Jennifer Tilly, a poker champ and scream queen, talks about her hardscrabble past and fortunate present.
She has been electrocuted, hatcheted, murdered by a doll with her soul trapped inside it. She has also notched up an epic kill count of her own, decapitating one victim with a nail file,
“At least in the Chucky movies you get stabbed in the front,” Jennifer Tilly said coolly, shooting a knowing look at this reporter as she lands the rimshot.
We are in a booth of the Margaux restaurant at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village. It is midafternoon and we are the only customers in the place. Tilly is wearing a simple black minidress with a flounced neckline cut low. Decolletage is her wardrobe default.
Picking at a mesclun salad, Tilly appears young enough to force a double-take; at 66, she has spent four decades in the public eye. The Academy Award nomination she sometimes fudges in conversation to make it seem like a win came so long ago that Bill Clinton was President.
That was for her inspired portrayal of a mobster’s floozy hellbent on a theatrical career in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. The role, as written, was a camp inside a parody inside a million show business cliches. And it was a keystone in a career whose watchword could be “meta”.
Tilly has a knack for embodying characters who somehow stand above or outside themselves. Think the scream queen Tiffany Valentine in the endlessly recurring Chucky horror series. Think of her stylised lesbian femme fatale, Violet, in the thriller Bound, the directorial debut of Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Think of her turn as a conniving gold-digger in the Jim Carrey comedy Liar Liar.
You would probably have to look back to the 1950s to find an actor with a career resembling Tilly’s. In that benighted era, smart and beautiful women like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Holliday were perennially cast in jiggle roles: empty headed, screen-filling eye candy. Each was obliged to squander much of her talents playing cartoon characters. Tilly has also been cast in her share of cartoons – literally, in the case of her voice work for the Monsters, Inc. films and Family Guy TV show – and yet she always conveys that she’s in on the gag.
“Jennifer can seem almost like a caricature of herself with the boobs and her voice and all the jewellery,” said Sutton Stracke, a cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and one of Tilly’s closest friends. “But behind all that is a wildly brilliant intelligence that can sometimes overwhelm you and sometimes sneak right by.”
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Advertise with NZME.Tilly joined the Bravo series in its current season, which wrapped up in March. The reunion episodes will air in April. For a while, she had been popping up on the show as “a friend,” said Andy Cohen, the host and executive producer of the franchise, and he liked what he saw. “When she enters a scene, you want to watch,” he said. But when he asked her to amp up her participation, she didn’t jump at the chance.
“She didn’t want to do it,” Stracke said. “I had been begging her to do this. They had wanted her for years.”
The reason for her reluctance, Tilly explained, was simple. She was already a real actor. Why play a “real” housewife? “I’d been a character on the show,” she said, catching herself quickly to make a correction. “They don’t like us to say ‘characters.’ But I didn’t know if I wanted to fully commit.”
The producers finally persuaded her to join as a foil of sorts to Erika Girardi, Bozoma Saint John and Kyle Richards. Think of her, Cohen suggested, as the carbonation in your favourite beverage. “She’s a kook, in the best possible meaning,” he said.
Tilly is also a gambler who, at the height of her career, “took a severe left turn and did the Chucky movies,” she said. “Can you imagine Cate Blanchett suddenly doing a slasher film?” She decided to do Real Housewives in that same spirit. “I thought I could take it and have some fun with it,” she said. “Plus, I was having intimations of my own mortality.”
Unlike some others on the show – with their laboriously perfected physical surfaces veneered over substrates of emotional, psychosocial and financial decay – Tilly didn’t need the gig. In addition to an impressive resume, she has that greater rarity: a contented existence. Partnered to the same man, professional poker player Phil Laak, for nearly two decades, she has won Saturn, GLAAD and MTV movie awards. She is also a professional poker player herself, the owner of a World Series of Poker bracelet, with roughly US$1 million ($1.7m) in career earnings and a spot in the Women’s Poker Hall of Fame.
There is one further detail. Tilly is rich. How rich? When her seven-year marriage to Sam Simon, a creative force behind The Simpsons, ended in 1991, the divorce settlement provided her with a percentage of the net proceeds of the show’s earnings. Revenue from the longest-running American animated series, longest-running American sitcom and longest-running scripted prime time TV series, along with its related comic books, video games, books and other tie-ins, has been estimated in the billions.
“Listen, once you hear she owns a piece of The Simpsons, that is such a delicious piece of historical information,” Cohen said.
