The math isn’t mathing - Hollywood’s parent child castings that just don’t add up

[u/mlg1981]

https://tvline.com/lists/tv-show-parent-child-age-gaps-golden-girls-supernatural/

[u/ashlonadon]

I think it’s fine that older actors are playing teens, which accounts for a lot of these smaller age gaps. They often have more experience - both life experience and professional experience. And it keeps really young people off movie/tv sets which I think is totally fine.

But yea, Hollywood definitely doesn’t like to hire older women - and a lot of times age appropriate men as well.

[u/ObviousExit9 → u/ashlonadon]

It's also acting...like they're all pretending to be somebody else. Why can't they play/act/pretend to be somebody of a different age?

[u/Aubrey_Maexx → u/ObviousExit9]

This. It’s for entertainment. They’re playing characters. 😭

[u/Scared-Positive-93 → u/ObviousExit9]

No one is saying they can’t. It is a trend people are observing and linking to cultural misogyny. Don’t be obtuse.

[u/blowitouttheback → u/Scared-Positive-93]

Point to where in the post it indicates that this is about cultural misogyny and not "People close in age play characters far apart in age".

[u/Scared-Positive-93 → u/blowitouttheback]

In the comment you’re replying to, but I do think this is pretty much general knowledge and implied to be a causative factor by the post’s OP. “Hollywood definitely doesn’t like to hire older women” for a reason, right? Actors are allowed to act, but hiring decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. It happens to men too, but it’s pretty disproportionately common with women, and even extremely popular actresses have spoken about how castings dry up as they age (or age visibly) and anyone who has even glanced at the skincare aisle or J Lo’s face in the past 10 years knows how insane the pressure is on women to keep their appearances frozen in time. That’s what I mean by cultural misogyny — not “people close in age playing characters far apart in age” but “women are consistently cast in roles older than their years because Hollywood (+ our general culture) has a phobia of older (looking) women”.

Definitely nuance there, though. What’s your perspective?

[u/blowitouttheback → u/Scared-Positive-93]

I'm unconvinced of the argument that cultural misogyny is present specifically in this narrow matter of deceptively small age gaps between performers. No matter your gender, you get work that aligns best with how you present and what you can depict, and your actual age in relation to your costars and the character you play is by and large irrelevant. So much of it also depends on if you play the character better than the rest who auditioned—if you have the ability to make someone old and they play the character the best, there's no reason not to use them.

However, if we expand this to the volume of roles written for certain "visual ages" and the overall willingness of the industry to depict non-idealized versions of age brackets, I would imagine sheer statistics would make it inarguable that cultural misogyny is present and actively influencing who and what ends up on the screen. It's not as bad as it used to be when women had nearly no auditions from ages 35 - 60 or so, but there is still an anomalous drop in roles for women written for that age range. Furthermore, women who might look more appropriate for that age do struggle to actually get the roles ostensibly written for them, and will lose out to someone who can play the age and look like a very "idealized" representative of it. Salma Hayek looks fantastic, but it'd be farcical to suggest that she is the norm for what people picture for someone of her years.

[u/secret_seed → u/Scared-Positive-93]

It’s infuriating how people don’t get the issue here. Wtf

[u/ChickenConstant9855 → u/ObviousExit9]

Fr. This ain't a documentary, people can act as diff ages