Julia Louis-Dreyfus is nestled into a corner booth at the San Ysidro Ranch. Airpods in, curly brown hair pinned to the nape of her neck, she’s contemplating the wildflowers that seem to grow especially tall just for the exclusive Montecito hotel— 3,000 physical and psychological miles away from Selina Meyer, the soulless DC swamp creature she’s played to perennial Emmy glory on HBO’s Veep. You might even mistake this particular diminutive lady as one of the rarefied few who can while away a Monday afternoon lunching at one of the finest establishments in all of California, or imagine that such a scene is a permanent fixture of Louis-Dreyfus’s future.

When we meet on a gloomy, late-spring day, it’s a few weeks after Veep’s seven-season flambéing of U.S. politics has come to its ash-black finale and several months after the series wrapped shooting in December. Louis-Dreyfus has won the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for each of the show’s previous six seasons and is nominated again this year. Combined with another in the category for her work on The New Adventures of Old Christine in 2006, and one a decade earlier for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy for Seinfeld, Louis-Dreyfus is currently tied with Cloris Leachman for the most acting Emmys in history. It seems all but certain she will have the honor to herself as of awards night this year.

Louis-Dreyfus has, in other words, had one of the most fruitful runs in American comedy history, and a little break might seem to be in order. Yet as we sit at the quaint Stonehouse Restaurant, it becomes quickly apparent that contemplating the Montecito wildflowers might be all the tranquility the 58-year-old can afford right now. There’s one last Veep Emmy campaign; postproduction on her upcoming film Downhill, a five-year passion project she produced and stars in opposite Will Ferrell; plus her youngest son’s graduation from Northwestern. Work, it turns out, and really only good work at that, is where Louis-Dreyfus seems to feel most complete. She loves grinding through a scene until the rhythm rings just right, when the jokes fly high and the insults land with finely calibrated precision. She seems to take breaks only when they are thrust upon her.

Photograph by Jason Bell; Styled by Nicole Chapoteau.

“I said to my husband I’m taking July and August off, and he kind of laughed,” she says. “I’m going to try to stick to it,” she continues, then pauses. “I’m looking for a new psychiatrist as we speak.”

So there’s Louis-Dreyfus’s undeniable work ethic, but there’s also the fact that with rest comes thought—and the unenviable task of unpacking all that’s happened to her in the last three years. Her beloved father died in September 2016. The following year, doctors diagnosed her with stage II breast cancer; she underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy. Then, just as Veep was ending its final season, her 44-year-old half sister died of an accidental drug overdose.