Tara McCauley December 5th, 2020 - 1:55 AM
Last week, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep) channeled Rudy Giuliani in a Twitter video that served to announced a new Veep cast reunion ahead of Georgia’s Senatorial Run-Off Election. The December 6 reunion will feature a table read of the season five episode “Mother”, centered around an election recount, and benefit America Votes, a group focused on increasing voter turnout in Georgia’s January 5 election. Showrunner David Mandel (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Louis-Dreyfus spoke to People this week about Veep’s continued relevance in 2020 and the cast’s upcoming reunion.
2020 won’t stop ripping off #VEEP, so we had to do something about it. Our cast is hosting a LIVE virtual table read of the episode everyone was talking about in support of @AmericaVotes‘ grassroots work to turn out voters for the Georgia Runoffs. Sign up: https://t.co/uAgG2a7mSv pic.twitter.com/r3U1ZT45uF
— Julia Louis-Dreyfus (@OfficialJLD) November 24, 2020
The cast of HBO’s political comedy Veep, which aired its final season in 2019, organized their first reunion this past October in order to raise funds for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Everybody just had such a good time,” Mandel told People about the October reunion “even our rehearsal for it was so fun, with the tech errors and whatnot.” The virtual call was moderated by Mandel and featured new and deleted scenes from the show. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the event raised over $500K for the Biden-Harris campaign.
View this post on Instagram
That October event was just the beginning of the Veep cast’s contributions to the 2020 presidential election. Mandel hosted a mini-reunion with cast members Timothy Simons (Veep, Looking for Alaska) and Sam Richardson (Detroiters, Veep) to support North Carolina’s senatorial race. Throughout the election season, a large majority of the cast stayed vocal about the election on their personal social media accounts as well as in a group text-chain with one another, via People.
Louis-Dreyfus says as the news cycle becomes more and more reminiscent of Veep it sparks “a flurry of text chains” between herself and fellow cast members, via People. Louis-Dreyfus commented on this phenomena as earlier as 2016, saying “our show started out as political satire, but has become a sobering documentary” in her Emmy acceptance speech.
The fraud accusations and pursuit of state recounts that have followed the 2020 Presidential Race have led many to make comparisons to the news cycle and Veep’s season five episode “Mother”. “It was like 2020 chose the table read for us,” Louis-Dreyfus told People.
View this post on Instagram
Shortly after announcing this latest reunion, Louis-Dreyfus unveiled the fundraiser’s guest cast on her Instagram. Veep alumni Patton Oswalt (A.P. Bio, Ratatouille) and Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, The Big Sick) will join in the table read alongside Mark Hamill (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Batman the Animated Series) and Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). Nanjiani once played an unnamed White House statistician in the show’s second season, while Oswalt had a longer arc as Teddy Sykes, a political strategist who engaged in ongoing sexual harassment of Simon’s Jonah Ryan. Neither of these two established roles feature in the episode “Mother”, so it’s unknown what roles Nanjiani and Oswalt will fulfill in the reunion.
View this post on Instagram
On Thursday, Louis-Dreyfus posted a promotional photo for the upcoming cast reunion on Instagram, which that saw the cast photoshopped in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. This is a reference to a recent mix-up from Trump’s communication team, in which a press conference was booked at the Pennsylvania landscaping company instead of the hotel chain with the same name. “If [Mandel had] pitched Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” Louis-Dreyfus spoke of the real-life event in relation to Veep storylines “I would have said, ‘Come on, we’re trying to tell a real story'” (People).
Mandel implied, while speaking to People, that the absurdity prevalent in the current news cycle has prevented conversations of bringing Veep back in any official capacity. “The future of Veep is tied to the future of our country,” Mandel told People “there needs to be a return to normalcy — where Selina seems outrageous again — then, maybe, we have a shot.”
Until that sense of normalcy returns, the Veep cast can be seen reunited on Sunday December 6 at 8PM ET, for a table read of the episode “Mother”. The cost of admission is a donation, in any amount, to America Votes in order to bolster voter turnout for Georgia’s runoff Senatorial Race.
