Julia Louis-Dreyfus has insisted that she doesn’t believe Kamala Harris is anything like the female vice president she played in Veep. 

The political satire comedy has enjoyed a surge in popularity since President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy in the forthcoming presidential election and his vice president Harris took his place.

In an interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which aired live from the Democratic National Convention, Colbert mentioned that streams of the show had gone up 350 per cent.

“It’s a great thing, I think?” Louis-Dreyfus said, before emphasising that her character, Selina Meyer, bears little resemblance to Harris.

“Let me explain to you, on Veep I played a narcissistic, megalomaniac sociopath, and that is not Kamala Harris,” she said, adding: “It might be another candidate in the race.”

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She was then asked which Veep character was most like Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance. “That would be Jonah Ryan,” she said, referring to Meyer’s White House liaison, played by Timothy Simons, who frequently ends up in conflict with members of her staff. “I’m sure he’s made love to many couches,” Louis-Dreyfus joked.

Colbert pointed out that despite its tone, Veep also drew attention to the treatment of women in politics and asked if she had a favourite scene that reflected this. Louis-Dreyfus pointed to a moment between Meyer and Matt Walsh’s Mike McLintock.

“He came to me with this speech, and the speech began ‘as a woman.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘First of all, as a woman, I’m not going to start a speech with “as a woman,” because I can’t identify as a woman,’” she recalled. “Men hate that and women who hate women hate that, which is most women.”

The series originally aired between 2012 and 2019.