How did a nearly 30-year-old film spark a global kerfuffle about huge age gaps in Hollywood films? Some say it’s the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning. | By SamanthaSMorris
“The casting of Jennifer Connolly in Top Gun: Maverick” - pictured, right, with co-star Tom Cruise - “I think people were surprised that [the age gap] wasn’t as [wide] as you’d think,” says University of Melbourne popular culture lecturer Lauren Rosewarne.
“[Alfred] Hitchcock made an entire career of this,” says film scholar Bruce Isaacs of films like Vertigo, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, pictured, in which an older man lusts after and controls a younger woman.
“Women are expected to bring hotness and fertility to the table, and men are expected to bring smarts and money,” says Rosewarne. , proving that there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60.” One year later, Maggie Gyllenhaalthat she had, at 37, been told she was “too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me.”