It takes a lot to get Jennifer Tilly away from the poker table. A love for the game turned into a full-on obsession after meeting her boyfriend—professional poker player Phil Laak—and tournaments fill her calendar, leaving little time to act.
Unless an old friend like Dave Foley comes calling.
“I have a lot of things going on in my life and my agents asked about this, assuming I’d say no, and I went, ‘Dave Foley! I want to see him again!'” Tilly appears in Tuesday’s new episode of Spun Out—”The Secret of My Ex-Wife’s Success”—as Maggie Felgate, one of Dave Lyons’ exes. As Tilly tells it, Maggie and Dave are still carrying a bit of a torch for each other … until Maggie poaches one of Dave’s clients to start her own PR firm.
Tilly says the allure of reuniting with Foley and the chance to visit her sister, Meg, in Toronto were both big reasons for her to agree to the role, as well as the writing. At this point in her career, she reveals, a role has to be interesting, fun, creatively fulfilling or all three to grab her attention.
“If someone had told me back when I was obsessed with acting that I’d be obsessed with poker, I have thought they were crazy,” she says with a laugh. Tilly has made a career out of signing on to interesting projects, whether it be voice work on Family Guy and The Simpsons, crime thriller Bound, cop drama Hill Street Blues or playing the girlfriend to a murderous doll in Bride of Chucky. But the malevolent child’s toy is no match for the truly scary stuff Tilly sees in Hollywood.
“A lot of Hollywood people are trying to play younger and get all shot up with Botox and have this and that done,” she says with a twinge of sadness. “I don’t want to be one of those people with the huge Botox vein.”
“I was watching a movie recently and this woman looked like she hadn’t aged in 20 years. And she started to cry. I could tell she was crying because the tears were rolling down her face, but her hairline was just twitching a little bit. It was the most horrifying thing I ever saw.”
Spun Out airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CTV.
