The silver-haired silver screen: Hollywood’s stars are getting older
From Daniel Craig, 54, to Tom Cruise, 60, Hollywood stars are getting older, raising concerns about the health of cinema.
Brad Pitt, when he was 55, explained his decision to do less acting and focus on producing. “I just feel, the game itself, it’ll move on naturally,” he said. “There will be a natural selection to it all.”
Three years on and he appears to have been wrong. From Daniel Craig, 54, in his swan song as James Bond to Tom Cruise, 60, belying his years in Top Gun: Maverick, leading actors and actresses in the most popular movies are much older now than at any point in the past four decades.
In the 1990s, the average age of film stars was 38. After a slight dip in the following decade to 37.4, it has now shot up and stands at 44.5 for the first three years of the 2020s. The average leading man is now 46.8, with the most high-profile actresses being 41.8.
The statistics have raised concerns about the health of cinema, which is increasingly dominated by remakes and sequels - Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park as well as Top Gun - and the Marvel superhero franchise and “origin stories” for familiar characters from the Joker to Buzz Lightyear.
A Bafta-winning producer said the cinema industry is in a “creative rut” and needs to push boundaries beyond bankable stars and franchise blockbusters. “It is very hard to create a movie star these days. Nobody takes risks on big movies or movies with people you have never heard of,” he said.
“All that producers are able to sell are things with movie stars - they can’t sell a good idea with an actor that could be a movie star,” they added. “Streamers [such as Netflix and Amazon] only want people who are established. People have got to take risks and make things they love and give people chances. There has got to be more opportunities for young actors to do new, interesting things.”
Film studios need as close to a guarantee for a financial return as they can get. Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of Top Gun in 1986 and its sequel, told the Sunday Times Culture in May: “I still get the same list of ten men the studios want in a movie. You still get Tom [Cruise], Leonardo [di Caprio]. Get one of these big names and you’ve got a good shot at getting a movie made.”
Bruckheimer, 78, said that Chris Hemsworth, star of Marvel’s Thor films, is one of the few leading actors to “break through” this century, but that “women are harder. It’s just not that strong a list yet”.
The dominance of an increasingly old guard can partly be put down to the fact that everybody has more entertainment choices than ever, thanks to the internet, satellite television and streaming services, whereas when Cruise first played Maverick in 1986 people had much fewer options and young stars could break through quickly. “It has all got fractured,” one film and TV producer said of pop culture.
Leading ladies have closed the age gap on leading men, according to a Sunday Times analysis of more than 3,400 leading actors and actresses starring in almost 1,900 films released since 1990, defying recent controversies about older men playing opposite younger women as their love interests. Nicole Kidman, 55, played US TV star Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos when she got pregnant, while Frances McDormand, 65, won the best actress Oscar twice in four years for her performances in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Nomadland.
The cyclical changing of the cinematic guard has yet to happen, with many stars working for longer and the increasingly widespread adoption of anti-ageing technology meaning that older actors can play younger versions of themselves. Septuagenarians Al Pacino and Robert de Niro play the same characters over five decades in 2019’s The Irishman thanks to computer-generated trickery, while Willem Dafoe, 67, and Alfred Molina, 69, were de-aged by more than 15 years each in Spider-Man: No Way Home to reprise characters they first played in 2002.
Tim Richards, the founder of cinema chain Vue and chairman of the British Film Institute, said that while he believed Top Gun’s new-found success was a “one-off” the data showed how important it was to encourage a new generation of stars.
“There is talent that can open films - [Arnold] Schwarzenegger, The Rock, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt - people would just go and see it. People would go and see a Christopher Nolan film; that takes time to build up. It just shows we have got to get young people out there.”
Of the top ten film and TV earners in the past year, all are men and only two - Venom star Tom Hardy, 44, and 38-year-old Hemsworth - are below the average age of top film stars. The list is topped by Cruise, who is poised to land a $144 million payday after Top Gun soared to more than $1.44 billion in ticket sales at the box office, according to Variety. He is followed by Will Smith, 53, Leonardo Di Caprio, 47, Brad Pitt, 58, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, 50.
The dearth of new talent is also a consequence of the pressure that continues to mount on independent film producers, the lifeblood of the industry that is often the place where future stars have their breakthrough moments. Significant inflation in productions costs and ongoing crew shortages has put the long-term viability of the sector in jeopardy, the BFI said last week.
“Independents are often responsible for breaking talent. If the world is harder for us then, yes, that slows things down,” said one Oscar-winning independent producer. “We have to have that combination of a brilliant script, director and stars. Whereas the franchises can push things out star led with very little going on in the script department.”
Not everybody agrees. Kevin Proctor, founder of independent production company Studio Pow, which released Funny Cow starring Maxine Peake in 2018 and is making a biopic of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, said he preferred to watch films about people over the age of 40.
“People are more interesting [over 40]. We’re making a heist film with four women over 40. What draws me to those stories is about experience and that comes with age,” he said. “Age doesn’t matter for me, it is all about the story.”
@iamliamkelly
The Times
More Coverage
Eight hacks that will help to ease back pain
Cutting five minutes from each hour you spend seated is effective - but there are other tricks worth knowing, writes Peta Bee.
Navalny’s daughter campaigns for Harris
The daughter of Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader, has joined the Kamala Harris election campaign team.