The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
GOLDEN GAL
Jane Fonda embraces female friendship in ‘80 for Brady’
The basic plotline for the comedy film “80 for Brady,” recently released in theaters, sounds like pure torture for any die-hard Atlanta Falcons fan: four 80-ish female Tom Brady acolytes travel to Houston to have a little fun in 2017 during that Super Bowl when the New England Patriots rallied from a 28-3 deficit in the third quarter to vanquish the Falcons.
Legendary actress and social activist Jane Fonda, who lived in Atlanta for 20 years but now resides in Los Angeles, plays one of those four women. She’s Trish, a former TV personality who became a popular author of romantic fan fiction around Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski, a Patriots tight end in 2017.
Trish is also gorgeous, falls in love easily and dons a dozen different wigs in the movie.
“You know how much it costs me to look like this?” Trish tells her friends in the opening minutes of the film. “A fortune!”
In a phone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to promote the film, 85-year-old Fonda admitted feeling a bit conflicted by the fact that the movie canonizes a man who turned near certain defeat into a miracle win against a shocked Atlanta team.
“I’m sorry,” Fonda said. “Atlanta is still like a second home to me. I’m not too happy about the fact
the Patriots beat Atlanta.”
But she was drawn to the film because of the message around female friendship and getting to work yet again with 83-year-old Lily Tomlin, her longtime partner in crime over seven seasons of “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix. Tomlin’s character Lou is the film’s protagonist, a cancer survivor who snags tickets to the Super Bowl for the foursome.
“Lily and I agreed to do it together,” Fonda said. “I
was clearly going through Lily Tomlin withdrawal.”
She was also thrilled about the casting of 76-year-old Sally Field as long-married math genius Betty and 91-year-old Rita Moreno, who plays a recent widow with a knack for gambling.
“I’ve known Sally since the 1970s,” Fonda said. “I think she’s so talented. I’m fascinated by her. She wrote a wonderful book. I’ve always wanted to work with her. It’s a dream come
true.”
As for Moreno, Fonda worked with her briefly on a short-lived TV series based off the 1980 film “9 to 5.” And go figure: “Rita played Lily Tomlin’s part from the original movie.”
Three of the women are Academy Award winners, and Tomlin was nominated for an Oscar and has the most Emmys.
Fonda said when the four legends first got together on day one of shooting, the director had a
hard time getting them to set. “We had so much to say to each other,” she said. “It was remember when, or I saw you then. We couldn’t stop talking.”
And while Field is a big football fan, Fonda said she is not. “I’m a baseball gal,” she said. “My second husband Tom Hayden played with older guys in a league up until he died (in 2016). He coached a lot of our son’s baseball games and we used to go to Vero Beach when the Dodgers were in spring training. My kids thought Tommy Lasorda was their uncle.”
The movie, loosely based on a real quartet of senior Brady fans, is a pleasant goof with a parade of smaller roles for celebrities like Billy Porter as a choreographer, Harry Hamlin as Fonda’s love interest and Guy Fieri as himself, hosting a hot wings competition that Field’s character takes part in at the fan-based NFL Experience.
With Brady’s backing, the film is a love song to the NFL and features actual footage from the 2017 Super Bowl game interspersed with the women finding a way to somehow influence the game and inspire Brady to bring the Patriots back from a 25-point deficit. The way this happened could only happen in a movie.
As the trailer shows, the ladies also work with Porter on a basic dance sequence via another plot twist that could only happen in a movie. Fonda said she had just had shoulder replacement surgery and deliberately stayed in the back row.
“I couldn’t lift my arms properly,” she said.
While shooting the film in spring 2022 in California, she didn’t realize she had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Once diagnosed, she had chemotherapy treatment and is now in remission and back at full strength.
“I didn’t have to do the last two chemo treatments,” she noted.