It’s not often that you can say being of mature age is of the zeitgeist. But that is how actress Lindsay Duncan explains the spiking number of roles for older actors at the moment.
The 63 year-old, who stars in Le Week-End (a movie belonging to the booming “couples-at-the-crossroads” genre), says that it makes better business sense for films to be about older people, because those are the people who are going to the movies.
“Because people our age are still going to the cinema and many others aren’t. Younger people are using other devices to look at film,” she told The Australian.
Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. Photo: Getty Images
Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. Photo: Getty Images
Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. Photo: Getty Images
Among the recent spate of films with senior stars are The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Expendables and Hope Springs.
This year’s Academy Award nominations feature a bunch of sexagenarians and septuagenarians including Meryl Streep, 64, for August: Osage County, Judi Dench, 79, for Philomena and Bruce Dern, 76, for Nebraska.
English screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who wrote Le Week-End and other productions with mature-age catalysts such as The Mother (about a 60-year-old woman who falls in love with a younger man) does not say he writes older characters thanks to business sensibilities.
“Older people are just more interesting,” he says. “I’ve got teenagers and I like them, but I don’t find their lives all that fascinating.”
Roles for older actors aren’t just limited to “couples-at-the-crossroads” types of films. Some of today’s biggest action stars are the same actors from the 1980s and 90s: Sylvester Stallone, 67, Liam Neeson, 61, and Bruce Willis, 58, showing that the veterans might just appeal to the youth as well.
