A 61-year-old pregnant or a 3-year-old mother: Why do movies like to cast actors who don’t age? | film

TIn order to enjoy Kate Winslet’s new Christmas movie, Goodbye June, you need to be able to do a few things. First, if you’ve ever experienced any form of bereavement, you may have to take it slowly, as the film is explicitly about the death of a parent. But the other thing you need to do is not to Google the age of any of the actors.

And this is for good reason. Dame Helen Mirren plays the titular June, and her husband is played by Timothy Spall. Top actors and national treasures, the duo is one of them. However, Mirren is 80 years old, and Spall is 68 years old. And again, that’s good. I’ve undoubtedly met couples with larger age gaps than this, and they’re probably perfectly happy together.

But the problem comes when you take into consideration the ages of their children. Goodbye June is about four siblings who must put aside their differences in a moment of intense family crisis. Toni Collette plays one of the siblings. Toni Collette is 53 years old, and you’re already beating me here, aren’t you?

In order to square this circle, you have to accept that Mirren’s character was 28 when she gave birth to Colette, but Spall must have been only 15. This is not mentioned at any point during the film. Perhaps that’s wise – a Christmas movie about a dying parent is heavy enough, so a Christmas movie about a dying parent of a woman who was herself a literal schoolboy’s daughter might be a little too sweet about it – but it’s very strange nonetheless.

But let’s not be too strict here. Since the dawn of cinema, actors have been playing roles older and younger than their actual ages. Maybe – we hope! – Timothy Spall plays someone a decade older than him. The biggest problem is that when you start noticing this kind of stuff, it’s everywhere.

In the latest Bridget Jones film, the main character (played by Renée Zellweger, 56) has a six-year-old son. And in the expatriate film Lulu Wang, Nicole Kidman (58) has a young child. Again, it’s great for their personalities, and having a child later in life is great. It’s strange that no one mentions this, especially since it’s so statistically rare. In fact, to return to Goodbye June for a moment, it might be worth noting that Colette’s character is also pregnant.

While the number of US women over age 50 who give birth has increased dramatically over the past few decades – there were 144 births recorded in 1997, compared to 1,217 in 2023 – it still represents a vanishingly small segment of all births. Women over the age of 50 account for only 0.03% of births, so you would think that something as rare as this would have at least been acknowledged in the conspiracies.

Things get a little murkier in Eli Roth’s 2023 horror film Thanksgiving, as it’s revealed that the character played by Gina Gershon (61 at the time of release) is pregnant. It’s not entirely unheard of — in 2019, 74-year-old Eramathi Manjayama gave birth to twins after receiving IVF — but the pregnancy is sure to be the highlight of her character. Some forums have tried to explain this away by assuming that her character was never pregnant, and that the film’s maniacal villain was simply making it up, but a lot of thought was spent on Eli Roth’s film.

What is the reason for this? In the case of Bridget Jones and the Aliens, this may be because the filmmakers wanted to reflect the growing trend of women giving birth later in life, but again it may be because Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger could be perceived as younger than they actually are.

Then again, in the case of Goodbye June, it may be because Kate Winslet had access to Helen Mirren and Timothy Spall, and when you have access to actors of their size, you’re willing to fudge the numbers a bit.

It’s distracting, but it’s not a bad thing in and of itself. In fact, you could even see it as a corrective to years and years of women being cast in Hollywood to play the mothers of actors who aren’t that much older than them. Jessie Royce Landis played Cary Grant’s mother in North by Northwest, for example, although they were so close in age that she had to give birth to him when she was eight.

Likewise, Angela Lansbury had to give birth to Laurence Harvey at the age of three for The Manchurian Candidate to make sense. And the less thought goes into Oliver Stone’s Alexandra (in which Angelina Jolie plays the mother of Colin Farrell, who is just 362 days her junior), the better. By comparison, Timothy Spall was very old when he gave birth to Toni Collette in Goodbye June. Thank God Hollywood was so scary.