Jason Alexander Finally Details Why They Killed Off Susan On ‘Seinfeld’: “It Was Such A Disaster”

In the finale of Seinfeld‘s seventh season, Susan Ross — a character played by Heidi Swedberg, who was due to be married to George Costanza (Jason Alexander) — died in a sudden and extremely Seinfeld-esque way: she was poisoned after licking too many of the low-quality wedding invitation envelopes that George had decided to scrimp on.

Alexander has spoken of his difficulty working with the character in the past, explaining last year that Swedberg was cast as a lookalike, not on her acting ability. The role expanded exponentially, and he never managed to find a good dynamic with her (“I always felt as though I was punching into jello,” he told the Archive of American Television. “It was literally a chemical problem”).

But overnight on Howard Stern’s show, Alexander went into a little more depth, explaining — in a not un-patronising way — exactly how the decision got made.

“The preamble to this is the actress is this wonderful girl Ms Swedberg, and she is. I love her. She’s a terrific girl. I love her. But I couldn’t figure out how to play off of her. Her instincts for doing a scene — where the comedy was — and mine were always misfiring,” he begins. So when showrunner Larry David told Alexander that his character would be getting engaged to Susan, he responded with the opposite of enthusiasm: “I went, ‘Oh great! Who’s playing George?’ — because it was such a disaster.”

“After every episode, we’d all go out — not the guest cast, but the four of us and Larry — we’d go out and we’d have a bite to eat and we’d just bitch about everyone and everything. And I kept saying, ‘I’m going out of my mind, you guys, you’re killing me: I can’t understand how to play off of this girl. I’m sure that this stuff is not working — it can’t be!’ And they’re saying, ‘It works great, you don’t know what you’re talking about’.”

Through all this, as Larry struggled to find an ending for the season, George was the only character sharing scenes with Susan. But finally there was an episode which pushed her together with Elaine and Jerry. “And they do the week, and then we get to the restaurant afterwards, and they go, ‘You know what? It’s fucking impossible! It’s impossible!'” Alexander says.

“And Julia actually said, ‘I know! Don’t you want to just kill her?’

“And Larry went: ‘KA-BANG!'”

So: George, Elaine and Jerry got together in a restaurant to bitch about someone for something beyond their control — and that person ended up losing their job.

Sounds not too dissimilar to a Seinfeld plot-line, really.