Susie Essman berates Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. "Larry had called me about a year after we finished season eight and told me, 'We're done, it's over, I'm never doing it again.' I cried. I went into a kind of depression. The thought of never putting on those Susie Greene outfits again was so disturbing to me. I was not ready for her to die." It wasn't till about a year ago that David, over one of their routine phone calls – the two are old friends from their days on New York's stand-up circuit in the mid-'80s – revealed an inkling to return. "Once he said that, I knew we'd be doing it … Larry, he's not a casual kind of guy," she laughs. The comic genius is known to pore obsessively over episode outlines, grinding out his unique observations and angsty situations like some sort of tortured sculptor.

"Larry always thinks that all his ideas are dried up and he's never going to be able to do it again, which of course is ridiculous," says Essman. "We're talking about one of the most fertile minds I've ever met. But once he came up with, I don't know, four or five outlines he was happy with, then he said we're on. I gotta tell you, I was pretty happy." The new season, which Essman says picks up with Larry and crew back in Los Angeles, finished shooting in March. Despite being bizarrely targeted in August's HBO hack, which saw scripts and clips from the series leaked alongside episodes of pirate fave Game of Thrones, details remain scant ahead of its premiere – and Essman isn't playing. "I will tell you that at some point I'll be cursing, yelling, screaming, and kicking Larry out of my house," she offers. Well, you'd hope so. Essman, as Curb's perennially apoplectic Susie, has turned cursing into an art form, her Bronx-inflected rants – whether directed at Larry ("you freak of f---ing nature") or her cheating husband Jeff ("that fat f---") – ranking alongside Peter Capaldi's sprays on The Thick Of It as TV's all-time great ragers. The shrill, begrudging housewife has long been a stock sitcom character, sprung from the minds of male writers eager to set up easy punchlines – a concern Essman says troubled both her and David at first, and subscribed to dialling the invective to 11.

"The first season we were doing an episode called The Wire, where Jeff (Garlin) brings an underprivileged kid into the house and the kid robs us blind. It was the first Susie tirade I ever did, and I remember Larry, he yells 'cut', pulls me aside and says, 'Don't hold back, go for it, " she says. "It must've been like, nine, 10 takes, and then Larry goes, 'I want you to make fun of Jeff's fat.' I was reluctant," she laughs. "But that was the first time I called Jeff a 'fat f---' and it was like the genie was let out of the bottle! I started going full tilt. The character just took form, and she really made sense. "I think what I try to do with Susie ... she's not acting angry, she is angry," Essman continues. "The tirades can't be rote. People have this impression of Susie as a raging lunatic, when the truth is she's always provoked. Larry provokes her! Her anger is real." The show's casual blur of fact and fiction, a play on personas still influencing imitators almost two decades after its debut (see: Andrew Dice Clay's Dice, or Rob Schneider's Real Rob – or rather, don't), has resulted in awkward fan encounters. "These husbands come up to me on the street and say, 'My wife is exactly like you!', and I go, 'Why the hell are you still married to her?!' I don't speak that way in real life. I might've gone Susie Greene on each of my kids at least once, but, you know, teenagers will do that to you.

"The idea that people think we're our characters is hilarious to me," she adds. "Larry is nothing like Larry on the show. He always tells me he aspires to be that character. You know, that jerk who will say exactly what's on his mind without any filter. I mean, Larry might think and feel all those things, as we all do, but he has tact and sensitivity and cares about other people's feelings. It's a fantasy thing, which is why people can relate." Season Nine of Curb Your Enthusiasm premieres on The Comedy Channel on October 2. The channel will be airing a back-to-back marathon of Seasons One to Eight from September 30.