Unrealistic age of female actors

They turned Lagertha's hair white over night in the season break of the current season, but nobody referred to it! And it doesn't make her look any older anyway.

I'd flag up the 2014 film "Lessons In Love" in which Pierce Brosnan (61) is having a mid-life crisis, cheating on his 'young' wife Salma Hayek (48) with his undergraduate student Jessica Alba (33).

If everyone was fifteen years younger, it mught just work.

@Tinsel, yes! Lagertha looks amazing for her age. Bjorn was a baby a few seasons ago, now he looks older than his own mother!

I loathe it when I think I recognise an actor or they remind me of someone and then realise that they've had so much cosmetic surgery that this is why I'm not recognising them (and, sometimes, not just the surgery but they've not aged in accordance with my expectation of my memory, IYSWIM).

I agree with you in general Molten, however this will be a problem in any series which covers a long period of time, but which the producers don't initially know how many series they will be commissioned for.

They're not going to cast an older actor than the part requires in season 1, just to make sure they'll be older than their future child in a hypothetical season 4.

My pet hate is how they age the male actors in The Vikings (by giving them ever longer beards), but the female actors aren't aged at all.

To be fair in The Last Kingdom example, Aethelfled was a baby in Series 1, so they would have had to swap her mother (and everyone else in it) for other actors as she grew up if they were going to make the age gap realistic.

I’m inclined to agree there are a tonne of female actresses I grew up watching, and it’s a shame you don’t see them as much.

This thread also reminds me of the episode of 30 Rock where a man scams Tracy Jordan by pretending to be his son. The actor playing the 'son' is only 11 years younger than the 'father'. But that was the essence of the joke. I suspect Tina Fey was taking a subtle dig at exactly this sort of nonsense that goes on with the casting of female actors.

The Greatest Showman - Hugh Jackman’s character grew up as the same age as his wife and yet he is in his 50s and she is in her 30s! Figure that one out!

A 25 year old mother of a 25 year old? That is the most ridiculous example of the phenomenon I've ever seen. Usually they at least make the actor playing the mother 5-10 years older (which is still absurd obviously).

They also often have teenagers played by women who are in their 20s. I assume this is partly because it is easier to employ adults with regard to labour laws, but my theory is that it is also to make male audiences feel OK about being sexually attracted to a depiction of a school child and to feed the myth that teenage girls are mature, basically adults and therefore 'fair game'.

Yeah, something needs doing about this. It's down to casting directors.
Sometimes there are reasons - in Outlander, Claire (and Jamie) is supposed to have aged 20 or more years, but now doesn't look all that much older than her daughter.
The only case I can think of this in men is Crispin Glover as George McFly in Back to the Future, who was supposed to be Michael J Fox' da, but is three year's younger.

It is not petty at all.

Demonstrates the patriarchy perfectly.

Men can have long careers in starring roles. Women can only have short careers in starring roles. And they usually have to be beautiful to start with, of course.

www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/hollywood-ageism-women

"In 2015, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal said, at 37, she was told she was too old to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man".

And interesting that the roles are always "love interests". Love interest of whom exactly? Why men of course. Who get to have actual characters of their own, instead of being defined solely by someone's sexual interest in them.