‘Grace & Frankie’ Creator Marta Kauffman on Creating Better Roles for Women
Friends, Veronica’s Closet, and Grace and Frankie co-creator penned an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter in which she speaks about her mission to give a platform to actresses in their 70s who are tired of playing the grandmother.
She also spoke about the now-famous billboard of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin holding dildos.
“Let’s straighten out one thing,” she started. “They’re vibrators, not dildos. A dildo mimics a penis, and a vibrator shakes you up. When we started doing Grace and Frankie, one thing we wanted to deal with was sexuality in your 70s. Once you get past a certain point, for women in particular, people dismiss you as a sexual being. The idea that these characters would start to sell vibrators targeted to older women in season three perfectly fit into our desire to tell people that you can start your life at any age. The idea to put Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda on billboards with the vibrators — that came from the annual meeting we have with Netflix and Skydance. We all glommed on to it because, well, it was freaking funny.”
She continued: “I’m the oldest person in the writers room — one that ranges from 30 up to 60 — and we’ve all done reams of research about older people and the realities that they face today. I’m not as old as Grace or Frankie, but I’m experiencing much of what they experience — maybe not to the same extreme, but I’m feeling it. There are certain things that at my age I already can identify with. I feel what these characters feel about being dismissed. After you get to a certain age, you’re not someone that people look at anymore. Women sort of disappear, especially around younger men…
“People might think that for some actors, there’s always work. But I know that Jane and Lily and Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston are so happy to have a regular job — something that they come to every day,” she writes. “I’m not sure they felt that was something that was necessarily going to happen for them again, as opposed to a movie here or a movie there. Lily and Jane are the busiest women I know in Hollywood, but Jane left the business for 15 years. She didn’t know what she was going to be coming back to. Once we got the show going, that’s when this responsibility to give an authentic look at aging became weightier. We hire many older actors, all of whom I think are tired of playing the grandmother or the grandfather. They get to come in and get to be funny. They get to be the love interest.”