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‘Our Souls At Night’ lets Jane Fonda fall in love with Robert Redford again

For Jane Fonda, her new movie “Our Souls At Night” provides the perfect capstone to her decade-spanning collaboration with Robert Redford, with whom she’s co-starred in four films beginning with the “The Chase” in 1966 and continuing with “Barefoot In The Park” (1967) and “The Electric Horseman” (1979).

Streaming on Netflix, beginning on Sept. 29, “Our Souls At Night” stars Fonda and Redford as two long-time neighbors, Addie and Louis, who begin a tentative romance after each of them loses their respective spouses.

“In “Barefoot in the Park,” it was me who couldn’t keep my hands off him,” says Fonda, a two-time Oscar winner. “I was constantly forcing myself on him. While we were making this new movie, “Our Souls at Night,” I realized that even though they’re totally different films, the dynamic between my character and his character is somewhat similar to “Barefoot in the Park.”

“My character Addie, she’s the spark plug. She’s the one that says, “Come on. Let’s do this.” She’s always kind of moving them forward and he’s kind of lagging behind. So there was that similarity. It was a lot of fun.

“And I just love the fact that these films bookend our careers. We played that young love, and just getting married and now we are playing old peoples’ love and old peoples’ sex, although in my opinion, [director] Ritesh Batra cut the sex scene too soon.”

Fonda doesn’t hold back when she discusses what it was like to fool around with Redford while the cameras rolled.

“He doesn’t like sex scenes,” she says. “And I live for sex scenes with him. He’s a great kisser. It was fun to kiss him in my 20s and then to kiss him again in my almost-80s.”

And, yes, the “Our Souls At Night” couple does hit the sheets. As far as Fonda is concerned, doing sex scenes with Redford has become more fun, the older she gets.

“I think it gets better because, first of all, we’re braver,” says the actress, 79. “What the heck do we have to lose? So, my skin sags. So does his…. I think although we never actually see the sex, Goddarn it, in this movie of ours, it’s great that they still want to have sex and that they do, and that they become profoundly together.”

It was Redford who helped put “Our Souls At Night” into production. Through his company, he acquired the rights to the novel in hopes of winning over older viewers who rarely see themselves portrayed on screen.

“The film business is pointing more towards the younger audience,” says Redford. “There are

very few opportunities for films to be made that satisfy older audience so that was one reason [I picked up the rights.]

“The second reason was that I feel that love stories always will have a life. The third was that I was looking

to do another film with Jane. We had not done one together in 37 years.

“So, I wanted to do another film with her before I died. Jane and I have a long history in film and I wanted us to be able to have another chance…I just wanted to work with Jane again.”

Fonda says that she’s been hoping to reunite with Redford as well and was tickled when he proposed

they co-star in “Our Souls At Night.”

“We had not worked together for [37 ] years and when I made the last movie with him [“Electric Horseman”], the Sundance Institute was just beginning, and now what he created has really changed American cinema in the most profound ways.

“I not only love him and admire him as an actor, a

director and a producer, but this is a man who has had a profound effect on American cinema, and so I wanted to be able to spend time with him and see what he had become.

“Plus, I wanted to be able to fall in love with him again. I always was in love with him in all the movies that I made with him.”

If Fonda’s best-selling memoir “My Life So Far” is

to be believed, the actress has not only been smitten with Redford onscreen but she’s been smitten with him offscreen as well. While she wrote that nothing ever happened romantically between them, she’s fallen for him every time they worked together.

Asked if those romantic feelings impacted their performances in the new movie, Redford says, “I think you can say there were things that were unspoken and spoken. The unspoken, I think, carried a certain weight to it. That’s all I’ll say.”

For her part, Fonda isn’t willing to give up hope that she and Redford might one day hook up offscreen as well as on.

“It’s never too late,” she says with a laugh.