Acclaimed actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has spoken out about Hollywood’s inability to treat women fairly – especially if they are so bold as to undergo the process of aging.
In an interview with The Wrap, Gyllenhaal described a recent incident in which she was told she was too old to play the love interest of a man almost 20 years older than her. Gyllenhaal, at just 37, was told she was too old to play the lover of a 55 year old male actor in an upcoming film.
The implication that a female actress must be more than 20 years younger than their male love interest speaks to a Hollywood trend that has been attracting mounting criticism in recent months: Excluding older women.
Leaving aside the unreasonable age difference between the two characters, the fact that Gyllenhaal was expressly excluded from a role for being “too old” at just 37 is worrying. She agrees.
“There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,” she said.
“I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me.”
“It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”
The incident is particularly egregious when you consider male actors her age – like Leonardio DiCaprio – seem to have very little trouble getting cast in roles, and continue to get cast alongside women half their age.
A study by Vulture in 2013 illustrated just how differently age is treated for men and women in Hollywood – it showed that as male leads age, the actresses playing their love interests remain the same age. In other words, one male star can continue to get the same kind of leading role as he ages across a 20-year period, but his female co-star is replaced each time by a younger counterpart.
For example, between his roles in Darkman and Third Person, actor Liam Neeson aged no less than 23 years, but his respective female co-stars actually got younger over that time. In Darkman, when Neeson was 38 years old, his love interest was played by 33 year old Frances Dorman. In Third Person, when the actor was 61, his female counterpart was 29 year old Olivia Wilde.
With this in mind is it any wonder that Australian actress Rebel Wilson has been lying about her age? It was revealed earlier this week that the actress is not 29, as she has claimed, but is in fact 36 – just one year younger than Gyllenhaal. The latter’s experience shows that getting rejected for a role because you are 37 rather than 29 is a tragically real possibility, and makes Wilson’s decision to lie look like a necessary career move.
Earlier this year Russell Crowe suggested that the reason older women don’t get cast as frequently as men is because they aren’t “acting their age”. Gyllenhaal’s story proves Crowe’s point wrong.
The reason older women don’t get cast is not because they refuse to “act their age”, it’s because they are being discriminated against based on their age.
Women struggle in Hollywood regardless of their age – only 23% of films made in 2014 featured even one female protagonist. The ratio of male to female actors in high-earning films is 2.25:1. So when you consider that women have to struggle against a gender bias in Hollywood and, increasingly as their careers progress, an age bias, the picture looks pretty bleak.