Lily Tomlin Talks About Jennifer Aniston’s ‘9 To 5’ Remake And Why The Original Co-Stars Passed On A Sequel
Lily Tomlin knows that a remake of the 1980 comedy classic 9 to 5 would be tricky. Particularly since the world she, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton parodied has changed so much. And that’s why a sequel never happened.
“We had one official crack at the script,” Tomlin said in a People interview. “The draft just didn’t work for us. We couldn’t really see the work world today [in the pages]. People work from home. They take gig work. They don’t even know their boss. They’re at home!”
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The trio ended up passing, with Parton telling Entertainment Tonight that the women had “dropped that whole idea.”
“I don’t think we’re going to do the sequel,” she said at the time. “We never could get the script where it was enough different than the first one, and that one turned out so good.”
Jennifer Aniston is producing a reimagining of 9 to 5, with a script by Oscar winner Diablo Cody.
Tomlin had mixed feelings about that news.
“I felt sort of the same way I felt about the musical,” she said. “You know, part of you feels rejected. You think that character’s yours always. And you could reembody it.”
She added: “It’s going to be tough to make [the movie] happen. My sympathies are with Jennifer and her writer, Diablo, who is a good writer.”
Next month, Tomlin appears in Netflix’s Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, a documentary that examines how she and other LGBTQ+ comedians sharpened their wit amid the struggle for equality, turning pain into humor and laughter into change.
“The world has opened up in being able to relate to gay people,” she says. “I feel [proud] I was a part of that. I just can’t think there are more people unlike us than there are people like us. And I don’t mean gay — I mean human.”
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