Lily Tomlin was driving down Moorpark Street in the Valley, talking about that time she ended up on the news for cutting down her eucalyptus trees. “They said I had dendrophobia, fear of trees!” Tomlin said with her characteristic cackle of a laugh. “I can’t remember why we started talking about this.”
The circuitous conversation had begun on the topic of the soft brakes in her ’55 Dodge, which nearly rolled over her in her driveway once .(We were not in the Dodge, thank God, but in Tomlin’s Lexus). The neighbor who had complained about the trees came to Tomlin’s aid, validating her worldview that most human beings are better and more interesting than we think.
It’s a philosophy that has animated Tomlin’s work, from the rich and riotous characters she created as a young comic in the 1960s and ’70s to the textured and topical ones she’s playing today. Tomlin plays an acerbic lesbian widow helping her granddaughter get an abortion in a critically praised film called “Grandma” and an aging hippie whose husband has left her for his male law partner in a new Netflix series with old friend Jane Fonda, “Grace and Frankie,” which just got picked up for a second season.
At 75, Tomlin is, much to her surprise, happening.
“I’ve been flung back into hipdom,” she says in her Studio City office, a room stuffed with the debris of her extraordinary five-decade career, including Tonys, Emmys, Peabodys, the covers of magazines such as Ms. and Rolling Stone and a comically large key to the city of Provincetown, Mass. “I’m very existential. I don’t believe a lot of stuff other humans believe about fame. I can’t believe I’ve been well-known for as long as I’ve been and just keep on doing it. The time has just evaporated.”