Martha Plimpton was thrilled she got to reunite with her former on-screen father Tommy Lee Jones in her new show “The Lowdown.”
“A lot of people think of [Tommy Lee] as a rough, gruff kind of guy, but I think he’s just a teddy bear,” Plimpton — who played Jones’ daughter when she was 14 in the 1984 movie “The River Rat” — told Page Six.
She added that she was “so excited” to see Jones, 80, and work with him again in the second season of the Ethan Hawke FX show.
“When you meet someone and work with someone who played your father at that age, there’s always a little part of you that sees them that way,” Plimpton, 55, explained.
Plimpton told us the “Men in Black” actor “didn’t quite recognize” her at first, until Hawke called out her full name on the set, which caused Jones to “perk up.”
“And he turned around and saw me, and we just had the biggest hug…it was incredible,” she said.
“The Lowdown” follows the exploits of the Oklahoma-based citizen journalist Lee Raybon (Hawke) as he exposes corruption in Tulsa.
Jones joined Season 2 in a rare TV role as Lee’s estranged father. Plimpton joins the cast as the tough sheriff, Vela Thorne, who clashes with Lee.
The “Goonies” actress told Page Six that she’s “not terribly picky” about roles.
“I think that’s self-evident at this point, given my career,” she quipped. “But as long as the character is necessary to the story, it doesn’t matter how big [the role] is, for me.”
The Emmy-winning actress and Hawke, 55, are longtime friends, as they both came up in Hollywood in the ‘80s. They also both starred in Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” Broadway play trilogy in 2006.
“We haven’t really ever lost touch,” Plimpton told us.
She said it’s been “wonderful to see someone that you’ve known for so long, at different phases of their development in life.”
The “East of Eden” actress said that Hawke has always been “smart, a cute and silly and fun guy, a curious person, a real reader – someone interested in the finer points of literature and poetry.”
But as Hawke has gotten older, “I think he’s mellowed into this really extraordinarily good person,” said Plimpton. “There’s something about when a person feels comfortable in themselves – in horse riding, we call it ‘finding your seat.’”
Plimpton is currently in the midst of a hot moment in her own career, as she was also recently in the Netflix series “East of Eden” with Florence Pugh and in HBO’s Emmy-winning “Task” with Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey.
The actress teased her upcoming role in Task, which is filming its second season in Philadelphia right now, “The entire cast apart from Mark’s character and his family and my character is brand new.
“So, it’s a completely new storyline and it’s opened up quite a bit. Mahershala Ali is in it. Edgar Ramirez. We’re having a good time.”
“The Lowdown” airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on FX and Hulu.
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