Tomlin only plays football fan on big screen
‘80 for Brady’ star says QB completely natural as film actor
Lily Tomlin’s not one for football.
“I’m not terribly involved in sports,” says the actor and comedian of her interest in Sunday gridiron showdowns. “The other girls will say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a big sports fan! And how about that when so-and-so did such-and-such?’ and all that. Like someone was saying when (Tom) Brady lost the last Bucs game,
‘The defense was not helping him.’ Well, I might not make that conclusion.”
Tomlin “took a look” at that recent game but didn’t find herself mentally or emotionally engaged in the on-field action.
“Whatever it is that makes me interested in stuff, I just don’t relate to it in the way the person that is inclined that way relates to it,” says the Emmy, Grammy and Tony winner and Oscar nominee. “I see a football game on television, I don’t think, ‘Oh my god, who’s playing? Who’s playing? Oh there’s No. 14, oh my god, there’s No. 3!’ I don’t know that. I haven’t tried to learn.”
Even though Tomlin wasn’t glued to her television during the NFL playoffs, football is relevant to the discussion because she’s one of the stars of “80 for Brady,” a warmhearted comedy about four senior friends who travel to the Super Bowl to root on their hero, Brady. The film — co-starring Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and yes, Brady — is now in theaters.
It’s Tomlin’s most high-profile, big-screen role in two decades and the latest part in a career that stretches back to the late 1960s. Tomlin broke out on “Rowan & Martin’s
Laugh-In” in 1969 and has been a steady presence in arts and culture ever since; she’s a 30-time Emmy nominee (and seven-time winner), a winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and a 2014 Kennedy Center Honors recipient.
Ask Tomlin what she has learned during the years, and she answers with typical irreverence and humor.
“Not much,” says the 83-year-old.
“I’m so amazed when all my friends give interviews, and they have, like, life philosophies. They all figured out so much! They have wise, eloquent things to say about the passage of time. And me? I have nothing to say.”
Tomlin joined “LaughIn” during the show’s second season and stayed on for five seasons, earning her first Emmy nomination for the series in 1971. She later collected her first
Emmy for 1973’s “Lily,” her CBS variety special; she won again for 1975’s “The Lily Tomlin Special.”
Through the ’70s, she performed on Broadway, released comedy albums and starred in a series of movies, including Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” which earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.
She starred in several comedy hits in the 1980s, including 1984’s “All of Me” (opposite Steve Martin) and 1988’s “Big Business” (opposite Bette Midler), and she returned to TV in the 1990s and 2000s, playing Miss Frizzle in “The Magic School Bus” and an executive secretary to Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet on “The West Wing.”
Tomlin provided the voice for Aunt May in the 2018 animated hit “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” And, in 2013,
she married her creative partner, Jane Wagner.
Through the years, Tomlin’s most fruitful on-screen partnership has been with Fonda, whom she met while making 1980’s “9 to 5.” Fonda had been trying to get the movie off the ground for a while and had envisioned a more serious-leaning project, but after seeing Tomlin in a comedy show at the time, she decided to bring in Tomlin and make it a more humorous affair.
It worked. “9 to 5” — which also starred Dolly Parton and Dabney Coleman — was a monster success, grossing more than $100 million in theaters and becoming the year’s second biggest hit, behind “The Empire Strikes Back.” It went on to be a programming staple in the early days of cable television.
Fonda and Tomlin reunited in the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie,” which ran for seven seasons on the streamer, from 2015 to 2022. The pair also teamed up for “Moving On,” a comedy due in theaters in March.
“I have great affection for Jane, because Jane has had such an incredible life,” says Tomlin, who says she was a huge fan of the actor and activist dating back to 1971’s “Klute.”
“Her mantra from an early age was, ‘I can make it better.’ She has clung to that, and she has really tried to make things better for a whole lot of people.”
Fonda and Tomlin were the first two parties on board for “80 for Brady,” which is loosely based on the real-life story of Brady superfans and their unwavering support of the quarterback.
The pair was brainstorming on co-stars and came up with Field and Moreno, “and it’s so funny because they’re the two players who aren’t 80: (Moreno) is 90 and (Field) is in her 70s,” Tomlin says. (Tomlin and Fonda, who is 85, fit the title’s billing. Field is 76, and Moreno is now 91.)
They pitched the pair to producers, and Field and Moreno came on board. “They could have forced anybody on us,” Tomlin says, “and they might have eliminated us in the process.”
In the film, Tomlin plays Lou, a superstitious Brady fan battling back after a cancer bout who at one point pep talks her hero, No. 12, to a come-frombehind Super Bowl victory. Tomlin says the seven-time Super Bowl champion was very comfortable in front of the camera.
“As an actor, he was completely natural, very effective. He’s a performer,” Tomlin says. “As an athlete, he’s a performer, and as an actor, he’s a performer, and those worlds meet very nicely in a movie about football.”
“Diners, Dine-Ins and Drives” star Guy Fieri also appears in the film (“great fun, very off-the-cuff, kind of wild,” Tomlin says of the Flavortown mayor), and the movie features a theme song by the all-star team of Parton, Belinda Carlisle, Cyndi Lauper, Gloria Estefan and Debbie Harry.
Looking ahead, her work slate is clean, “and maybe I’ll keep it that way,” Tomlin says.
Her goal for 2023? “I’d like to lie in a hammock by a stream,” she says, and any old stream will do. “I figure there’s one somewhere in the world. I would just lie there, kind of comatose.”
Circling back to the topic of life lessons and advice, it turns out Tomlin does have a little wisdom to impart after her 50-plus years in show business. She just had to think about it a little.
“Save your money. If you make a dollar, save a dime,” Tomlin says. “And always wear sunscreen.”