Exclusive Interview: Veep’s Armando Iannucci

NEW YORK: Known in the U.K. for his biting political satire on the BBC’s The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci is now preparing Veep’s third season and continues to poke fun at politics and power.

WS: When you were writing the pilot of Veep, did you have Julia in mind from the beginning?
IANNUCCI: It was a long process of mine thinking what should be the central role—should it be someone in Congress, a senator, a governor, an ambassador, a cabinet member. Then we decided the vice president. And pretty instantly I thought it would be good if it’s a female vice president because we could make it feel a bit new, a bit fresh and people wouldn’t say, Oh is this meant to be Joe Biden. So we wrote the pilot script for Selina and once we wrote it we realized that we’d need a very good strong comic actress to play her. Julia was the first name that sprung to mind and the first person I got in touch with and it was all sorted pretty quickly after that.

WS: What has she brought to the role beyond what you had envisioned?
IANNUCCI: She has a great depth and breadth of experience. What I hadn’t appreciated was that she actually grew up in Washington, D.C. So she already had a slight background feel for the city [and its workings]. She also had a lot of experience doing improvisation in Chicago. But the other thing that she brings to the role is, because of who she is and what she has done [she starred in the hugely successful comedy Seinfeld] she is quite an eminent figure in America. Therefore she is used to going into a room and knowing that everyone is looking at her and knowing that she has to smile and be pleasant. She knows all the tricks that Selina would have to use, but Julia can look spontaneous and natural rather than making it seem like a performance. So there was that element of body language, of being on the public stage but trying to be protective of your own privacy, or not let slip what is actually going on in your head. These were all unexpected bonuses from my point of view. We cast her because she is a brilliant performer, but when we really got down to talking about the role and the script, these other things all started emerging as bits of her experience that could be brought to the role.

WS: Were you intrigued by the limitations of the vice president as always being second banana to the president, who is number one?
IANNUCCI: It’s that but it’s also a second banana role inhabited by someone who up to then had been in a position of authority. So Selina, for example, had been a senator for some time. She had won several elections. She had no doubt been on several committees and had influence on legislation and had the power base in her home state. She was used to making decisions. So to go from that to having to voice the opinion of someone else and having to back the policy of someone else or to have your role shaped by someone else—because the VP’s role is whatever the president makes of it—is a challenge. If you are very close to the president, you have lots of power and influence. If you’re not that close, you have none. So you are entirely at the whim of the president. For a grown-up, hard-hitting politician that’s a very, very, awkward position to be in.

WS: Unless you are Dick Cheney.
IANNUCCI: There’s someone who made the vice presidency one of the most powerful roles in Washington, during George Bush’s first term. But it was gradually taken away from him in the second term when Bush realized that Cheney was a bit more of a liability.

WS: Power is a theme that you really want to explore?
IANNUCCI: Absolutely. In the first season it was all about the frustrations of not being at the center, so we thought in the second season, what happens when you are given your wish, what does that do to you? How do you cope with the responsibility of the decisions that you have made? How is your personal life impacted by power and what you are doing publicly? Also in the first season, I suppose it was very much Selina coming to terms with the limitations of her office. In the second term, having mastered her office, as it were, it was about wanting to do something else and take that ambition elsewhere. And viewers are also getting closer and closer to the president’s office and the president’s staff, seeing the West Wing and just getting nearer to the heart of power.

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