In 2014, Michelle Obama and Tom Hanks toasted Lily Tomlins lifetime achievement at the Kennedy Center an honor that didnt mark the end of her career so much as kick off a comeback. Nearly five decades after her debut on Rowan and Martins 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 comediennes 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 stars 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 its clicking?
We just try to make the show meaningful, you know? We really embrace issues that old people have to deal with that, truthfully, arent 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.
Backstage With Lily Tomlin and Her Brand-New Broadway Baby12 Most Important Lines From the Historic Gay Marriage DecisionMarty Stuart on Making Ken Burns' 'Country Music'20 Insanely Great Eminem Tracks Only Hardcore Fans Know
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 its well-founded or really illuminating.
I ask because youre 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, wellhis 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 doesnt have any relevance at all. But I dont 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 couldnt 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 dont 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 cant 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, theyll never take that down. Its kind of miraculous. At the same time, how can they do anything else? The time has come. For same-sex marriage too.
Do you think celebrities like yourself coming out played a role in public opinion shifting so quickly?
Maybe in the last decade. Before that, people were much more cautious about coming out. I only officially came out in 2001 or something. And thats because a guy who was interviewing me said something about being gay and I said, Yeah. First of all, 10 years ago I couldnt imagine that anybody would be interested in my sex life. Its like, I saw a cartoon where somebodys at a press conference: Im here to announce to everyone that I am heterosexual. It seems like the same thing with people who call press conferences just to say, I am gay and Ive been gay and I will always be gay. It just struck me as some kind of benign hubris.
You didnt hide your relationship but you didnt make an announcement, either.
It wasnt necessarily easy for me to come out. When I was doing specials in the Seventies, everybody in my company knew that Jane and I were a couple. I had one of our writers say to me, I think you and Jane should come to work in different cars. I said, Well why would we do that? She said people everywhere are talking. I said, Well were not gonna go out and get another car just to drive to work!
You hit back with a joke
I was always really nimble, you know. I couldnt betray myself or lie about myself. I was on The View not long before I came out. Barbara said something like, Youve never been married. Have you just never found the right guy? I said, Now Barbara, you and I both know thats not the reason. And she just shut right up. Those kind of things happened a lot. From the 1970s forward, I wouldnt lie. I just couldnt. I could think of so many anecdotes, but I dont want to talk about them.
Now its so different.
Its meaningless now. I did what I could do in the time. I never didnt support an issue or show up for a fundraiser or do whatever I could do. Maybe I was just shy: Shy of calling a press conference.
You saw the negative side of social media when that video of you and David O. Russell went viral. Recently you had the opposite experience: Fans rallied when it was reported that Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston were being paid the same as you and Jane Fonda on Grace and Frankie. How was that resolved?
How it was resolved is that Jane and I have a back-end [payment in addition to salary, unlike Sheen and Waterston]. When I raised the issue, the guys were so funny about it. They went on the Today Show, Matt Lauer was trying to stir [things] up and they said, Jane and Lily should definitely be paid much more because they work harder. Lauer asked, So are you okay that they are paid more than you? And they said, Absolutely not! It was just great!
How did it come up?
In the New York Times article, they asked, Are you thrilled with working for Netflix on the cutting edge of the industry? I said, kind of facetiously, Well, I was pretty pleased with my check until I saw that the guys were paid the same as we are. Jane even said, They are? I didnt know that it was going to go any further because I was sort of kidding. I didnt really know what they were paid!
Really?
I guess I just took it for granted that Jane and I made more. I love [Waterston and Sheen] and Im glad that I have a piece of the back end!
Theres a dearth of female superheroes. I read you were once lined up to be Wonder Woman in a show from the creator of the Batman series.
It never happened because the Vietnam War was heating up. They shelved the project because Diana Prince [Wonder Womans alter-ego] worked at the Pentagon.
So it was a comedy?
It was supposed to be a comedy. I dont know if my costume would have been baggy or what.