Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Curb Your Enthusiasm Finale Seinfeld Reference

Though Julia-Louis Dreyfus didn’t make an appearance in the final Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that called back to the Seinfeld series finale, she’s a fan of how Larry David wrapped up his follow-up series.

“I loved it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of last month’s Curb ending. “I loved everything about it.”

Curb‘s 12th and final season finished with a cameo from Jerry Seinfeld in which he and star-creator David, both playing fictional versions of themselves, reference the famously divisive Seinfeld end. After Larry is convicted of violating Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, he’s sentenced to a year in prison. But Jerry intervenes.

He discovers that one of the trial’s jurors broke the sequestering rule, causing a mistrial to be declared and Larry to walk free.

“Larry,” Jerry says, “is a free man!”

He adds, winking to the poor reception to the Seinfeld finale: “You don’t wanna end up like this. Nobody wants to see it. Trust me.”

As he and Jerry are walking out of the courthouse, they reminisce about Seinfeld.

“Oh my God, this is how we should’ve ended the finale,” says Larry.

Jerry adds, “Oh my God you’re right, how did we not think of that?”

“Ahhh,” they say, throwing their hands in the air.

Seinfeld famously left its star foursome of Seinfeld, Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards in jail after they were found guilty of violating a good samaritan law, but with the Curb finale, David and longtime collaborator Jeff Schaffer subverted expectations and had Larry avoid jail time as he and Jerry delivered a meta take on the 1998 end of the NBC sitcom.

“Ultimately, this ending was about more than the show. It spoke to the contrary DNA of Larry, and it sort of spans his entire career and makes it a fitting end to the series and puts a stubborn exclamation point on all of its work,” Schaffer told THR the day after the Curb finale. “That’s the other thing I liked about it. It spoke about not just the series but about the creator of the series.”

Schaffer recalled how Seinfeld was excited about the Curb finale too. “When we finished shooting that jail scene, he was so jazzed about it and he said, ‘This is amazing. This is a joke that is 26 years in the making.’ He was excited about what this was doing, too,” Schaffer said. “I’m just glad we all stayed in showbiz long enough to actually pull this off.”

Less than two weeks after the Curb finale aired, at a PaleyFest event, Schaffer said that he received an “amazing, sweet email” from Louis-Dreyfus after the finale.

Louis-Dreyfus previously said that while she enjoyed her experience making the Seinfeld finale, she “understood why people were disappointed.”

“Just from a purely emotional point of view, it was really a delight to sit there in that courtroom and watch one guest actor after another parade through. I mean, it’s like we were watching the show, so that was really fun, that aspect of it,” she told The Daily Beast last year. “But I understood why people were disappointed. First of all, expectations were ridiculous. But I also understood, because we didn’t do too much in it. Once we had been arrested and in court, it was just us sitting there watching one person after another parade through.”

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Both she and Seinfeld made light of the poor reception to the Seinfeld finale on David Letterman’s final Late Show, where they were part of an all-star group delivering the final Top 10 list. When Louis-Dreyfus said something about being part of “another hugely disappointing series finale,” Seinfeld gave her a look of mock offense.

Louis-Dreyfus shared her brief but enthusiastic response to the Curb finale with THR at the 2024 Webby Awards last week, where she was among the winners for her podcast Wiser Than Me, in which she interviews older women who share the wisdom they’ve gained as they age.

Accepting her award from recent guest Ina Garten, Louis-Dreyfus delivered a blunt, slightly salty five-word acceptance speech: “Listen to old women, motherfuckers,” she said onstage before smiling and gently waving to the audience.

When asked by THR at the Webbys what she’s learned from the women she’s interviewed, Louis-Dreyfus spoke about the “true agency” she’s observed with her guests.

“There’s a theme that keeps cropping up with all of these women and that theme is that they’re unencumbered by concerns that they used to have in their youth,” she said. “There’s a feeling of true agency about getting older, and they have an authority that I really admire.”