There’s a new age of film, and some of Hollywood’s leading ladies are here for it.
Within the past year, actresses such as Nicole Kidman, Anne Hathaway, Laura Dern and more have enthusiastically taken on roles that have shattered sexual stereotypes and challenged cultural conversations. From Kidman’s “A Family Affair” and “Babygirl” to Hathway’s “The Idea of You” and Dern’s upcoming film, “Lonely Planet,” the plots share a common theme: the exploration of what it’s like to be a middle-aged woman discovering self-identity, all while romancing younger men.
Though it’s a theme that has been around for years (who can forget Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate”?), there’s a notable, and long, overdue shift happening now, says Eric Schiffer, Chief Executive Officer of Reputation Management Consultants.
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“Hollywood’s taping powerful cultural shifts on age and romance, headlining older women as empowered and desirable, kills stereotypes, that message that women fail to be sexually hot as they age,” Schiffer told Fox News Digital. “Women relate to this dopamine hit of eternal youth and a novel message that arrests their imagination, takes on taboos, and causes audiences to buzz and clamor.”
“Big stars like Kidman and Hathaway sign onto these roles because they blow up the normal romantic leads in favor of complex characters that can influence cultural conversations and change how people and society view female age and romance,” he added.
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Robert J. Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said these films are doing just what is expected of them: “challenging the standard status quo” when it comes to gender roles.
“The very fact that we’re now starting to get a challenge to these things is notable,” Thompson said. “The fact that we’re seeing a lot of this now may demonstrate that some progress is being made in that, this has been going the other direction for most of the history of the movies and the fact that now we’re starting to see movies in this direction to some extent that it’s being normalized.”
“It’s beginning to reflect changes, which include more women directing, more women in powerful positions behind the camera, as well as in front of the cameras than we did a generation ago,” he continued.
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“These roles resonate in particular with female audiences,” David Schmid, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, added.
Kidman, who starred alongside Zac Efron in “A Family Affair,” a film in which her character has a full-blown affair with her daughter’s much younger movie star boss (Efron), has just wrapped one of the most challenging roles of her career.
In the upcoming erotic thriller, “Babygirl,” the Australian actress, 57, plays powerful CEO and mom Romy, who partakes in a hot affair with her younger intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson).
“This definitely leaves me exposed and vulnerable and frightened and all of those things when it’s given to the world, but making it with these people here was delicate and intimate,” the “Moulin Rouge” star said during a press conference for the film at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. “Right now, we’re all a bit nervous.”
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Describing the film, Kidman said it’s “obviously about sex, it’s about desire, it’s about your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, it’s about marriage, it’s about truth, power, consent.”
“This is one woman’s story, and this is, I hope, a very liberating story,” the Academy Award winner added, according to Variety. “I didn’t feel exploited. I felt very much a part of it. It’s the story that I wanted to be a part of, that I wanted to tell. And every part of me was committed to that.”
Earlier this year, Hathaway had a similar experience in that she was thrilled to explore her character’s desire for something more.
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In “The Idea Of You,” Hathway, 41, portrays Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom who finds herself entangled with a younger man, a singer in a boy band (Nicholas Galitzine).
“The thing I was interested in about Solène was this idea that, turning 40 and knowing who she was in a professional sense, knowing who she is as a mother, she had not necessarily given herself full freight to explore aspects of herself as a person,” Hathway told the New York Times ahead of the movie’s release.
“This is a movie about a woman healing her heart after a massive trust trauma, and it says that a bloom can happen in a person’s life at any stage,” she continued. “I found myself almost possessed with the need to explore what those two things meant and looked like.”
“She felt familiar. I recognized aspects of myself in her,” Hathaway added. “I recognized aspects of friends or women I admire. She had a richness to her, combined with this idea that early in her life she had been a people pleaser. I was excited by that idea of somebody at a place in their life where they’ve grown out of that phase.”
That idea of ditching that “people pleaser” mentality is exactly what drew Dern into her new film, “Lonely Planet.”
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In the upcoming Netflix movie, Dern, 57, plays Katherine Loewe, a newly single novelist who meets a younger man, Owen Brophy (Chris Hemsworth), while on a retreat in Morocco. The two spark up a steamy, “life-altering” romance, according to the synopsis.
“What drew me to the story was the exploration of identity and self-worth within relationships, especially in a world as intellectually charged as the literary scene,” Dern said in a Netflix press release. “The dynamic between the younger man and the older, established writer intrigued me because it’s not just about romance — it’s about finding someone who truly sees and understands you, which is something deeply human and relatable.”
Fox News Digital’s Larry Fink contributed to this post.
