How the movies address an age-old question

The age gap between Hollywood's leading men and women is only important in one direction, laments Rob Long.

Nick Nolte and Robert Redford star in A Walk In The Woods. ters. Broad Green Pictures / AP

Robert Redford, the 79-year-old movie star, has been a famous person since the mid-1960s – and, frankly, it shows.

His face is still handsome, but let’s face it, it’s lined with age and sun damage – the result of years spent under the hot lights of superstardom and the relentless sunshine of the American west. So at 79, his famous blue eyes are still blue but they stand out a little less than they used to.

In his current film, A Walk in the Woods, in which he stars with Nick Nolte, another actor who has, as we say in Hollywood, some "serious road on his face", the two make a terrifically funny and fitting pair. Nolte is 74, so they're age-appropriate companions.

It’s a witty and strangely moving picture, what we in show business call a “two-hander”, meaning essentially a two-person piece.

Casting a two-hand film – or a television show, for that matter, which is something I have a lot of experience doing – is often a matter of getting the ages of the two stars to match up in a coherent way. It’s often a tricky business. It matters a lot what the relationship between the characters is supposed to be.

You have to be diplomatic, for instance, when you offer a role to an actor – if it’s a role that implies a certain age, like mother or grandmother – not to upset that actor’s self-image. You’d be surprised how many stars, some of whom are well into their fifties or sixties, insist that they’re not the “mum or dad type quite yet”.

“Who’s playing the kid?” is often the first question an actor asks when you offer the role of a parent. “I see myself playing a young mother,” a 60-year-old actress once said to me, without a trace of self-consciousness, “so make sure the actress playing my daughter is under 20, or I really can’t do the role.”

On the other hand, the way Hollywood works these days, it seems like it’s almost impossible to insult an actress – any actress – when you offer her the role of the wife in a film or TV series.

A few years back, on a certain American television network, they had several very successful comedies starring podgy, unattractive male comedians. But the casting mavens at the network felt no hesitation in asking outrageously beautiful actresses to play the wives in each television series.

What was more astonishing, in about half a dozen cases, the fashion-model fit and ravishing actresses readily agreed to take the parts. So American television audiences were treated to a sight out of science fiction: short, fat, wholly unattractive actors matched up with wives straight from the runways of Paris and Milan. And viewers just accepted that as natural, as if in real life, out in the wild, it’s a routine occurrence to see gorgeous supermodel-level women out on the arms of podgy, awkward men.

It must have been something along those lines that led Emma Thompson, the prominent British actress and comedienne – herself a rather sprightly and energetic 56 – to accept the role of Robert Redford's wife in A Walk in the Woods.

Sure, yes, it’s Robert Redford, but he’s still a rather obviously creaky 23 years her senior, and the film makes almost zero mention of this fact.

But if television is the medium where ugly dudes are paired with super-hot wives, film is the medium where ancient, decrepit men are cast opposite women who could easily be their daughters. And in each case, apparently, audiences accept it without resistance.

Imagine, for a moment, the reverse. Imagine a television comedy about a plain and heavyset woman, married – just as a matter of course, without any spin or particular comment – to a chiselled specimen of masculine perfection.

Imagine a film in which – again, just presented as a normal occurrence, without a spotlight or undue attention – an actress of Emma Thompson’s age (56) just happens to be married to, say, Jake Gyllenhaal (34) and no one thinks it’s weird.

Imagine, for a moment, being the producer or casting director of the project and calling up Jake Gyllenhaal and describing the role: “Jake, you’re gonna love it! It’s a terrific piece! It’s a two-hander. About a married couple who have this amazing adventure. And – oh, who’s playing your wife? Emma Thompson. You know her? Whaddya mean, is she too old for you? She’s only 22 years older than you are, that’s basically the same age. In the movies anyway. I’m telling you, audiences don’t care – we say you’re right for each other, and people just accept it.”

And that’s what it comes down to, really: if you put two people on screen together in a two-hander you’re telling audiences that these two people belong together and audiences will happily go along. The screen, somehow, makes it all work.

Unlike real life, of course, where if you happen to see an elderly or hideous man with a young and pretty wife you can be sure of one thing: what the man lacks in youth or attractiveness he makes up for in disposable cash.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl