Lily Tomlin on Coming-Out Press Conferences & Kicking Nat Wolff’s Ass
In 2014, Michelle Obama and Tom Hanks toasted Lily Tomlin‘s lifetime achievement at the Kennedy Center — an honor that didn’t mark the end of her career so much as kick off a comeback. Nearly five decades after her debut on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the 75 year-old is hot: Her Netflix show Grace and Frankie, costarring Jane Fonda, was just renewed for a second season and helped Tomlin earn her 22nd Emmy nomination. And the comedienne’s new film Grandma — about a cranky lesbian septuagenarian who helps her granddaughter get an abortion, opens August 21st — was conceived entirely by writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) as a showcase for his star’s talents. As Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction.”
Grace and Frankie is a show about two older women rebooting their lives after a divorce. Why do you think it’s clicking?
We just try to make the show meaningful, you know? We really embrace issues that old people have to deal with that, truthfully, aren’t so different from what younger people deal with. You can start over at any time — and the life that you have is not the only life that is going to suit you.
When we talked a few years ago, you felt comedy was getting too cruel. Do you still feel that way?
I would never say comedy should be anything. I would just say, you should judge if it’s well-founded or really illuminating.
I ask because you’re so good at being mean. In Grandma, you beat Paper Towns star Nat Wolff with a hockey stick and say his stubbly face looks like an armpit.
Yeah, well…his character had it coming because he was a such a little shit to my granddaughter. And he sees [my character] as this old bitch who doesn’t have any relevance at all. But I don’t think I would say anything to anybody who was really vulnerable just to make them hurt.
Your character helps her granddaughter get an abortion at a time when access is being rolled back across the country.
Gloria Steinem famously said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
From Grandma to doing peyote on Grace and Frankie, you can get away with a lot you couldn’t have done before.
When I was doing specials in the Seventies, they wanted to know every word in the script. They would come down and stop us in the middle of shooting and say, “We don’t want this on the show.” They probably thought they were telling me for my own good. We had to find that out for ourselves. You can’t be told not to do something.
You and your partner Jane [Wagner] both have roots in the South. Were you surprised to see the Confederate flag come down?
I said, “Well, they’ll never take that down.” It’s kind of miraculous. At the same time, how can they do anything else? The time has come. For same-sex marriage too.