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The unexpected demise of George’s fiancé, Susan, at the close of Seinfeld’s seventh season—courtesy of toxic envelope glue—was influenced by an unforeseen source: Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In a 2015 chat with Howard Stern, Jason Alexander revealed that he struggled to match comedic rhythms with Heidi Swedberg, Susan’s portrayer. “I couldn’t figure out how to play off of her,” he admitted. After Seinfeld and Louis-Dreyfus participated in scenes with her, they reached similar frustrations. “They go, ‘You know what? It’s f–king impossible. It’s impossible,’” Alexander recalled, emphasizing no ill will towards Swedberg personally. Louis-Dreyfus once joked, “Don’t you want to just kill her?” and creator Larry David took it from there, responding, “Ka-bang!”
A peculiar clash erupted between the Seinfeld cast and Roseanne Barr alongside her then-spouse, Tom Arnold, over a parking mishap on the CBS lot. Louis-Dreyfus inadvertently parked in Arnold’s designated spot, prompting him to leave a sharp note, “How stupid are you? Move your f–king car, you asshole!” This led Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander, and David to confront Arnold. Following the confrontation, Louis-Dreyfus found a Polaroid of someone’s backside with the word ‘c–t’ scrawled in soap on her windshield. Barr escalated the spat publicly, branding Louis-Dreyfus a bitch on David Letterman’s show, mocking, “They think they’re doing Samuel Beckett instead of a sitcom.” In the book Seinfeldia, Alexander countered, “I am willing to bet that she has never read anything Beckett ever wrote.”
Before settling on Junior Mints as the candy of choice for Kramer in the famous episode “The Junior Mint,” the plan was initially for him to drop popcorn into the patient’s open body during surgery. Writer Andy Robin recounted to HuffPost in 2015 that a conversation with his brother inspired the switch. “I was on the phone with my brother, running the story by him, and he said, ‘No, make it Junior Mints because it’s funnier,’” Robin explained.