones are doing it on the toilet. But Larry [in real life] actually decided to do something constructive with his pee time. He has a bathroom in his office and in that bathroom for a long time, he had the Gettysburg Address up.”
Schaffer says the creator-star knows the speech up and down, so every time they came across a bathroom during filming, they shot the montage that sees Larry memorizing President Abraham Lincoln’s famous address while urinating. “Like the fallen soldiers in Gettysburg, his urination was not in vain,” says Schaffer. And, it’s rubbed off: “In our post[-production] offices, the bathroom, our editors put one up in the bathroom.”
They end up tying in the joke with the “Pavlov’s bladder” scene when Larry goes to see Ted Danson as Lincoln in a play and, when he hears the speech, Larry has to pee so badly that his foot gets stuck and he trips and falls on his face in the audience (presumably, peeing along the way).
“Originally, he was going to trip over the coat, but then we had so much fun with actor Hymnson Chan that we brought him back [from the previous episode],” says Schaffer. “It’s pure comedy greed. It’s indulgent, we admit it. But it really tickled us.” A highlight for Schaffer was Larry’s expression in the moment: “The face that he makes when he realizes it’s going to happen now is like seven different expressions all at once.”
Sienna Miller made her return to Larry’s life now that he has finally found a way to call off his relationship with Tracey Ullman’s Irma. But the real David had one rule if they were going to pursue the storyline of Larry, 76, and the movie star, 42, dating on the show.
“Larry would only do this dating story, he would only approach it all, if we had him and Susie and everyone make fun of the age difference. Everybody just laughing, no one believes it. He’s too old,” says Schaffer. “Susie saying, ‘Why would she want to be with an old fuck like you?’ We wanted to do the story, but he would only do it if everyone made fun of how old he was, to his credit.”
Miller had first appeared in the third episode, praising Larry after he became a liberal hero in Atlanta when she bumped into him at the airport. “We didn’t know her. We loved her work. And so we’re pitching the story to her and at a certain point, the graffiti dick cat has to come out of the bag,” says Schaffer with a laugh, referencing this episode’s storyline of billboards promoting both Miller’s movie and Susie’s (Essman) new caftan business being defamed with graffitied penises. “So anyway,” he says, recalling how they pitched Miller, “You’re going to be on a giant billboard, holding a penis. You’re going to have alopecia. You can’t act without eating fruit. And she just goes, ‘I love it, let’s do it.’ She loved that we put her in these terrible movies. She was so fun; she really should do more comedies.”
Miller even inspired some lines in this episode. When improvising Yiddish in the last episode, Larry questioned her use of the word “shmietz,” which the converting Jew claimed meant “I gotta go.” Offscreen, Schaffer says he and David were stumped and, between filming these two episodes, realized no such word existed. They then wrote that into this episode with the “Rachel and the Rug Merchants” conversation.
“We wanted to continue Sienna’s journey into Judaism, and we thought it would be funny if she knew way more about Judaism than Larry. And then we quickly thought, ‘But, what if she’s wrong?’ And that’s how Rachel the Rug Merchants was born,” he says. “But when we were shooting episode five, and Sienna says, ‘I gotta shmietz.’ That was her; we didn’t come up with that. We said we never heard that before [after shooting] and she said, that’s something that my boyfriend who is Jewish says to me, it’s a Yiddish thing. We go, ‘huh.’ We looked it up and couldn’t find it anywhere. And she laughed [after seeing the episode five script] and was like, ‘It’s a real-life Rachel and the Rug Merchants!’ It was literally life imitating art.”
But Larry and Miller’s romance is short-lived after he unknowingly insults her. When he questions why she always wears wigs in her roles, she lets him have it: “I have alopecia, you fucking asshole!” The line about the autoimmune disorder was, in fact, inspired by the infamous Oscars slap between Will Smith and Chris Rock, after Rock insulted Jada Pinkett-Smith’s alopecia.
“It is a crazy coincidence that this episode is airing on the night of the Oscars. It just worked out that way. I only realized that today,” he says about the 2024 awards show, which was delayed due to the 2023 dual Hollywood strikes (and, to be clear, announced long after Curb plotted this story).
Schaffer already addressed the perceived echoes of the Seinfeld ending in this final season of Curb. (Larry kicks off the season as a very good Samaritan, after offering a bottle of water to a voter in a hot Atlanta voting line, while Seinfeld famously ended with the starring foursome going to prison for being terrible Samaritans, a finale that has been met with mixed reception.)
In this episode, it’s Danson who delivers the latest series finale jab to Larry. When talking about his Lincoln play co-star Loughlin, he assumes that Larry already knew her from their days working on Seinfeld. “You worked with her didn’t you?” Danson asks Larry, referring to Loughlin’s 1997 episode “The Serenity Now” in the classic comedy. “No, that was the last two years. I wasn’t there for that episode,” replies David, who had left the series by that point. “Oh, but you did the finale right?” prods Danson, to Larry’s chagrin, referencing how the creator returned to write the series ender, “The Finale.”
It was actually Schaffer who was a writer on Seinfeld when Loughlin’s episode aired. “I worked with Lori on Seinfeld, and Larry didn’t. That’s why that joke was in there,” says Schaffer. Adding that the Seinfeld bits are “just a fun running joke. Ted and Larry are friends who don’t like each other very much, and Ted never misses a chance to needle Larry. And because it was Lori, it was perfect. Because I was on the show when Lori was on Seinfeld, and Larry wasn’t. That’s why the joke happened. Because it’s true.”
Last week’s episode saw Larry’s lawyer (Sean Hayes) forgetting to file his dismissal after Larry meddled in the personal life of his attorney and his husband (played by Dan Levy). Larry was arrested at the beginning of the season for obstructing the election process in the state of Georgia, which is punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of $10,000. By the end of this episode, his trial continues to loom.
Schaffer offers this tease of things to come: “Those things have to be filed by a certain time or you don’t get to do it, and because Larry had opinions about a child’s name, that motion was not filed. So right now, it looks like he’s going to court. Will he? We’ll have to see. I’m not even sure they’ll get to court.”
By the way, the names Larry offered to the expecting couple are names the real David stands by. “He’s a firm believer that Foots should be a more common name than it is,” says Schaffer. “Foots David. Think about how successful he would have been if Foots David co-created Seinfeld?”
The storyline this episode that brought David his biggest onscreen laughs was when he was driving in the car and saw that the billboard Susie (Essman) had purchased for her new company, Catch as Caftan, was hit by a graffiti artist.
“Imagine the traffic jams if we actually had a Susie poster on Santa Monica Boulevard where she was getting double dosed,” said Schaffer referencing the two penises that were drawn — via VFX — on her billboard. “Susie’s gone into business one more time making caftans with the horribly titled name of her company, Catch as Caftan. We loved making the billboards for the caftans — the perfect gift for your aunt who drinks too much.”
As it turns out, HBO is prepping a marketing scheme to put up a real billboard in Los Angeles to promote Susie’s business — around Santa Monica and Centinela on Monday morning (one without graffiti) — and the caftans are also going to be available for purchase for fans (the merch sale is now live).
Schaffer also has a life-imitating-art prediction: “I don’t know how many graffiti artists are fans of the show, but I’m praying for a few dicks. If we’re lucky enough to get a few on that poster, I think the sales are going to go through the roof.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm releases new episodes Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO and Max. Read THR’s other season chats with Schaffer here.
