My favorite science fiction work is the Nancy Meyers comedy When you least expect it. In a movie in which Keanu Reeves at the height of his appeal plays a charming doctor, Diane Keaton and Amanda Peet lose their oremus over a wizened and insufferable writer played by Jack Nicholson (I point, 35 years older than Peet ). If I want to corroborate the fantasy of the argument, I only have to think of Nicholson and Reeves taking the winds for, say, Kathy Bates, like Nicholson, a very talented actress who does not seem worried about appearing even a year younger than she is. That film would never be produced. When was the play made into a movie? Frankie and Johnny in the moonlight that Bates had inspired and starred in was not even considered for the role, a part that Terrence McNally had written for her. She was replaced by Michelle Pfeiffer, 10 years younger, but much more believable in Hollywood’s eyes as an unattractive middle-aged woman. Involuntary high comedy.
That the audiovisual industry, almost any industry, has a problem with the age of women is palpable, it is denounced daily, and it is not even necessary to go to the cinema to verify it, it is enough to turn on the television and take a look at any program, even the news. Women not only have to be young, they also have to look like it and if not, the casting works the miracle.
At the beginning of brave heart, William Wallace and Murron are similar in age, but as adults she is played by Catherine McCormack, 16 years younger than Mel Gibson. The same prodigy is experienced in the newly released I’m going to have a good timethe protagonists are 12 years old when they fall in love to the sound of Hombres G, but when they meet again three decades later, he is Raúl Arévalo, 42 years old, and she is Karla Souza, 36. Those six years that have been lost along the way may seem like a trivial detail and it is so standardized that probably no one would consider it when choosing the casting, but it is relevant, because we know that the reverse rarely happens and reveals the conflict that the real age of women generates for some. Or rather the real appearance of women of a certain age.
One day Souza will wonder, as so many actresses have been doing for decades, where are the roles for women over 40 and the answer will be very simple: you played them when you were 30.
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