Cheers star Rhea Perlman: ‘All we cared about in the Sixties was sex and drugs'

Telegraph

05-07-2025

She was the beating heart of one of the best-loved, most-watched sitcoms of all time. In 269 episodes of Cheers, Rhea Perlman made the hard-to-love waitress Carla Tortelli the emotional core of the show. She was brash and bad-tempered with a sharp tongue, the mother to an ever-growing brood of children, who once begged Ted Danson's bar owner Sam Malone, 'You can't fire me, think of my kids, if I didn't have this job, I'd have to stay home with them.'
Carla sparred continually with the barfly Norm, played by George Wendt, who died in May from a heart attack at the age of 76. 'I can't even think about his passing without crying,' Perlman tells me today, her voice breaking. 'I tell you, he was such a wonderful man, one of the sweetest people I've ever met.'
Of course, Carla 'got to beat him up sometimes', she notes, smiling at the memory; it was a running gag that she would punch Norm on the arm when he annoyed her, 'and sometimes he'd go, 'Stop! It's hurting!'' The two shared a natural comic rapport. And Perlman's ­timing still comes easily to her, at 77, as she proves in Lena Dunham's follow-up to her groundbreaking HBO drama Girls (2012-17).
Too Much is an offbeat love story, mostly set in London (where Dunham now lives). Perlman plays grandmother to Megan Stalter's (Hacks) Jessica, who has lost the man she loves to a social-media influencer (played by tabloid favourite Emily Ratajkowski) and has moved in with the matriarch of the family.
Dunham has leant in to Perlman's talent for playing tell-it-like-it-is women and given her one of the smuttiest opening scenes for a grandmother ever seen on tele­vision. But the actress revelled in the opportunity to play a character who subverts expectations, especially those relating to what people of a certain age are supposed to do or say. 'That's a gift, when somebody writes those kind of lines for an old lady, something totally out of character for any old lady. I mean, I don't feel like an old lady, but I'm certainly not a young lady.'
Girls was lauded for its no-filter depiction of millennial women living sometimes messy lives, and for not trying to people-please by making the audience like them. Its lead character, Hannah Horvath (Dunham), had an openly autobiographical element. Many will draw similar conclusions about Too Much, and Dunham's break-up from Taylor Swift's producer Jack Antonoff (who's now married to the actress Margaret Qualley). But the sexual frankness of Perlman's role, at least, bears few similarities to her life growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s.
'I came from a very middle-class Jewish family,' she says. 'We never talked about sex. And when I did start going out with guys, I never brought them home.'
Home now is Los Angeles, where she is today, and where she attended one of the anti-Trump 'No Kings' marches that took place in more than 2,000 locations across America on June 14.
Hers was in her local neighbourhood of West Hollywood – away from the area of the city where the president had sent National Guard troops, yet Perlman's anxiety about what is happening in the US is palpable. 'There are a lot of people here who feel scared,' she says, 'because of this administration that seems to be, without any thought, ­dissolving our democracy.'
Her opinion of Trump is unequivocal. 'He's a dangerous man. I thought he was awful as the president to begin with and was never presidential. And now he's almost anti-­presidential. He's just taking anything that we have away from us because he can. And we don't trust him. You can't trust a guy who has no respect. We've all lived with this constitution that we respected, and it served us well for a long time.'
It's happening at a moment when Perlman is having something of a renaissance. She has played a casino mob boss in Poker Face and re­created the inventor of the Barbie doll, Ruth Handler, in Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie's 2023 blockbuster Barbie, although, she confesses, 'I had no idea it'd be that big. I mean, I thought it was a great idea... [but] I thought it was remarkable that it became that huge of a hit.
'And then there was the com­petition with the Christopher Nolan movie [Oppenheimer], which was night and day, but I thought, if anything, Barbie was the better movie. And I didn't like when people complained about it being about a toy. It's about what children like to do and need to do. They need to have dolls. When you're a child, they're not just a toy. My granddaughter has a baby doll that she rolls around in a carriage. It's a very important part of their upbringing. I didn't like when people came down on it – 'Oh, of course, it's going to be big. It was a famous toy.' Barbie was an important piece of life.'
Married to fellow diminutive actor Danny DeVito – 'I am definitely still married to him. We just don't live together' – Perlman's granddaughter's mother, Gracie, is a painter of lush, colour-filled impressionistic works; she also has a grandson by her other daughter, the actress Lucy DeVito; her son Jake is a film producer.
Perlman and her future husband began dating at the start of the 1970s and went on to play a fictional couple on the much-loved sitcom Taxi, which also launched the careers of Andy Kaufman and Christopher Lloyd.
Cheers would have a similar ­stellar-nursery quality, making stars of Danson, Shelley Long, Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammer, as well as ­Perlman. 'Ted's a legend, he was a legend in the show, and he still is – and these are all good people,' she says. 'There weren't a lot of assholes around our show.' Harrelson took over the role of bartender from Nich­olas Cola­santo's 'Coach', after the actor died from a heart attack, aged 61, following the third season. 'He was so much the right person to take that part and he's a lot of fun to be with,' she says, before adding, 'he got into a lot of trouble off camera in those days.'
(Harrelson earned a reputation as a wild partier during his time on the show, reportedly claiming to have sex with several women a day and joking that he felt trapped in a relationship after three hours.)
Perlman has seen huge changes during her more than 50 years in the industry. She started out in a more permissive era, coming of age in the 'let it all hang out' counterculture days of the 1960s. She contrasts it with her character's advice to­ ­Jessica in Too Much about why her boyfriend left her – 'You know, 'If you had just gotten yourself together better, he would never have left, and you could still get him back, if you just dress right, do a ­little something...' that wasn't anything we thought about,' she insists. 'I mean, all we cared about was sex and drugs.'
She's not talking about her teenage years at home. '[Sex] just wasn't part of my life... [comic pause], unfortunately. Any relationships I had were when I got to college, and then we were having relationships with everybody every day.'
She recognises that some of the shifts in sexual attitudes since then have been positive, including how the subject is portrayed on tele­vision. 'In lots of ways, you feel freer, but it's shown in a different way. In those days, people started working nude. That happened. I don't know what year it was, but I was a very young actress and that's when I did that play called Dracula Sabbat. It was a Dracula story, and nobody was wearing any clothes. And I invited my parents to it, and they were appalled. 'How could I dare invite them?' you know?'
This was a 1970 off-Broadway production, which The New York Times suggested made 'The Dirtiest Show in Town seem like Charley's Aunt', writing that, 'these people get up to capers in Transylvania that Bela Lugosi never dreamt of in his wildest nightmares'.
'It was a crazy time, and now people have seen a lot of things in film and on television – if the network lets them,' she adds. 'But a lot of things are censored now.'
Of course, Dunham made a habit of appearing nude in Girls, and there's certainly very little that's censored about Too Much. But it also has charm and an all-star cast that includes Richard E Grant, Andrew Scott and Stephen Fry. Perlman is optimistic it will find its audience.
'I hope people have fun watching it; it's light-hearted and has a lot to say. I think it'll be very successful and enjoyable, as Girls was. I mean, that was a very risqué show, all those years ago. Wow. Lena's relationship with Adam Driver? I'd never seen anything that sexual on a show before, and enjoyably so, because they were so great together and so free. I never get those parts. Where's my Adam Driver? Where's my Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Adam Driver in it?'
Too Much launches on Netflix on Tuesday 10 July