Jane Fonda hits Netflix with ‘Grace and Frankie’

TORONTO – Sorry, “Nine to Five” fans, but Dolly Parton will never be on “Grace and Frankie.”

So says Jane Fonda, who reunites with another “Nine to Five” co-star, Lily Tomlin, for the new Netflix series debuting Friday.

The screen legend notes she’s been frequently asked about Parton as she’s fielded interviews about her latest project, an odd-couple comedy about two women sent reeling when their respective husbands announce they are gay and plan to marry.

Fonda says the trio have stayed close since filming their 1980 workplace comedy feature. But they’re not interested in revisiting it.

“This is very different than ‘Nine to Five’ and we have to create and establish our own identity as a different style and different show,” Fonda says during a recent phone interview from New York.

“So no (she won’t be on). We love Dolly to pieces, but no.”

Fonda stars as the uptight Grace, whose lawyer husband Robert, played by Martin Sheen, leaves her for his law partner Sol, played by Sam Waterston. Tomlin plays Sol’s peyote-taking hippie wife Frankie, who rubs Grace the wrong way.

The Canadian Press reached the 77-year-old Fonda by phone this week:

CP: So nice to see you and Lily Tomlin together again on screen.

Fonda: I love working with her. We’ve remained friends over the intervening 34 years since “Nine to Five” and I don’t know, we get along really well and I think we have really good energy together.

CP: Tell me about Grace. She seems so fastidious, how could she not know her husband was gay?

Fonda: Grace is a woman who takes so much of her identity from externals — “I’m married to Robert, we belong to the right clubs, I wear the right clothes, I’m skinny” — all these superficial things. She kind of lives in this little box. The only breakout thing she did was start this quite successful beauty product business and she is a good businesswoman. But now she doesn’t even have that, so she’s in this little tight box and if Robert stayed with her for the rest of her life, she would die in a little tight box. Probably even more brittle and judgmental as time went on.

She will in time come to realize that Robert did her a real favour by leaving. Because what kind of a marriage is it when you don’t know that your husband is in love with another man for 20 years? Do you know what I mean? It was a family in which honesty was dangerous, the truth was a danger. There couldn’t have been any real intimacy…. But now that this has happened, Grace is going to be free to become who she was meant to be all along.

CP: And a lot of that has to do with her relationship with Frankie.

Fonda: Although she really doesn’t like Frankie, and they’re like oil and water in the beginning, in time she will realize Frankie is in fact the ideal person for her to be on a life raft with. She needs to loosen up, she needs to be more forgiving, she needs to see other ways of doing things. And on the other hand, Frankie needs the kind of organization and responsibility and to learn boundaries from Grace. So they can learn from each other, as friends are supposed to do.

CP: More obvious humour comes from Frankie but Grace has her gags, too. Do you enjoy physical humour and will we see more of that?

Fonda: I do and yes you will. Hopefully in what I hope will be our second season.

CP: It would be tempting to focus on the men’s storyline here. Normally, the women would fade into the background and you wouldn’t see them again.

Fonda: Especially if they’re old.

CP: Exactly.

Fonda: Well, that’s why I wanted to do a television series, because I wanted to have older women that are different than most older women we see in the mass media and be the central focus.

CP: It might not be common to have a gay ex-husband, but how universal are the issues Grace and Frankie face?

Fonda: They’re very common, it’s just that we don’t see them in the media. And so consequently women feel kind of left out. And older women are the fastest growing demographic in the world so it’s about time that the media starts reflecting our realities.

— This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow @cszklarski on Twitter.

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