When Grandma opens on Friday (September 25), it’ll be the second low-budget gem this year that took the great Sam Elliott out of his rock-hard safety zone—the place where he’s conventionally seen fighting alongside Patrick Swayze or advising Jeffrey Lebowski to stop cussing so much—and put him instead in the company of women. Older women, in fact.

Last May, Elliott romanced Blythe Danner in I’ll See You in My Dreams. In Grandma, he gets to play against type and Lily Tomlin while hitting the heaviest emotional beats of his long career. The legendary mustache is missing, too.

“I just think that I’ve spent a lot of my life doing these kinda stoic westerners,” the actor muses in a call to the Georgia Straight from L.A. “But there was just so much more of [the character] Karl, or so much more of a human being than most of those other characters I’ve played. I like to think that I’ve learned something as an actor over the years, and I just pretty much opened it up to this thing. And working with Lily was such a joy.”

It was Elliott’s Golden Compass director, Chris Weitz, who got him onboard, informing the actor that his writer-director brother Paul had a screenplay he should read. He further assured him that Paul wasn’t “crazy”.

“Well, I thought that was an interesting introduction, anyway,” Elliott recalls with something between a low growl and a chuckle. “And I read the script and obviously there was no equivocation, put it that way, about whether I wanted to do this thing or not. I just thought, ‘Wow.’ It was 11 pages but that was about as well-drawn of a character as I’d ever seen.”

His appearance is brief, searing, and diabolically smart on the part of Weitz. Elliott does his panty-drenching bit for the first few minutes and then unloads in blistering fashion as Tomlin’s deeply hurt ex. Hardly surprising: she left him decades ago for the opposite sex.

“It’s one thing to get cuckolded as a man, we all do, probably, along the line somewhere,” Elliott remarks. “But to get cuckolded by another woman… That’s, like, ‘Oh, fuck, man, really?’ ”

Add to this the film’s larger story, in which Tomlin’s lesbian matriarch tries to secure an abortion for her 16-year-old granddaughter, and Grandma becomes the last thing in the world any Ram Heavy Duty drivers might have expected from the man, right?

“Well, you know what? That’s what independent filmmaking is all about, making shit that nobody else is gonna touch, sometimes,” Elliott offers. “Thank God for it.”

Bearing in mind that he appeared in 2003’s lamentable version of Hulk, Elliott is no less blunt about the course Hollywood has taken of late.

“It’s always been driven by so much weird shit that has nothing to do with making good movies,” he says. “Not to be totally negative, because along the way and currently today there remains a handful of brilliant filmmakers that do these giant blockbuster movies, but there’s so many of them now that are just these sequels, and sequels of sequels, and all this mindless shit that they do, and all this computer-driven stuff—it really doesn’t have much to do with the real world. At least not my real world. And I think the fuckin’ libido and money still drive a certain portion of the business. That’s not a good combination.”

No, but Sam Elliott and Lily Tomlin? That’s dynamite, and as real as it gets.