Lily Tom­lin: ​‘I’m real­ly good at swearing’

Despi­ca­ble Hol­ly­wood mon­ey types are prob­a­bly kick­ing them­selves for hav­ing not cast Lily Tom­lin in a lead­ing role until now. She’s a one-time stand-up come­di­an whose ​‘This Is A Record­ing’ disc – which show­cased her bel­liger­ent, snort­ing phone oper­a­tor Ernes­tine – gar­nered acclaim and a Gram­my award. Lat­er she became a main­stay on Broad­way, and she first entered into film with a small but sig­nif­i­cant part in Robert Altman’s coun­ter­cul­tur­al state-of-the-nation address, Nashville.

Maybe peo­ple thought that a lit­tle Lily went a long way, as since her com­mer­cial break-out in ball-bust­ing work­place com­e­dy, Nine to Five, she’s remained present, but on the periph­ery of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. At 79, she’s now enjoy­ing the biggest suc­cess­es of her career, with a hit Net­flix series in Grace and Frankie, and a star­ring role in Paul Weitz’s Grand­ma, a delight­ful road trip com­e­dy in which she plays an age­ing les­bian poet who agrees to help her grand­daugh­ter stump up $650 for an abortion.

LWLies: The direc­tor of Grand­ma, Paul Weitz, has said that he wrote this movie for and about you. When some­one does that, do you feel oblig­ed to then star in the film?

Tom­lin: You have to say no if it doesn’t reflect your sen­si­bil­i­ty! That’s what’s hor­ri­ble about it all. When Paul told me, the first thing I thought was, ​‘Oh crap, what if I don’t like this?’ I read it with great trep­i­da­tion. But I thought it was won­der­ful. And we most­ly spent time try­ing to explain why Elle was broke. She had paid off lots of med­ical bills and then cut up her cred­it cards to make a wind chime. I want­ed the issue of abor­tion to be treat­ed very real­is­ti­cal­ly and have the grav­i­ty that the deci­sion requires. So all that was solved.

Grand­ma is about a grand­ma and her grand­daugh­ter who, across a sin­gle day, have this bond­ing expe­ri­ence. What was your rela­tion­ship like with your grandmother?

I did have a lit­tle some­thing with her. My grand­moth­er grew up in rur­al Ken­tucky. She’s been dead quite a few years now. My own moth­er has been dead 10 years, and she lived to be 91. My grand­moth­er lived until her mid-’80s. She was very hard of hear­ing. Deaf­ness ran in the fam­i­ly among the women. I don’t have it. Yet. I look like my father’s side of the fam­i­ly, so I feel like I don’t have that gene. Because of her hear­ing, she didn’t real­ly par­tic­i­pate in the con­ver­sa­tion when there was more than one oth­er per­son talk­ing. She was a very sweet, lit­tle tiny woman who was a farm wife all her life.

I didn’t get to spend that much time with her. I grew up in Detroit and I’d go down to Ken­tucky for the sum­mers. I stayed at her house up until I was about ten, as then I want­ed to stay with my cousins who were my age. She was a very car­ing woman. When­ev­er I get sick, I can still feel her hand on my fore­head. She sat around think­ing a lot, rarely talk­ing. One day I went to Pad­u­c­ah with her which is the big city near her farm. We vis­it­ed her sis­ter, Kate, who is my great aunt. They would be sit­ting out there on the porch, and they would just laugh and laugh and talk up a storm. I remem­ber sit­ting near my grand­moth­er and just lis­ten­ing to her. I remem­ber these moments to this day, as it was kind of a bond­ing expe­ri­ence. Just to realise that my grand­moth­er had once been a young women. She had gone to ice cream sup­pers when she and her sis­ter were single.

Ice cream suppers?

Out in the coun­try, it’s like a lit­tle par­ty where they have ice cream. But I had under­stood some­thing about her. She was not like Elle at all. Not too many grand­moth­ers would be.

With her being from Ken­tucky, I imag­ine there would be quite a big polit­i­cal difference.

Oh yes. Ken­tucky was a bit… retro.

