Age Discrimination for Female Actors

The Hollywood industry is a very tough place to work in. One day you’re out and the next you’re in. Hollywood is already controversial as it is, so when people found out Olivia Wilde didn’t get the act of Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in Grammy-nominated movie, ‘Wolf of Wall Street’, because she was too old, people started to rage about the controversy again.

Wilde (only at age 28 and Leo at 38) was interviewed about the subject on The Howard Stern Show recently. She says after her audition for the part of the love interest of Leo DiCaprio’s character Jordan Belfort her agent told her she didn’t get the part because she was too ‘sophisticated’. She says in the interview that she wouldn’t have been upset or sad if that was the real reason she didn’t get the part; she actually liked the fact of being called ‘sophisticated’. Only to find out later they said she was ‘old’.

The part went to 22 year old Australian model/actress Margot Robbie who got nominations and played the performance incredibly. But the fact still is that the movie industry has move for improvement. There have been actress scandals of all kinds about stars such as Rebel Wilson and Catherine Zeta-Jones lying about their age just to get a part. But then there’s the part of the industry that only we have control of. Carrie Fisher was called out by many people on the internet last year because she was ‘no longer resembled the way she looked in her 20s’ as Princess Leia. Well, of course she wasn’t going to look exactly the same, since it had been 30 years since she played the part in the Star Wars movie, but that doesn’t mean her acting has aged.

Olivia Wilde was able to land her role in “Vinyl” (her new HBO show) because the show’s producer, Martin Scorsese, was so impressed with her “Wolf of Wall Street” audition, and that’s great. But the fact still remains that a movie industry in which actresses are already “too old” to play the love interest of much older men by their late 20s, an industry where many actresses feel the need to lie about their ages in order to get work, is desperately in need of some serious change.

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