Are Demi Moore and Michelle Yeoh's Bold Choices Changing the Rules for Actresses of a Certain Age?

10/16/2024 09:00 AM

At 61, Demi Moore is having a major career comeback with “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s critically-acclaimed horror film that examines society's obsession with beauty and youth. It takes the actress into vulnerable terrain where she is stark naked and then morphs into a grotesque troll.

It's not the only daring performance by a woman over 60 of late. Sixty-two-year-old Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar-winning role in the multiverse-jumping action-drama “Everything Everywhere All at Once” let her play a pantheon of wildly different women, including a martial arts expert and a glamorous movie star. Jamie Lee Curtis, 65, defied convention as a drab IRS auditor in the same film, and did it again in a tour de force guest turn as the unhinged mother in "The Bear."

Other older actresses are breaking the mold: Jodie Foster, 61, won her first Emmy for playing a dogged investigator in “True Detective: Night Country” this year, and “Hacks” star Jean Smart, 73, collected the Emmy for her portrayal of a past-her-prime comedian seeking a comeback.

All of these actresses seem to be bucking Hollywood's longstanding rejection of women of a certain age, finding roles of substance and artistic originality decades after the industry might — at one time — have written them off.

"At the core of it, what [‘The Substance’] is really about is what we do to ourselves, and I loved that it was illustrated in such a physical way — showing that violence with what we do with our thoughts, how we attack ourselves and distort things,” Moore explained as to why she took on "The Substance" after decades of avoiding the big screen. She spoke in a conversation with Yeoh in Interview magazine. “There's great power in knowing that what we do to ourselves is a choice, and we can make a different choice.”

Yeoh agreed. “It's like, why can't a 45-year-old, a 50-year-old or 60-year-old be sexy?’ But that whole perception is undergoing a lot of change because people like you and me won't sit back and just take it,” Yeoh told Moore.

And yet. The impression that Hollywood is cracking open the door to women over 60 is not the full picture, say experts who work on the subject of gender equity, age and entertainment.

“God bless Meryl Streep, but that’s not happening across the board,” said Madeline Di Nonno, CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which studies women in film and television.

While it's true that the 75-year-old three-time Oscar winner has her pick of roles in modern TV hits “Only Murders in the Building” and “Big Little Lies," Di Nonno said, she remains the exception.

Even if there is an older female character in a movie or series, she said, “we find that they are particularly domesticated. They’re shown indoors. They’re shown being reliant on other people.”

A Small Club

Twenty years ago, when she was 48, Geena Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which continues to study how women are represented in film and television.

But it’s a small club: Studies show that just a handful of big names keep getting the plum roles.

An August study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (AII), a think tank that addresses inequality in entertainment, found that between 2007 and 2023, only 22 women over 65 were featured in ensemble casts — and many of those roles were filled by the same 16 women, including Jane Fonda, who was in both "80 for Brady" and "Book Club: The Next Chapter" in 2023.

The initiative’s founder, Stacy L. Smith, told TheWrap that a few standout roles, such as Moore’s and Foster’s — or the 2023 Oscar wins of Yeoh and Curtis — don’t change the bigger picture.

“Anything north of 45, particularly for women and women of color, there aren’t roles,” Smith said. “This was our 17th version of the report, and I feel like I could have written it with my eyes closed.”

Smith said that in 2023, the 100 top-grossing films featured only 30 lead roles for women, down from 44 the year prior. The stats were even worse for women over 45, dropping from 10 to three in that same time period.

“The fact that we can actually name [most of the individual actresses over 50] means it’s still a rarity,” sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen told TheWrap. “There’s so many series starring older men. Most of the time they’re seen as virile for a really long time, both romantically and in terms of action. And I think for women, it’s much more rare,” she said.

Take “Yellowstone” star Kevin Costner: The actor and director, who is now 69, romanced Piper Perabo, who is 21 years his junior, in Season 4 of the hit Paramount Network series.

“When we don’t see older women at all [in films or TV], and then we don’t see them as attractive or intelligent or active, it fuels ageism on many levels,” Tracey Gendron, author of the book “Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It,” told TheWrap.