Tilly, who remained close to her ex-husband until his death from cancer in 2015, seems as surprised as anybody by this twist of fate. “No one thought the show would go on for trillions of years,” she said. “Believe me, I thank Sam every single day.”
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Advertise with NZME.Her wealth puts her in a bracket apart from most fellow housewives. She has two adjacent houses in the pricey Bel Air neighbourhood of Los Angeles, one she calls a “playhouse” that is used mainly to store her wardrobe. She also keeps a beach house in Malibu, a place she seldom visits because it is “haunted,” she says, as well as residences in Las Vegas; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Manhattan.
Unlike many of the celebrities who accept loaner clothes from high-end fashion brands, courting clicks and brand awareness, she buys her own haute couture dresses. The extravagant jewellery she wears she pays for herself.
“Jennifer is an owner, not a loaner,” said Cameron Silver, an entrepreneur credited with building the market for high-end vintage clothing in Los Angeles. “It makes a huge difference when the clothes are your own, when you take your jewellery off at night and it goes in the safe, as opposed to a security detail.”
Also unlike certain of her fellow housewives, Tilly makes no secret of her humble origins. “When we were little, we used to move every year,” she said.
The second of four children, she was born Jennifer Ellen Chan in Los Angeles. Her father, Harry Chan, was a used-car salesman of Chinese origin. Her mother, Patricia Tilly, whom Tilly described as a debutante turned hippie, was a Canadian schoolteacher and stage actor. They divorced when Jennifer was little, and she was raised mainly in rural British Columbia by her mother and stepfather, John Ward.
“They told us growing up that he painted post offices and that, when he finished painting one post office, we had to go look for others,” she said of her stepfather. “My sister has her dark theories. She thinks they may have been run out of town.”
She was referring to Meg Tilly, one of her two sisters, also an accomplished actress and Academy Award nominee, who has gone on to a second career as a novelist. “We could never have friends sleep over when we were growing up,‘’ Meg said by phone from her home in British Columbia, “because there wouldn’t be enough for everyone to eat”.
Their shared challenges forged a durable bond, she added. The two sisters imagined that, when they grew up, each would have lots of money and open a store. Meg’s would be a confectionary where children without enough money could get free candy. Jennifer dreamed of a shop selling glamorous gowns.
Cinderella got her wish, it would seem, given that she now travels routinely to Europe for the couture shows, wears custom clothing from Chanel and Balmain and has a sizable jewellery collection that includes a diamond brooch Eddie Fisher once bought for Elizabeth Taylor and a charm bracelet that belonged to Joan Crawford.
And then there are the pieces that got away, like the Cartier flamingo brooch formerly owned by Wallis Simpson, the former Duchess of Windsor. At a 2010 auction, Tilly couldn’t bring herself to offer the roughly US$2m ($3.5m) it took to win it. “I dropped out at US$800,000 ($1.4m),” she said.
If Tilly was initially “chagrined” at being pigeonholed as “the rich one” on Season 14 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she has since made peace with it. “Jennifer is not only in on the joke — she wrote the joke,” Cohen said.
After a few tentative early episodes, she found her comedic rhythm, acing situations with a studied naivete and sometimes giving herself over to the caricature of the clueless zillionaire. In an episode that included an outing to the Caviar Kaspia restaurant, she said blithely, “I just try to order the most expensive caviar on the menu, because I figure it’s probably the best.” With her breathy voice and sparkly attire, she regularly commandeers the screen time that, in reality television, is the only valid currency.
“Everything I ever succeeded in, I worked for,” said Tilly, whose decision on whether to extend her stay as a Real Housewife beyond the current season shifts by the week. “I earned my way through college and sold Moveable Feast sandwiches when I first came to Hollywood for 80 cents.”
When acting teachers told her she had no talent, she refused to listen. “I never believed in having a backup plan,” she said. “That assumes you won’t succeed.”
And if playing the hand you’re dealt is core to her philosophy, so is knowing when to bluff. “Poker is a metaphor for life,” she said. “If someone acts one way, they are not necessarily that way.”
Long after many actors her age have been cruelly pushed aside, she is busy reinventing herself as a sexy moneybags with a stealth sense of humour on a hit franchise.
“Listen, I play poker with billionaires, guys way above my pay grade,” Tilly said. “And I win.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Guy Trebay
Photographs by: Sinna Nasseri
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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