Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ iconic Elaine dance from Seinfeld took a bit of finesse to “get the laugh,” the actress revealed this week.
On the latest episode of her podcast Wiser Than Me, Louis-Dreyfus sat down with dance legend Debbie Allen, and the conversation naturally turned toward the “little kicks” dance immortalized on Seinfeld. Louis-Dreyfus said that while she considers herself a good dancer, everywhere she goes where there’s dancing, people watch her to see if she’ll bust out her sitcom character’s terrible moves.
“I can feel people watch me, because obviously they’re expecting me to dance that horrible dance, the Elaine dance,” she told Allen.
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The actress also broke down the origin story behind the Seinfeld episode in question, “Little Kicks,” explaining that Seinfeld writer Spike Feresten based it on his own experience with a “person [who] was very respected and admired and looked up to, and then at a work party, this particular person danced and all of that respect and admiration instantly vanished.” The person Feresten based the episode on, he later revealed in his book Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything, was Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels.
Being terrible at dancing wasn’t without effort, though, as Louis-Dreyfus said she’s actually a pretty good dancer in real life. “The truth is that I’ve always felt inside that I’m a dancer,” she said. “Not trained or anything, but you know, I just have an inner confidence that I’m good. I’m a good party dancer.”
So she set out to create dance moves for Elaine that would be the exact opposite—and elicited some help from her family to find the absolute worst dance she could come up with.
“The night before rehearsals began [for ‘Little Kicks’], I stood in front of a mirror and I tried to come up with moves that were weird and didn’t resemble anything graceful or rhythmic,” she recalled. “I came up with a couple of options and I went downstairs where my mom, who happened to be staying with us at the time, and my husband were in the kitchen. And I said, ‘OK you guys, so which one of these is the worst?’ I did the two movements, and both my mom and Brad picked the same one. That’s the movement, ladies and gentlemen, that I incorporated into the episode.”
As terrible (and spot-on) as those moves were, Louis-Dreyfus said there was just one more thing needed to really put it over the top. “When we started to rehearse, they had this music track going,” she said, “and as soon as I heard the music, I couldn’t block out the beat. Those weird kicks and putting my thumbs out—they’re gonna look pretty bad, obviously, no matter what, but they’re gonna look so much worse if they’re not on the beat.” To really make it as bad as it could be, she said, they had to lose the music.
“I really wanted it to be bad, so I had them turn off the music so that I would dance with no beat at all,” she added. “Then they put the music in later so that my very erratic, herky jerky movements wouldn’t have any sense of rhythm whatsoever.”
That did the trick, she said, and “ever since that episode aired, it became one of the more popular episodes of Seinfeld.” But that doesn’t mean she necessarily likes to relive the moment. “The truth is that if I actually stumble on that episode on TV, I can’t even watch it because it’s just so god-awful ugly,” she concluded. “It just makes me wince.”
For more, listen to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on The Last Laugh podcast.
