Wednesday, October 06, 2021
Age-Blind Casting Reinforces Male Privilege
Ms. Magazine: Sir Ian McKellen is ushering in post-COVID theatre with a new interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor in London. McKellen, 82, is playing the young Danish prince. Yes, he’s playing Hamlet in what is being advertised as “age-blind casting.”
McKellen is one of my favorite actors. But, let’s call the “age-blind” casting what it is—a gimmick that reinforces male privilege.
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I agree with Brandt’s dislike of age-blind casting. As a viewer, I find it distracting when the actor is clearly not the age they are supposed to be playing, whether it be too young or too old. While it’s great that older male actors can have long careers, women don’t get those opportunities nearly as often. When they do, they are not respected for their work, as the article mentions. Older male actors get to be “silver foxes” but older female actors are judged harshly when they look “too old,” and are also judged if they get Botox or fillers to look younger. It’s an impossible standard, and age-blind casting is an easy excuse for what is really just a lack of respect for women and their acting careers. I appreciated the author of the article talking about her personal experiences and the sexism she saw from directors and critics.
I think that this issue can be traced back to the larger issue that women are only valued for their looks despite the skills they possess. Women are constantly nagged at to look young and attractive or else they no longer hold the value that they used to, it doesn’t matter if they are just as talented, or even more talented than their male counterparts. I think that this article also begins to highlight the problem of age gaps. In the Romeo and Juliet example at the beginning of the article, it is displayed how differently we view older women paired with a younger man than vice versa. Sexist ageism in media extends greatly to how we view these relationships. It’s perfectly suitable for an older man to date a young woman but when it is reversed the woman is seen as greedy or indecent. Overall the ageism that women face in acting is something so rooted in the misogyny of how women’s value is placed in their looks.
I think the author of this article nailed in on the head about how ageist and sexist a lot of casting directors are. It's not fair that female identifying people are reduced just to their bodies while men are allowed depth. It feels like most people are only interested in what will sell and make money and that doesn't include aging female identifying bodies. Everyone gets old and no one can look young forever, why can't we normalize that, instead of making the rest of us feel crappy for our knees creaking every morning and all the gray hair we have. It's also truly sad that this doesn't happen to men, like, they can be regarded as aging gracefully but they wouldn't give the same grace to anyone else. But hopefully they're right in that it will get better as people start to diversify and make it more normal to be old.
At first, I was surprised by the headline because in my head I was going "but this would be great for the women in acting that are told they're too old for a role!" But I think that optimistic part of my brain forgot that while that may be a good intention, that is not the society we live in and that is not how implementing age-blind casting would actually be utilized. I also find it kind of ridiculous that 45 is considered no longer desirable for a female lead. To me, that's still exceptionally young and could be mid-early in a man's career. For women, of course, your career is basically over. Let's just normalize valuing women for more than their bodies and stop being so hypercritical. Stop preserving unrealistic body standards and narratives. It's crazy that they felt the need to edit Kate Winslet's body when she is such a breathtaking individual to begin with. If even she is deemed not worthy of the screen without edits why isn't the entertainment industry asking itself why their standards are so skewed?
Ageism and sexism in casting go hand in hand. Again and again in film and theater do we see men playing alongside women decades younger than them, because of the ancient and incorrect belief that audiences can’t sympathize with any woman outside of a very narrow beauty standard. This beauty standard is reinforced by casting, and so a vicious and detrimental cycle is created. Men are never thought of as less viable options for parts due to wrinkles, gray hair, or visible age, but women are. The “preference” for younger women in leading roles is a serious problem. Much of this problem comes from the vast majority of casting directors being male, as well as the vast majority of these male casting directors being given implicit permission to disrespect and degrade actresses behind closed doors. Older women deserve the spotlight, in spite of and in order to disrupt the misogyny we see in the arts every day.
This is a perfect example of why efforts to diversify an industry should be led by the people who would benefit most from the diversification. To put it plainly, when white men attempt diversification, they are usually so misguided by their own privilege that they do things like this that are honestly kind of embarrassing for them from an outsider view. I once listened to a male artistic director pat himself on the back for having a WHOLE TWO Black employees in his company of 70 people, and he thought it was a massive improvement. Their bar for diversity is SO low, that they will even meet it by letting an old man play Hamlet. Patriarchal and racist systems in entertainment play such a major role in how we perceive media, and it results in women and non-white people being subject to different standards that their white male peers. If anything, this article is a perfect example of why we need diversification of everything entertainment, especially in the lines of race and sex, and an injection of intersectional feminism into every level of the hierarchy that runs media.
