The New Leading Ladies In Film? Not The Ingénues Of Yore

I found myself recently discussing the topic of age with some girlfriends over wine, specifically how I felt about entering my fourth decade in the next year or so. “I can’t wait,” I said after an indulgent gulp of rosé. “Apparently I’ll be a hot commodity in my 40s.” To be clear, my comment wasn’t meant to be a self-deprecating joke, even if some at the table may have taken it that way. I was referring to the recent wave of media placing women over 40 in a new light. A light that doesn’t include bitter spinster or the quiet and wise mother figure that fades into the background or is always in the kitchen. It seems that studios and streaming companies are creating more space for more sexual, desirable, ambitious, and, dare I say, troublemaking women in the demo. One that could very well be dethroning the 20-something ingénue that so many of us grew up idealizing.

“I remember looking at a chart featuring Tom Cruise where it showed his leading ladies,” says podcaster, author, and pop culture aficionado Danny Pellegrino on a recent phone call. “And [his female co-stars] either got younger or they always stayed the same age as he got older. And it just never felt balanced when it came to the leading ladies and the male counterparts.” The recent shift is much appreciated, he adds, because it's the same thing that has been happening with male actors and the roles they’re taking on in media. “Now we're seeing more projects where it might be an older woman romancing a younger man.”

Recent films and streaming shows like The Idea of You, Ted Lasso, and the just-released A Family Affair have all included these exact plots, showing women in their 40s and 50s as not only desirable objects of affection but also sexual beings. “There's a really famous clip that you can find on YouTube from Inside Amy Schumer where [she discusses] the unf*ckable age that women reach,” says associate professor Nichole Bogarosh, who specializes in the study of women in pop culture. “It was so true that you just never saw anybody past a certain age. They're all really super thin, everybody is white. And we just didn't see any real variation from that. And thankfully, we're starting to see some variation from that.”

Variation, indeed. Netflix’s latest rom-com, the aforementioned A Family Affair, depicts Nicole Kidman as a widowed author and mother of a 20-something aspiring film producer (played by Joey King) who ends up in a romantic entanglement with her daughter’s famous boss (played by Zac Efron). The comedy, which shows Kidman in all manner of precarious situations with a smooth-talking Efron, comes off the heels of the more dramatic The Idea Of You, which features Anne Hathaway who plays the divorced mother of a high school student who becomes the unexpected love interest of a boy band pop star. The films were released within months of each other. Pre-2024, shows like Ted Lasso featured Hannah Waddingham (TZR’s October 2022 cover star) as the owner of a football club navigating a male-dominated business and the dating world as well as a brief fling with a 21-year-old footballer. And in the 2022 sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a 60-something Emma Thompson plays a woman who seeks a young sex worker to help her experience pleasurable sex.

“Let me say that they [film and TV executives] really should be pushing [these stories] because Hollywood is a commodity-driven thing,” explains Bogarosh. “[This over-40 female demographic] is so much of the population, first of all, and that is when women come into their sexuality. So they really should be marketing to us.”

There’s also the fact that more women in this demo are in decision-making positions at these studios, helping propel these narratives that feel more authentic to them. “I think a lot of those A-list actors that we grew up watching are in powerful positions now where they're able to get stuff made,” says Pellegrino. “There are more women fronting their own production companies. You see someone like Margot Robbie now and Reese Witherspoon. I think Reese did a great job creating this template where she'd find female-centered stories from her Book Club and then adapt them to film. I think these young ingénues saw that, post-40, there weren't as many opportunities for women. So now, as they get older, they have found ways to combat that.”

Bogarosh also credits a shift in mindset in what it means to get older. “People are living longer, they're having second, third acts,” she says. “And so as the population ages, then we start to think about, OK, people are going to have romances, careers, etc. past the age of 30, past the age of 35.” This leads the professor to her next case for over-40 women in film, diversity, which includes age. “We need to think about everybody when we tell stories and narratives because everybody's perspectives are important,” she says.

While Pellegrino appreciates a rom-com plot, he says there are still more holes to fill for this specific demographic of leading ladies. Yes, messy love affairs are all well and good, but there’s so much more scope to be covered. “My main hope would be for these women to get the budgets in all of the genres. In romcom, in thriller, in horror. I would like to see them get the opportunity to tell these stories with the proper resources so that they look and turn out really well.”

Bogarosh says queer love stories are also missing here. “We're getting there, but I think we need more,” she says. “Because we still tend to lean very heavily into the binary of it. It's straight or gay, and not any of the shades in between. And I definitely think we need more diversity in weight. I still think we're pushing very, very particularly thin body types that aren't representative of the population in general, and that is very not helpful. Particularly for a society where we're leaning more and more into this, ‘Love your body the way it is, no matter what size. Whether it's really thin or heavier or what have you.’ And yet we still don't largely see that represented in film and television.”