Unrealistic age of female actors

[MoltenLasagne]

I know this is a petty issue, but lately I've been noticing and becoming increasingly annoyed at the unrealistic age of female actors in films and tv shows.

It's not so much the creepiness of having extremely young love interests for much older men (although obviously that gets repetitive and gross) but there have been a number of times lately where the woman playing the mother is so young compared to her adult children that it makes me question the plot.

The most recent example was in The Last Kingdom, where Eliza Butterworth (25) plays the mother of Aethelfled played by Millie Brady (25). I honestly spent time trying to figure out whether I'd missed some kind of step-mother related plot point.

Is it getting worse, or is it just me? And why on earth do casting / directors do this?! (I think I know the answer to that...)

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.

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.

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'.

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!

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.

A 25 year old mother of a 25 year old? That is the most ridiculous example of the phenomenon I've ever seen.

Yes, I was so confused and cross about it I was half watching the programme, half on google trying to figure out the age of the actors. Even back in 800 AD there needed to be at least a 14 year age gap between mother and daughter!

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.

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.

Fair enough Tinsel - I did come in from the second series so hadn't realised that. But all the male actors are in their mid-30s making that age gap look slightly more realistic. I just get so frustrated that not only are the vast majority of characters in any film/show male, but that the few female characters that do appear are consistently played by young women in their twenties even when it doesn't make sense for the plot.

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.

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).

@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'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.

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.

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!

Yup.

Or Jennifer Lawrence playing Bradley Cooper's girlfriend in "Silver Linings Playbook." She was barely out of her teens and he was nearly 40, yet in the book they went to school together and she was supposed to be a world-weary widow!

Not that this is a new thing. See any film starring Humphrey Bogart and compare his age to his leading ladies. Or even worse, in the classic 'older woman' film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was only a few years younger than the beautiful Anne Bancroft.

it is ridiculous. If a woman is above 20 she gets mother roles. If above 30, shes the grandmother

Men are the only ones allowed to get old

...And don't get me started on 'Teen' movies. It all started with Stockard Channing in Grease playing twice her age.

Another example: anyone remember the film Unfaithful?

The character played by the utterly gorgeous Diane Lane was clearly supposed to be quite a bit older than her boyfriend, played by Olivier Martinez. Yet the actors are the same age. There was an age gap in that film, but it was between Lane and her husband, played by Richard Gere, who is 15 years her senior. Yet that was not considered worthy of remark.

I know, look at Harrison Ford.

76 and still getting the all action hero roles (new versions of Star Wars and Blade Runner very recently, and currently working on Indiana Jones Part 5).

There is a 22 year age gap between him and his wife, Calista Flockhart. She is 54, just in case anybody thought he was living in domestic bliss with a 98 year old.

But of course nobody thought that.

IIRC, Sean Connery was 12 years older than Harrison Ford when he played Indiana Jones’s father.

I remember watching the film Entrapment from years ago with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones as his love interest and feeling really uncomfortable at the age gap (he was 69 and she was 30 at the time). It’s not a new thing but is really fucking frustrating that it’s still going on. Men can still be leading men well into their dotage apparently but women are relegated to supporting roles like mums or put upon wives unless they’re the lucky few like Meryl Streep who have earned the right to be in leading roles and have a few wrinkles. You don’t need to be anywhere near her calibre of acting as a man though.

The reason this happens so much is because the (vast) majority of producers, directors, casting agents etc are men, who, as I've heard it said, 'cast men who they want to be, and women who they want to fuck'.

If more power players in Hollywood were women, it would be very different.

I suppose part of it could be that older, extremely wealthy men often have younger wives, something less seen in the general population where the man in question didn't have the lure of a burgeoning bank account.

Although, I do think it's also the fact that women are more sexualised so necessarily need to be younger to fit this requirement.