When considering the implications of men being able to have their age disregarded in casting, it is very important to recognize that this privilege is not extended to women/non-men and only serves to highlight and enforce the misogyny of the entertainment industry. It is disgusting how often the looks of a woman are the top priority in casting decisions made regarding her and how women’s physical form is often the largest controlling factor in their careers. The gaze and judgement from (predominantly male) directors, casters, and audiences contributes heavily to these casting decisions; an older woman is perceived as unattractive in an industry where she must constantly be seen, and thus her value as an actress is lessened automatically. The constraints of the beauty standards forced upon women in this society has not only been suffocating and limiting in the film industry. It is a prominent issue in nearly all other fields of employment, and needs to be recognized and confronted in order to move towards equality and justice for women.
So much of this is rooted in the commodification of youth (encompassing beauty, worth, et cetera), especially in women. This comes through in the sexualization and objectification of young women, the lack of middle-aged women in roles that are considered seductive (and over-casting of young girls and women in roles that are), casting actresses to play love interests who are ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than their male counterparts. It can be appalling how little license for emotional and personal depth women and non-men are allowed, especially in entertainment, where so much emphasis is put on outward appearances and the marketability of them. Whenever I see successful older actresses (and even some young actresses now), whether they entered the industry in their youth or in their more recent years, doing whatever the hell they want, I'm always like good for you. Good for you. Gillian Anderson is a frickin' role model.
I’d like to confess to something: Before reading this article, I did not know (and had never heard talk about) “age-blind casting”. I would not have not even considered it as a solution to a problem. In fact, I had not even considered discrimination based on age to be a thing. More specifically, “not a thing” within the theatre industry. I know, I know. It sounds ridiculously simple. I am actually ashamed to admit it. But, now that that is out of the way, I will say: I loved the author’s take on intersectionality. The relationship between age and gender, as common as it may seem, is not one often discussed. Whether it be considered taboo or often overlooked, the question of age in relation to love is a hard one to answer. The Romeo and Juliet example provided an interesting point of reflection. In addition to looking at the article through a lens of gender and age, the article provides a conversation starter for a series of important questions.
I had never thought of age-blind casting as a thing before. In Hollywood this is almost always prevalent with people in their late twenties being cast to play high schoolers or the people playing their parents being within five years of their age. I always saw this as problematic because the way a person looks in high school is nowhere near how a person in their late twenties will look; and this creates dangerous levels of comparison. The point they make that age-blind casting reinforces male privilege confused me at first, but now definitely makes sense. With the few exceptions of people like Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren, so many women in Hollywood are forgotten by the industry after a certain age while male actors tend to have longer running careers. I wonder where this starts. Is it with the screenwriters for not writing challenging roles for older women? Or is it with the casting directors who chose a younger person to play the role?
Male actors get cast in the same roles as they get older and older, while their female costars often remain the same age. No one blinks when 59-year-old Tom Cruise gets cast in another Mission Impossible movie, but if a woman his age were to star in an action movie, many heads would turn. It's just another example of sexism in the industry, and a double standard that punishes women for trying to make a living by acting past the age of 30. In the example given by the article of Ian McKellen playing Hamlet in an "age-blind" production, I have to ask who is playing Ophelia? Is she the same age? Is that age gap going to be addressed? Are all the other actors age-blind, or just the white male protagonist? Are the words "age-blind" really true, or are they just an excuse to put Sir Ian onstage? I'd like to think about how women are treated by casting directors based on their age, and how that affects our perception of women in everyday life.
When it comes to trying to diversify performing and creative spaces, we can not let the old white men decide how to do it. Inevitably it always comes back to just helping them out rather than other people. Like what Sammy said, we had to sit through a guest on a zoom class boasting about how he hired TWO Black people and almost act like he was a savior. Saying shit like “I want to be the last white man in this position” ; okay so then step down and stop talking?? Anyway, I have never heard of “Age-Blind Casting” being a thing before, but I don’t see how this is a solution to anything. Casting anything “blind” is also not a good idea. Being conscious that the demographics of an actor can largely impact the overall messaging of the show is really important, and then adjustments to how the show is directed should be made accordingly. And I agree that being able to be old and play a role much younger than yourself has almost exclusively been for men. We see a lot of ‘silver foxes’ and george clooney type men, but almost never a woman with so much as a few wrinkles getting to do the same thing. We so often see in media that female presenting people only have inherent value if they’re young and pretty. Hopefully we can work to change this.
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