To say that wrapping up Grace and Frankie’s seven-season run during the pandemic was surreal would be a huge understatement—akin to saying that Lily Tomlin’s stoner-hippie character only kinda likes Del Taco. But June Diane Raphael, who plays Grace’s shark of a daughter Brianna, is “living in the celebration piece of it.” Better yet? There’s a chance we haven’t seen the last of the Hansons and Bergsteins.
Speaking with The Daily Beast ahead of the show’s last hurrah on Netflix, Raphael said she’s already pitched the streamer on a spinoff series she wrote alongside Marta Kauffman’s Grace and Frankie co-creator, Howard J. Morris. “It’s in their hands,” she said. “But I have a whole other life for her and a whole other future that I’m so obsessed with.”
Grace and Frankie is now the longest-running series on Netflix, yet Raphael hadn’t even been aware the streamer made original series when the opportunity to join one first presented itself. Over the years, the show has transformed from a sitcom about two women who have to learn not to hate each other after their husbands leave them for one another into a deeper exploration of familial love and dysfunction.
Raphael’s character, Brianna, has transformed as well—from a boss bitch who loves nothing more than yelling at people on the phone into a boss bitch who recognizes that sometimes, just sometimes, it’s OK to lead with kindness. (Although a bold suit in a loud color or print also never hurts.)
As fans begin to watch the show’s heartwarming final episodes, Raphael chatted about what it’s been like to be part of a series that imagines so many possibilities that fall outside of the usual prescribed boxes for women of all ages. She also explained why, in her opinion, Barry and Brianna’s breakup was the best possible ending for the couple.
Raphael, who co-founded a membership club aimed at providing Hollywood moms a workspace and once co-wrote a guide book for women who want to run for office, loves that her character is a woman who doesn’t know how to act. (And, for that matter, also doesn’t care.)
“It brings up a lot for people,” she said with a laugh. “It still feels like there’s still so many limitations on what we’re able to play [as women].”
When it comes to Brianna, “I think really her ambition, her unapologetic ambition, is to me the thing that I’ve really loved exploring about her.”
Going into this final season, Raphael’s worst nightmare was the idea that her gloriously messy character’s life might be tied up neatly in a little trope-y bow—in other words, “that we might end with a big old wedding and all that jazz.”
For several seasons now, Brianna has been in love with her former colleague, the delightfully dorky accountant Barry (Peter Cambor). Raphael praised the strange blend of goofiness and inner strength that her co-star brought to this role; the two developed a shared vocabulary over the years that allowed them to improvise their way through the characters’ one-of-a-kind dynamic. (It’s not often that you meet a guy who’s willing to face his parents right after they’ve accidentally seen a sext of you on a bed, spread eagle—and even rarer to find one who will immediately tell them that a similar nude photo exists of himself.)
“I love this kind of weird relationship that really flips the script on a lot of how we think about gender roles,” Raphael said. But even more than that, she appreciated that the characters’ strange antics never detract from the obvious love they have for one another.
Brianna might be a bit of a bully, she said, but Raphael “felt really strongly that you do want to feel like she really loves him—and even if she’s hard on him that there is a line. I never felt like we crossed it, but I know that there were many conversations along the way of like, Is this too hard? Can we pull back here?”
Ultimately, however, the couple’s journey ends with a breakup.
Brianna can’t deal with Barry’s choice to become a father by donating his sperm to a friend and her partner so that they could conceive, and Barry (rightly) refuses to downplay the role his biological daughter has begun to play in his life. Brianna’s source of hope for the future as the series comes to a close is not a romantic relationship but a burgeoning business partnership with her sister, Mallory (Brooklyn Decker).
As someone more accustomed to projects that end after just one season, Raphael has been thrilled to see how successful Grace and Frankie has become—not just with older audiences but with viewers of all ages. More than anything, however, she treasures the time she spent learning from the four veteran actors around which the series is built. “For me,” she said, “it’s been like a graduate-level acting class watching them do their thing.”
Raphael used the same word to describe Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sam Waterston (who plays Tomlin’s ex-husband, Sol Bergstein) and Martin Sheen (Fonda’s ex, Robert Hanson) as performers—egoless. (“I mean, they’ll take a note from anyone walking down the street!”)
“People my age are constantly worried about the next job or listening to what everybody else is working on, or there’s such raging insecurities on sets,” Raphael said. Her octogenarian co-stars, on the other hand, “are there because they want to do the work. And they are doing the work not because it’s leading to necessarily the next thing, but for the sake of it.”
Seeing how deeply her colleagues invest themselves for the sheer joy of their craft, Raphael said, will forever change how she views her own work. And as for what it was like to learn from Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin? She was about as effusive as one might expect.
When asked who in the cast was most like their character, Raphael picked Tomlin—not because she’s a space cadet (“Lily’s smart as a whip”) but because of her innate lovability. Most inspiring to Raphael, however, is Tomlin’s ability to be truly free when she performs—both in body and mind. Watching her work has been a reminder, Raphael said, to “not give a fuck about the vanity piece of it.”
“I think no matter what, women do still feel like we’re looked at first and then we’re listened to,” Raphael said. “Working as an actress on mostly male-dominated crews... you’re sharing your vulnerability, your comedy, whatever you’re doing, and in a room full of men. That’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always been self-conscious about that... So watching the way [Tomlin] works from a place of total freedom is amazing to see. I feel like I’ve only maybe felt that a few times in my career, fleeting glimpses of what that’s like. But I know what it is. And I know when I watch her, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s where I want to get to.’”
Fonda, Raphael said, is least like her character; where Grace can be cold and emotionally distant, she describes Fonda as generous, giving, loving.
“If Lily is totally outside-in and physical, Jane is completely inside-out,” Raphael said. “It’s amazing to see. She is so prepared and internally available.”
With colleagues like these, it’s easy to imagine why Raphael is sad to say goodbye to the show that’s been their home for nearly a decade. “I’ve experienced so much life during these seven years,” she said. “I have two children. I lost a parent. It definitely felt like the end of a chapter of my life.”
The goodbye was even harder, she said, because the pandemic obliterated any chance to end with the traditional wrap parties and festivities—an unfortunate side effect Raphael admits was “really, really strange” to process. Still, the press tour has become something of a victory lap for the cast and crew in the absence of these rituals, and given how many series were canceled—and the fact this one’s stars, as eightysomethings, are immunocompromised—the fact that Grace and Frankie got to shoot the rest of its final season at all still feels like a miracle.
“I still feel like, oh my God, thank God we got to finish the series,” Raphael said.
As she looks toward the future, she said she’s trying to be a bit discerning about what’s next. She’s played Brianna for so long that it’ll take a little time and thinking to decide exactly what that looks like, but she already knows one thing: “I’m just really excited to sink my teeth into another really demented lady.”
