George Costanza, the neurotic best friend of Jerry Seinfeld who would overthink every social interaction, panic over the tiniest things, and turn an everyday problem into a disaster, is one of my favorite Seinfeld characters. That’s in great part because of how well Jason Alexander played him in one of NBC’s best sitcoms. However, it turns out, the actor wasn’t sure how to play the guy at first…until he realized George was just Larry David.
While speaking on Archive of American Television (via Instagram), Alexander recalled the confusion he faced while trying to figure George out. He didn’t believe anyone would ever act that way. So, he asked Larry David about it. Here’s how that conversation went:
Somewhere in those first eight episodes, they wrote a scenario where George got into a situation which I thought was completely unlikely and then reacted to it in a way that I thought was for writing purposes only because no human being would do this. And I went to Larry after the table read and I said, ‘Larry, please help me. First of all, this wouldn’t happen to anybody. But if it did, no one would react like this.’ And Larry looked at me and went, ‘What are you talking about? This happened to me. This is exactly what I did!’
Well, they do say write what you know, and that’s apparently what Larry David did. He took his own hilarious, real-life scenarios and incorporated them into the show. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, as David played a wildly exaggerated version of himself in his HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, back in the early days of Seinfeld, it did throw Alexander for a loop.
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When he concluded that George was just Larry David in fictional character form, however, it really unlocked something. Recalling how this realization changed the way he played his Seinfeld character, the actor said:
And that was when the bell went off in my head. And I went, ‘Oh geez, he’s George. He’s George. He’s writing George.’ That’s when I got introduced to the Larry David notebooks where almost everything, some element of every story we did on Seinfeld, came out of something that happened to him. And that’s when Woody Allen went away and I started to laser focus on what makes Larry, Larry and incorporate as much of it as I could into the building of that character.
No wonder Jason Alexander did such a top job as George! Larry David put a version of himself into the character, and once Alexander noticed that, he modeled his performance after the show’s co-creator.
Looking back on Alexander’s revelation, it reminds me of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode when he guest-starred as himself, joining Larry David’s idea for a fictional Seinfeld reunion. But when Alexander quit, David decided to replace him as George for the reunion and ended up doing a terrible job. It was a hilarious way of showing that while the Seinfeld co-creator was the blueprint for George, no one could bring him to life the way Jason Alexander did.
Anyway, just when Jason Alexander thought “no human being could do” what George Constanza did on one of the best sitcoms of all time, Larry David actually had done it. With the comedic stylings of both men, George hilariously showed audiences that life’s funniest moments can come from our most painful human experiences.
Feel free to revisit some of George’s funniest and most neurotic moments on Seinfeld by streaming it with a Netflix subscription.
