Steven Prusakowski
After 24 years of playing Susie Greene on Curb Your Enthusiasm, I finally got a peek behind the curtain to see the woman behind the character and what I found surprised me. Susie Essman is nothing like her on screen persona. Actually, that was a goal of hers because, as she said, “I live with myself 24-7. I don’t need to be myself on camera.” So there was no swearing or screaming – okay, maybe a little, but only to portray her character.
Essman spoke with Awards Radar about how her character came to be and what she brings to the series. While maybe the loudest and often irate character on Curb, Essman sees her differently than you may expect. “She’s kind of simple in her ethics,” said Essman. “I think she’s actually the moral compass of the show in many ways.”
In the full video interview below she also shared a life imitates art billboard story about her the defacing of her actual billboard on Santa Monica Boulevard in LA that left her image surrounded by spray painted male genitalia. The conversation covers the course of the series, her process, her feelings about the closing out of the series and how the loss of several cast members, including Richard Lewis and Bob Einstein affected her deeply. Plus sprinkled throughout is her admiration and respect for Larry David.
It is a great conversation, which you can watch here. A few select excerpts can be found below, but we definitely recommend watching as well.
On becoming part of the series:
You never know what’s going to happen in life. I never thought I mean, I was a comic, so I knew my life would be about making people laugh. But I never thought my life would end up that I would be famous and beloved for cursing at people.
That was not in my plan. But, you know, you just go where life takes you, I guess. I’m not sure if it’s in many people’s plans, but it worked out well for me. I mean, who would have thought that that I could just show up and tell everybody to go fuck themselves. And then they pay me and I go home and then I come back the next day and do it all over again. It’s a little more than that. I don’t like to make it seem like that’s all I’m doing, but it’s what I’m known for, I guess.
On the unique improv process Curb uses:
The process didn’t really evolve that much. The process was pretty much the same from day one. What changed was the characters grew, the relationships grew. We don’t have a script.
We have an outline. Larry’s brain is all about story. And anybody who’s watched the show knows how important the story is and how it’s a big puzzle that he puts together in this callback after callback after callback. Everything kind of pulls together in the end. But nothing happens more or less just for the purpose of being funny without it having meaning in the story, without moving the story forward. I always see my role as the story driver.
Different people have different roles. He uses me a lot to drive the story, not consciously. It’s just how it kind of evolved. We’ve never we’ve never sat down and talked about it. We just kind of have a dialogue of the unconscious where we understand one another. And I always know what he wants. And I always know how to surprise him, which is one of the greatest joys of my job. And we just play. It’s just play.
How much of Susiee Green is Susie Essman and vice versa?
Well, you know, we’re very, very different. I never wanted to play myself. I live with myself 24-7. I don’t need to be myself on camera. So I kind of came up with this character and again, was given complete leeway within parameters of that. She has a filthy mouth and a temper to create who she was. Besides that Larry wanted me to be angry and cursing at Jeff and him. Besides that, I had complete leeway to create who this person was, including how she dresses. So I wanted to play this character that is completely sure of herself in every way.
That has zero self-awareness. All I have is questioning and self-awareness and overanalyzing everything and insecurity and all that. So I wanted to play the opposite of that.
Of this character who is just completely sure that everything she does and says is right. And that she wears the most gorgeous clothes and has the greatest taste. And that everybody is wrong except her.
On the ethics of the series:
What’s interesting about talking about the moral, the ethics of it, is that when you look at the show, not always. But most of the time, Larry is right in what he’s doing. He goes about it completely wrong. He does not have any bedside manner. But so often, he’s correct in what he’s saying. I feel like he’s acting out people’s fantasies.
And, I feel like Susie is doing that also, especially for women, that she’s acting out their anger. She’s allowing women to – because as women, we’re brought up, you know, to be nice little girls and anger isn’t pretty and all that kind of crap that I was brought up with.
Then I think Susie taps into that. I know because so many women stop me on the street, tell me I’ve given them permission to be rageful.
On her inspirations:
When I was growing up, Carol Burnett was a huge influence. She didn’t do stand-up. She did sketch stuff. That’s how I started. I started doing all these characters when I first started doing stand-up in the early 80s. She was a huge influence. What’s interesting about watching a Carol Burnett show, in retrospect, what I loved about it at the time was they always looked like they were having so much fun.
They’d break up. Harvey Korman would start laughing in Conway. That’s kind of how we are in the Curb set. We laugh all day. You could see Larry. You could see him stifling giggles in almost every take.
We laugh all day long. In a way, my life has become my fantasy, what I thought that it would be like, which is a very lucky thing, I suppose.
All 12 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm are now streaming on Max.
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