Your char­ac­ter Elle is a poet in the film. Have you ever dabbled?

I have writ­ten some poet­ry, but noth­ing to be proud of. I had a girl­friend going to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, and they have this land­mark place up there called the Arbore­tum, which is a big gar­den with trees. I went to Wayne State Uni­ver­si­ty, which is in the city which most­ly work­ing class peo­ple went to. So I had this assign­ment to write a son­net, and i went up to the Arbore­tum and wrote it one day.

What were you studying?

I most­ly in human­i­ties, but I quick­ly switched over to pre-med, because I want­ed to be able to get a good job. We total­ly believed back then that you only did well by doing good. So… the son­net. It’s total­ly an 18-year-old ver­sion of things. I saw a tree that was grow­ing on a lit­tle knoll, and I made it metaphor­ic. When the wind blew one way, the leaves were ochre, and when the wind blew the oth­er way, they would be magen­ta. They had two sides to them. So I Iden­ti­fied with the tree. I wish I had it here dammit… It was some­thing like… ​‘The sum­mer hills, some­thing, some­thing, the wind tries still to steal her ochre hair.’ It was quite a chal­leng­ing exercise.

Did Paul Weitz know about this?

No, I for­got to tell him that. But Elle was much more of a street poet, like Eileen Myles. She came to our open­ing in New York and I got to meet here. So I have tried to write a lit­tle. But not seriously.

The char­ac­ter of Elle swears with great rel­ish in the film. How does one swear well?

You have to be mad. You have to be upset at some injus­tice, some doo­fus per­son stand­ing in your way. If you have some­thing like that, then you can just curse up a storm. The only thing I don’t like about swear­ing is using body parts as a pejo­ra­tive. It’s just too debas­ing of our own fun­da­men­tal instru­ments. Though I felt I could say ​‘ass­hole’ when Elle’s grand­daugh­ter says ​‘I’ve got an ass­hole prob­lem’. I’m real­ly good at swear­ing, but I know peo­ple who can real­ly swear.

Is that peo­ple who can cre­ative­ly string togeth­er invective?

Yeah.

The into­na­tion is also impor­tant though, and the stress on the words.

I don’t swear a lot in my own work. You might say I ​‘work clean’. But I don’t think of it as that.

Is that an indus­try term?

Yeah, but I don’t like it. It’s nau­se­at­ing. Years and years ago, Wal­ter Mon­dale was run­ning for the Demo­c­rat par­ty, and I did an indus­try ben­e­fit for him. And I do a mono­logue in the char­ac­ter of Mrs Beasley who is a mid­dle-Amer­i­can house­wife. Jane my part­ner had writ­ten a piece where Mrs Beasley pros­e­ly­tis­es about vibra­tors. Unless you were a real raunchy kind of per­former, peo­ple just didn’t want to hear about that. So Mrs Beasley just has this bril­liant mono­logue where she says [adopts posh South­ern accent]: ​‘Hel­lo I am not a pro­fes­sion­al actress, I am a real per­son like your­self. About a month ago I was shown some prod­ucts designed to improve the sex lives of house­wives. I got so excit­ed that I just had to come here to tell you about them. To look at me you’d nev­er sus­pect that I was a semi non-orgas­mic woman. This means it was pos­si­ble for me to have an orgasm but high­ly unlike­ly. To me, the term ​“sex­u­al free­dom” meant free­dom from hav­ing to have sex. And then along came Good Vibra­tions, and was I sur­prised. Now I’m a reg­u­lar cat on a hot tin roof.’

And she goes on with it for a cou­ple of min­utes… So when I did this mono­logue, War­ren Beat­ty was there and a whole bunch of peo­ple like that. In the trades the next day, they said: ​‘Lily offend­ed by doing some blue mate­r­i­al’. That was so ridiculous.

You’d think the Democ­rats would’ve had a bit more humour about it.

You’d think! It was so shock­ing. They were slow at the start­ing gate. They were too damn retro.

Grand­ma is released 11 Decem­ber. Read the LWLies review.