Dolly Parton ‘9 to 5’ Gun Scene Inspired By Real Life Events

Long before Dolly Parton delivered one of the most memorable threats in “9 to 5,” the country music legend says she had already confronted a frightening situation with a real handgun in her hand.

Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, recounted the encounter during a 2021 interview with Nashville Soundbite. The story has resurfaced following her death and offers an intriguing explanation for how one of her character’s famous lines may have made its way onto the screen.

The interviewer asked Parton about the 1980 comedy “9 to 5,” in which she starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

Parton played Doralee Rhodes, whose lecherous boss Franklin Hart Jr., played by Dabney Coleman, falsely boasts that he is having an affair with her.

Doralee eventually makes her feelings toward Hart unmistakable. Armed with a revolver, she warns him that she could change him “from a rooster to a hen.”

According to Parton, Hollywood may not have invented the idea.

She recalled an encounter with a man whose advances became frightening enough that she reached for a gun.

“This guy was really coming on to me and it was scary as it could be and so he just kept on,” Parton said.

Growing up as a “country girl,” as she put it, Parton was accustomed to firearms. And on this occasion, she had one available.

“At that time, you know, I had a gun so I pulled it out,” she recalled.

Then came a warning remarkably similar to the one audiences would later hear in “9 to 5.”

“I said ‘Look,’ it was basically what they kind of based that , ‘if you touch me one more time I’ll change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot,’” Parton said.

She said she had told the story years before the movie, providing a possible origin for Doralee’s memorable threat.