Hollywood's Obsession with Age
I’m sure at some point you’ve watched a film or tv series and noticed an unusually matched couple on screen. So you quickly take out your phone to look up the age gap between them.
From the pairing of Annabelle Wallis with Tom Cruise in the reboot of The Mummy (an age gap of 22 years) to Keira Knightley paired with Steve Carell in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (a gap of 23 years), to the age difference between Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in the currently airing Wandavision (18 years), Hollywood doesn’t want to let women age and doesn’t want to let men feel like they’ve aged.
It’s not just romantic relationships that have this startling age gap. Angelina Jolie was cast as Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander. Jolie is only a year older than Farrell. I don’t think anyone needs explaining to them the impossibility of this in real life. Whichever way you see it, Hollywood has a serious issue with ageing.
While this is undoubtedly an issue, there seems to be little being done about it. Women’s age in Hollywood is a messy knot of glorifying youth and infantilising young women to vilify and hide middle-aged or older women. By putting female actors in relationships with older men, Hollywood influences society’s expectations of how women age and act.
It is important to distinguish that this article is not about couples in real life in consensual loving relationships with large age gaps, but the problems that arise when Hollywood presents these relationships as the norm.
When have you ever seen Tom Cruise paired with a woman the same age as him? Cruise is currently 58, but countless times we have seen him paired with women far younger than him, and everyone just complacently goes along with the narrative that he is much younger than he actually is. It writes the narrative that (attractive) men are allowed to age, whereas women reach the peak of their acting careers in their 20s as opposed to men who reach their peak in their 40s.
This is not to say that women are more successful at a younger age but that their careers are being cut short. Consider the rise of Jennifer Lawrence just 10 years ago. She was everywhere from The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook (an age gap with her co-star Bradley Cooper of 15 years) and American Hustle (in which she was paired with Christian Bale - a gap of 16 years), but in recent years, her career seems to have significantly slowed down as she has approached her 30s. Hollywood sees her as less and less desirable as she ages.
Another more example is that of Audrey Hepburn. Have you ever seen a picture of her in the later years of her life? I always assumed she had died young. She still died fairly young at 63, but we forever remember her image as the Audrey from films such as Roman Holiday (age 24) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (age 32), but not the older Audrey who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom just a month before she died. Her beauty and youth are always seen as her biggest achievement.
Another actress that has been subjected to huge age gaps with her co-stars is Emma Stone. Emma Stone has been cast in two films that contain an extensive age gap between her and her co-star. In 2013 Stone was cast in Gangster Squad at age 25 alongside Sean Penn, who was 53 at the time (28 years her senior). The other role she was cast in with a significant age gap was Magic in the Moonlight alongside co-star Colin Firth who was 28 years older than her. Surprise, surprise, directed by an all-around awful human being, Woody Allen, who is also in a marriage with a large age gap (35 YEARS). Oh yeah, and his wife is also his ex wife’s adopted daughter, who he raised, and his biological daughter has accused him of sexual abuse.
The normalisation of relationships with large age gaps can open the door for abuse to go unseen and leads to young girls being taken advantage of by older men.
In 1977, 43-year-old director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby) was arrested and charged for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. Polanski pleaded guilty in exchange for a plea bargain and was put on probation. However, instead of facing prison, he fled the country and has avoided being extradited to the US. While his victim has been refused any closure, Polanski has made films and even won an Oscar and a Lifetime Achievement Award.
What is worst is that many overlook his crimes and instead focus on his career. More than 100 people in the film industry, including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Tilda Swinton, Harrison Ford, and Guillermo Del Toro signed a petition in 2009 calling for the charges against Polanski to be dropped. Natalie Portman, an actress who Hollywood has sexualised from a very young age, also signed the petition, but in 2018 expressed her regrets for signing it. I cannot comprehend why someone would ever excuse behaviour like that, how the child’s safety comes second to someone’s ability to make films.
When people like Polanski evade justice, it says to all women that our pain must come second to a man’s career, as if our age was just a number and not an indication of our understanding of the world and our bodies. Cases like this have set a dangerous precedent, shifting our cultural views so that we are only now seeing predators like Harvey Weinstein and R Kelly face charges for crimes against women that they have been accused of since the 90s.
We have to stop perpetuating this cycle of unhealthy age gap relationships in the media. Yes, these relationships can exist in the real world under healthy and consensual encounters, but not at the same rate in which Hollywood presents them. This cultural Lolita Complex is dangerous. It sees predators as romantic and young women as innocent but seductive when they are just underage girls who don’t know themselves and the world yet.
When women date men who are younger than them, they are called cougars (like Madonna was), or, like Selena Gomez’s relationship with Justin Bieber, get called a paedophile (Gomez was a year and a half older than him). Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend, Alexandra Grant, (who HE is 9 years older than) faced backlash because she was assumed to be older than him because of her grey hair and actually looks like a woman in her 40s, rather than the 20-year-olds we usually see on the arm of older male celebrities. Speaking of which, Leonardo DiCaprio has been praised for never publicly dating a woman under 25, and he was last known to be dating Camilla Morrone, who was born the same year Titanic came out.
There is a double standard when it comes to the age of who men and women date. You are either a stud or a cougar, depending on your gender.
We want to hide from age, or at least to look aged. The constant hiring of young women and the lack of representation of older women lead to the same sense of alienation that BAME actors miss in roles. Older women are similarly another excluded and overlooked group.
In the 2011 census, the median age of the population of England and Wales was 39 years old, with 27% of the population aged 40 to 59 and 22% aged 60 and over. With women and girls making up 51% of the people in England and Wales in 2011, we can see that a huge percentage of our population comprises women over 40.
We, as the public, can do a few things outside of calling for more roles and more diverse roles for older women. We can, for example, urge the male actors we love to not settle for being paired with actresses far younger than them or ask them to suggest actresses over 40 for specific roles. Male actors need to use the power they have to call out the issue.
Too often, once a woman ages, she is stuck in the background in the role of wife or mum (not that they’re not important roles, but they are often not the lead role). As Winona Ryder once said, once you have gone through your twenties, ‘there is a bleak hinterland before you start being offered the ‘mum’ roles.’
Women who are beyond their twenties have exciting stories to tell and deserve a fair representation, so Hollywood needs to make way for the plethora of female writers and directors who are disregarded because of their gender.
Written by Sasha Smith
Sasha is a poet currently completing her Master's degree in English. Check out her poetry on Instagram @sashayawaypoetry