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Jason Alexander reveals the real reason his Seinfeld fianceé was killed off
The four protagonists in Seinfeld may have been self-obsessed misanthropes, but no one came closer to spending the rest of his life with someone than George Costanza. Much of Seinfeld's seventh season followed George's extended engagement with Susan Ross (Heidi Swedberg) — which suddenly ended when Susan died after licking the toxic glue on their wedding invitations.
What led to such a sudden and bizarre death? In a recent interview with Howard Stern, star Jason Alexander revealed the real reason Susan was killed off on Seinfeld:
"The preamble to this is: the actress is this lovable girl, Miss [Heidi] Swedberg. And she is... I couldn't figure out how to play off her. Her instincts... her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine, were always misfiring. And she would do something and I would go, 'Oh, I see what she's gonna do. I'm gonna adjust to her. And then I'd adjust, and then it would change!I had done three episodes and Larry [David] called me up at the beginning of the season and said, 'Good news! I got a great arc for you this season. You're going to get engaged.' And I said, 'Oh, that's great! Who do I get engaged to?' And he said, 'Susan.' And I said, 'Oh, great. Who's playing George?' Because it was, like such a disaster. But what he said was, what Heidi brought to the character was that we could do the most horrible things to her, and the audience was still on my side."
Though she appeared in 12 episodes of Seinfeld, Susan finally got the boot when Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus filmed an episode opposite Swedberg and had the same complaints. "Julia actually said, 'Don't you want to just kill her?' And Larry went, 'Kabang! Now we gotta kill her," said Alexander.
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Update: As the Howard Stern interview spread across the internet, Jason Alexander took to Twitter to offer an extended apology to Heidi Swedberg for his comments. "Ok folks, I feel officially awful," he wrote, clarifying that the problem was the the lack of "security" or "maturity" he took in his own work. "Now with distance, I can look at those episodes and see that there was a fun relationship there between George and Susan," he wrote. "It works perfectly. I simply couldn't see it or find it at the time."
Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.
