Madam President: The most memorable fictional female US Presidents in film & TV
Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, will be the stars in Chicago on Monday, as the Democratic National Convention runs from tomorrow until Thursday 22 August.
This is a historic event as Kamala Harris has already officially secured the Democratic Party’s nomination for President – becoming the first woman of colour to win a major party’s nomination.
Hollywood is expected to hit the Windy City, with the likes of Uma Thurman, Yvette Nicole Brown, Anthony Anderson, Busy Philipps, David Cross and Danai Gurira set to make an appearance.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus has even dropped a big hint to The Times that she will be attending the DNC in support of Harris, adding that she plans to be “extra-involved” in Harris’ campaign to beat Donald Trump.
The award-winning actress is famous for several of her roles on the big and small screen, including Veep, the fantastic HBO political comedy created by Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci. The show, based on fictional vice-president Selina Meyer who ends up becoming POTUS, earned Louis-Dreyfus six Emmy Awards in the titular role. It ended in 2019 but viewership of the comedy has gone through the roof since Harris’s run was announced.
Louis-Dreyfus said the show played into the fact that female candidates are always more scrutinished than their male peers. She told The Times: “That is the reality and we played into it and used it to our comedic advantage. There is an episode in which a character suggests Selina open a speech with ‘As a woman’ and she said, ‘I can’t identify as a woman! People can’t know that! Men hate that and women who hate women hate that, which I believe is most women.’ So we used that for a lot of fodder."
While there haven’t yet been any