Why Hollywood Often Casts Older Men Alongside Much Younger Women

Cary Grant turned 59 during the filming of Charade in 1963, and Audrey Hepburn was 33. Grant was uneasy about the gap, enough that the script was reworked so Hepburn’s character pursues him and his character keeps pointing out how old he is. He had reportedly turned down romantic leads opposite Hepburn in Roman Holiday […]

Cary Grant turned 59 during the filming of Charade in 1963, and Audrey Hepburn was 33. Grant was uneasy about the gap, enough that the script was reworked so Hepburn’s character pursues him and his character keeps pointing out how old he is. He had reportedly turned down romantic leads opposite Hepburn in Roman Holiday and Sabrina for the same reason. More than 60 years later, the pairing that bothered Grant is still a standard casting choice in romantic films.

The Numbers Behind Romantic Leads

The film researcher Stephen Follows looked at 422 romantic films released between 1984 and 2014, each of which earned more than $1 million at the US box office. On average, the male lead was about 4.5 years older than the female lead. Follows compared it with an average gap of 2.6 years among couples in England and Wales, which makes the screen gap nearly 2 years wider than the one in ordinary households.

Men were older on average in almost every year of the study, with the widest annual gaps in 1984, at 10.4 years, and 1991, at 9.2 years. Robert Redford was typically about 20 years older than his co-stars, and Dudley Moore about 18. Among actresses who appeared in 4 or more of the films, only Goldie Hawn and Sandra Bullock were older than their male co-stars on average, and in both cases the difference was little more than a year. By director, Sydney Pollack’s films had the widest average gap, at 16 years and 5 months. Pollack cast Redford as a romantic lead several times, including in Out of Africa in 1985, when Redford was 49 and Meryl Streep was 36.

Who directed the film made only a small difference. Male leads were 4.53 years older in films directed by men and 4.16 years older in films directed by women. Men directed 88% of the films, so the female-directed sample was small.

Character Ages in Top-Grossing Films

Martha Lauzen, who runs the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, counts the ages of characters in the 100 highest-grossing films each year. Among the 2023 releases, women in their 30s made up 33% of female characters, while women in their 40s made up only 15%. Men in their 40s made up 28% of male characters, the same share as men in their 30s. Men in their 50s made up 15% of male characters, and women aged 60 and over accounted for 7% of female characters.

Lauzen’s reading is that the number of female characters falls sharply at about 40, while for men the drop does not come until about 50. A casting director looking for a romantic partner for a 55-year-old star is therefore choosing from a large pool of men his age and a much smaller pool of women his age. In 2015 Maggie Gyllenhaal, then 37, said she had been turned down for the role of a 55-year-old man’s lover because producers thought she was too old. She did not name the film or the actor, and she later said the comment made her feel bad at first and angry soon after.

Relationship Types on Screen

When a script pairs a star in his 50s with a co-star in her late 20s, writers usually explain it through a familiar type, most often a mentor and his protégée or a widower who gets a second chance. Each type gives the audience a ready reason for the age difference inside the story.

Off screen, large age gaps turn up in many relationship types. The sugar daddy relationship is one of them, alongside second marriages and couples who met at work, and few of these follow a script. Films tend to show the pairing and leave the type unnamed.

Box-Office Records of Older Male Stars

A male star who has opened films for 30 years has a box-office record that studios and financiers rely on, and his age does not cancel that record. Redford, Richard Gere and Sean Connery all played romantic leads well into their 50s and 60s, and each film needed a female co-star. Connery was 68 when Entrapment came out in 1999, with Catherine Zeta-Jones, then 29, as his partner in the heist and the romance. Gere was 49 when Runaway Bride paired him with Julia Roberts, then 31, one of the actresses Follows found to be most consistently younger than her male co-stars.

A second analysis by Follows, covering US releases from 2006 to 2015, put the average male lead at 42.8 years old and the average female lead at 36.7. The gap was widest in action films and thrillers, where male leads averaged 43.3 and female leads 33.6. A separate chart by the data site GraphJoy, tracking 20 leading men over 30 years, found that 9 of them had an average on-screen age gap of 10 years or more. Since turning 35, Denzel Washington had been an average of 15.33 years older than his female co-stars, and Tom Cruise 12.55 years older. With far fewer women over 40 cast in any role, as Lauzen’s counts show, the older male lead keeps working and is usually paired with whoever the studio can cast, which most often means someone younger.

The 2024 Reversal

In 2024 several films reversed the pattern. The Idea of You paired a 40-year-old gallery owner, played by Anne Hathaway, with a 24-year-old singer. Nicole Kidman starred opposite younger men in both A Family Affair, with Zac Efron, and Babygirl, with Harris Dickinson. NBC News grouped these with Lonely Planet, in which Laura Dern plays a novelist who becomes involved with a younger man, and read the cluster as a new embrace of the age gap on screen, with the woman as the older partner.

Critics were divided about what the cluster meant. TheWrap described women taking control of May-December romances and reported that the 2024 films found receptive audiences. Others noted that the women cast in these roles were Oscar winners who were expected to look far younger than their age, which suggests that expectations about how an actress should look had barely moved.

Screen Couples and Real Couples

The age gap in Hollywood romance has never matched the couples in the audience, and the 2024 films do not match them either. The age gap in Babygirl, between a 57-year-old actress and a 28-year-old actor, is as far from the 2.6-year average as Connery and Zeta-Jones were in 1999. Studios have widened the range of age-gap stories they will tell, yet both versions leave out the couple most viewers belong to, two people born a few years apart.