I Can No Longer Tell How Old Anyone Is, Thanks to 2023 TV Shows
The post I Can No Longer Tell How Old Anyone Is, Thanks to 2023 TV Shows appeared first on Consequence.
In the third season of Party Down, one-time actor-turned-high-school-teacher-slash-cater-waiter Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) has a breakdown in front of a client, after the client reveals he can’t pay the beleaguered catering company for their services. “Jesus Christ! I’m 46 years old!” Henry wails, before listing all the ways his life is pathetic, crumpling into such deep despair that the client ends up finding a way to pay after all.
As soon as he gets the check and the client leaves, Henry reveals that it was all an act, impressing the high school student who had just been telling him that she thought acting was “just pretend.” As he exits the room to applause, Henry’s final zinger is this: “I’m 42, by the way.”
It’s a great scene, but the first thing I did after the episode ended was look up how old Adam Scott actually is in real life (50 years old this April). This is because this spring, I have increasingly lost my grip on knowing how old anyone is on screen anymore, entirely thanks to the gaslighting of so many shows.
Part of the magic of acting is that a great actor, with nothing but sheer talent, can transform themselves into literally anyone — with nothing more than a change in posture and facial expression, a legend of the stage and screen like Sir Laurence Olivier becomes an adolescent Romeo or an infirm King Lear right before our eyes.
Even with actors of slightly lesser talent than Olivier, audiences have been conditioned for years to accept that the age of the character we see on screen may not reflect what’s on the actor’s birth certificate. The teenagers of Beverly Hills 90210 were more than a few years past high school in real life. Jennifer Lawrence played 16-year-old freedom fighter Katniss Everdeen in 2012’s The Hunger Games and 30-something mop inventor Joy Mangano in 2015’s Joy. Brad Pitt played a li’l ancient baby man in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Acting! It’s magic!
But acting does have its limits, as we’ve been seeing in 2023. Casting directors have become more attuned to the idea of seeking out people from marginalized backgrounds to play characters from said marginalized backgrounds (Olivier is a legend, but his take on Othello is no longer a welcome one). Age, though, is a far more nebulous concept, especially in an industry where defying one’s age, in either direction, is of extreme interest.
Party Down (Starz)
Adam Scott playing a character eight years younger than him isn’t a big deal at all. (He’s honestly acceptable at any age range past 35 these days.) And certainly things have improved on this score, with teen roles in particular still often being played by actors in their 20s, but on a far more believable level than 33-year-old Stockard Channing in Grease or 29-year-old Alan Ruck in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But it gets frustrating when a solid show that could easily avoid this issue instead just runs into it head-first, either with a bad casting choice or poor implementation of the tools which allow an actor’s age to register properly on screen.
Easily the worst offender recently is Star Trek: Picard, which in Season 3 introduced the character of Jack Crusher, played by Ed Speleers. It’s established quickly that Jack is the son of Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), the former ship doctor/occasional love interest for Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), who cut off contact with all her friends and disappeared “over 20 years” ago.
To be clear about this, it is stated repeatedly that Beverly disappeared just over 20 years ago, only to reemerge with a son who wasn’t born before she left all her friends and family behind. A son who looks like this.
Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+)
There is no question that Speleers is a handsome person, and more importantly looks like he could be the son of Dr. Crusher and Picard (oh yeah, no points for guessing that Jack is secretly Picard’s son). He also happens to be 34 years old in real life, and looks it to some degree. Not in a bad way, just in a “this person has been on the planet Earth for 34 years” sort of way. (Yes, the character of Jack has been living in space for a good portion of his life, but Einstein’s Twin Paradox or the ultra-aging effects of interstellar UV rays are not presented as an explanation.)
Variety, in an interview with the actor, point-blank asked him about the question of Jack’s age, and Speleers says the character is meant to be “23 [or] 24,” adding:
“It was something that was discussed. I certainly felt a challenge to play down a bit. I know that happens in TV and cinema quite a lot anyway — quite often actors have to play down in age. I definitely tried to bring some youthfulness to the role, I think… I know that it might be an ongoing question. However, I believe that if we get the story told in the right way, and if these characters are believed, then the relationships will be believed — and I think the numbers and the age differences will become superfluous.”
All due respect to Speleers and Picard Season 3, but at least for this viewer, it has not become superfluous. Instead, it’s incredibly distracting.
Again, the last few months have been rife with examples of actors almost successfully playing outside their age range. The character aging in Apple TV+’s Extrapolations is pretty hard to track as the series moves decades forward into the future (though there’s a very clever choice made in the show’s finale, when it comes to showing us what a 60-something Kit Harington might look like, with the benefit of being exceptionally rich). In The Last of Us, 47-year-old Pedro Pascal plays the character of Joel at the ages of 36 and 56, which isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things, but leans heavily on the hair department’s application of grey hairs and lines of dialogue about Joel’s bad knees.
More egregious is the Prime Video musical drama Daisy Jones & the Six, which as Primetimer also recently observed, features its core cast both in 70s-set sequences as well as flash-forwards to 1997, when the band is being interviewed for a documentary 20 years after their last show together.
The series establishes in the first episode that Daisy Jones is 15 years old in 1968 — while the younger Daisy is played by the young-looking Amanda Fix, 33-year-old Riley Keough plays the character in her late teens, 20s… and beyond. Basic math tells us that the character was born in 1953, which means that in the documentary segments set in 1997, the show is telling us that this is what a 44-year-old woman looks like:
Daisy Jones & the Six (Prime Video)
It’s a bummer to see otherwise solid shows held back in this regard, because the issue isn’t whether a person can play a character 10 years younger than their actual age, or if an actor should be allowed to embody a character across multiple phases of their life. The issue is that if they’re going to do it, they have to do so believably, through whatever combination of craft and hair and make-up magic makes it come to life on screen.
Otherwise, cast an actual 40-something actress to play older Daisy, or screw with the Star Trek timeline to say that Beverly Crusher got pregnant 30 years ago, not 20. If only so that maybe, just maybe, we can all get a grip on what it actually means to not just be a certain age, but get older — the one thing we’re all lucky enough to do, if we’re still here.
I Can No Longer Tell How Old Anyone Is, Thanks to 2023 TV Shows
Liz Shannon Miller
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