Caroline Frost
Veep creator Armando Iannucci has been hailed for his gifts of foresight, with fans detailing how his vice-president character Selina Meyer ended up in the top seat.
However, the writer and producer – who also wrote the Oscar-nominated political comedy In the Loop – has expanded on his response earlier this week when he reminded fans his show “was made up, though.”
Saturday Iannucci told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that the cyclical nature of politics meant it was inevitable storylines from fiction were going to reappear in real life. He explained:
“With fiction, if you’ve got the research right, reality will always shine through. When we made Veep we spent a lot of time talking to the vice-president’s office, the west wing, state departments, senators. The actors met their counterparts in Washington. So you get a rough idea of what the terrain is going to be like.”
He added that although his made-up character Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, differed from Kamala Harris, he realized people would find they shared several traits:
“Comparisons are inevitable. They have the same kind of career. Selena was a senator like Harris, and is then plucked from a powerful job into a job that’s frustratingly powerless. I wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was in any way modelled on Harris.”
Veep won 17 Emmy awards during its seven-year run, which saw Selina Mayer cut a swathe through Washington, her powerlessness as VP mirrored by her naked ambition. She eventually made it to the White House, although not for long.