Gendron added that women over 60 are “hugely underrepresented” in Hollywood. "Grace and Frankie" notwithstanding, despite the growing senior population offscreen “we still don’t target older people as a market, and they certainly don’t see themselves portrayed in roles," she said.

While Smith believes that studio heads could have embraced more diverse roles for women by now if they truly wanted to, Di Nonno is more judicious on the matter, saying that the studios “want to do better. And they don’t really realize this total disparity is happening, and that’s always been how we’ve operated.”

Di Nonno said Davis’ goal was always to be “collaborative” instead of confrontational about improving screen representation for women. “It was like, ‘Hey, these are my colleagues. If I have some data, how can I help them do better?”

The Ageless Test

One of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media’s recent reports, which took an international look at female characters, found that only one in four films passed the “Ageless Test,” which requires that films feature at least one female character over 50 who is essential to the plot and who is portrayed without ageist stereotypes. The 2019 report summed up most characters played by older women as “frail, frumpy and forgotten.”

Like Women in Film’s ReFrame initiative, Davis’ institute offers a “toolkit” to filmmakers. “We’re just saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to develop a female character, can she have a job? Can she have some agency?’ If the script says doctor, that doctor could be a female. It could be an older female. It’s always been really well received,” Di Nonno added.

She shared one instance where the recurring character of a venture capitalist on hFox series “Empire” was going to be written as a man — until Di Nonno had a conversation with one of the show’s writers and producers, Wendy Calhoun, and the role ended up going to Marisa Tomei.

“Because of our research, she thought, ‘I wonder if this venture capitalist could be female.’ And she went back into the writers’ room and pitched it. It was that simple. [Calhoun] heard us speak, she went and did her homework, and that was a major role, a major arc for Season 2.”

Meaty roles for women of a certain age may still be few and far between, but, as Moore and Yeoh discussed, the opportunity to broaden the conversation is a welcome one. Kathy Bates, 76, is another actress upending age tropes in CBS’ new hit “Matlock” — in the reboot, her character is introduced as a poor widow when, a late-pilot twist reveals, she’s actually a wealthy and successful business woman using that facade to her advantage.

Feeling 'The Substance'

“The Substance” isn’t afraid to dive into the deep end with its bloody, over-the-top manifestations of the pressure for physical perfection that plagues women. It centers on Moore’s self-doubting tv exercise personality, Elizabeth Sparkle, who buys into a medical procedure that involves injecting the mysterious “substance” of the film’s title. The process temporarily de-ages her in the most violent and skin-crawling of ways. (Her younger self is portrayed in the film by Margaret Qualley.)

“It was such a unique way to be exploring this issue of aging, of societal conditioning, of what I also see as the pressure of the male-idealized woman that we as women have bought into,” Moore told Yeoh in the conversation in Interview.

But one of the most talked-about scenes is less sci-fi and more human, as Elizabeth, after having just been fired as host of a workout show, impulsively calls a gushing male fan who recently gave her his number. But in trying to get her makeup just right for her first date in ages, she ends up smearing lipstick all over her face in frustration.

While Moore is still a knockout in her 60s, as the extremely revealing nude scenes in “The Substance” demonstrate, the actress said she’s been getting the message that she’s too old for Hollywood for more than 20 years.

“I felt [criticism] more when I hit my 40s. I had done ‘Charlie's Angels,’ and there was a lot of conversation around this scene in a bikini, and it was all very heightened, a lot of talk about how I looked," she recalled.

“There didn't seem to be a place for me. I didn't feel like I didn't belong. It's more like I felt that feeling of, I'm not 20, I'm not 30, but I wasn't yet what they perceived as a mother,” Moore continued. "Where do I fit in? It was a time that felt … not dead, but flat. There was a moment, I have to say, where I started to wonder, is this really what I should be doing? Maybe that part of my life is complete. Not even over, but complete.”

Yeoh responded: “Hollywood is cruel to women of that age, where you don't find the scripts or the characters that resonate with you anymore. It's either, you are the mother or you're old enough not to be sexy in their eyes.”

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