The natural passage of time has been enemy number one of the hollywood actresses since time immemorial. Reaching 40 in the film industry is a professional sentence that translates into fewer main characters and many roles of mother and grandmother. In other words, in the mecca of cinema, men mature while women age.
And if two decades ago many of us raised our eyebrows in surprise when we saw a Catherine Zeta-Jones 30 years being the romantic interest of Sean Connery at 69 in The trap (1999), now we do it again when we know that Carrie-Anne Moss She was offered a grandmother role the day after she turned 40.
Years after the success of the trilogy of Matrix The actress reached 40 with the hope of beginning a stage of maturity before the big screen, longing for the arrival of deep and interesting characters that would allow her to explore the experiences and emotions of adult life. What he did find, however, was that Hollywood’s age bias was no urban legend.
During a talk with director Justine Bateman published in The Hollywood Reporter, Carrie-Anne Moss confessed that she was offered a role as a grandmother “the day after turning 40 “.
The interpreter reveals that she had heard that reaching 40 used to change everything for an actress, but that she did not think it would happen to her just because it had happened to other people. “But literally the day after my 40th birthday, I was reading a script that had been sent to me and talking to my manager about it. ‘Oh no, no, no, no, it’s not that paper [que estás leyendo], is that of the grandmother ‘he said ” Carrie-Ann was counting. “It happened overnight. I went from being a girl to a mother to farther away than the mother ”.
He acknowledges that at that time, when he had just turned 40, it was a reality “brutal” that he had to face, especially when seeing that his male companions do not suffer the same prejudice, as is the case in many films by Tom Cruise, Richard Gere or George Clooney. But also because she looked forward to reaching that moment in her life and translating it into her career. “I saw those French and European actresses who had something so special that it made them so confident in their own skin. I couldn’t wait to be that. I tried hard for it. But it is not easy to be in this business. There is a lot of external pressure ” sentenced the 53-year-old actress.
Sadly, the story of Carrie-Anne Moss is one more in a sea of actresses who have suffered from the same prejudice. Without going further, Helen Mirren defined female age discrimination as a practice “outrageous”. “We all watched James Bond get more and more geriatric and his girlfriends younger and younger. It’s so annoying” sentenced in 2015 (via The Wrap).
Jamie Denbo, known for her role as Ginsberg in Orange is the New Black, she announced a couple of years ago that at 43 she had been branded as “too old ” to play the wife of a 57-year-old man. The actress shared her story on Twitter where he detailed, without giving names, that it was the role of a mother of an 18-year-old character and the first and only wife of the male role, but that the project wanted someone of 38 for the role. “Old white men, enjoy your last run. We are all sick of you, lizards“she concluded angrily.
Maggie Gyllenhaal once shared that she was also told that it was “too old ” to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man, despite being 37 at the time. “It made me feel bad, then it made me feel angry and then it made me laugh ” confessed to The Wrap in 2015.
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Even Dakota Johnson He exposed his frustrations around this reality in the film industry using his mother as an example, Melanie Griffith, and his grandmother, Tippi Hedren. In an interview for Vogue he wondered why his mother wasn’t in more movies when “She is an extraordinary actress”, like his grandmother, and dismissed the industry as being “brutal”. “No matter how tough you are, sometimes there is a feeling that they don’t like you. It is absurd and fierce. Whenever I am inactive, I am not sure if I will go back to work ” commented.
However, thanks to movements like Time’s Up, the continued work of actresses like Meryl Streep and Geena Davis, and many others who have chosen to become producers, this perception is slowly changing. We see it reflected in the successful and varied careers currently enjoyed by Reese Witherspoon (46), Kate Winslet (45), Amy Adams (46), Julianne Moore (60), Meryl Streep (71) or Glenn Close (74), although still there is still a long way to go so that actresses can enjoy the same thing without the same journey full of successes.
In the case of Streep, she founded a scriptwriting course designed for female writers over 40 with the intention of generating more projects for them, while the latter founded the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media in 2004, which analyzes gender representation , race, disabilities, age, body size and the LGBTQ + community on the screen. For example, in 2019 analyzed the representation of women over 50 across 30 blockbuster movies finding that none had a female lead older than that age, and that only 1 in 4 movies featured a woman over 50 with a significant role in the story.
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