Carrie-Anne Moss has opened up on the ageism she faced in Hollywood right after turning 40.
The Matrix actress spoke about this while moderating a session for her friend Justine Bateman, who is promoting her new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, a creative nonfiction tome about the ways society responds to women as they age.
“I had to get rid of this idea that my face was something that was horrible and should be fixed,” Bateman said, reflecting on the ageism she faced.
And Moss shared her own story: “I had heard that at 40 everything changed. I didn’t believe in that because I don’t believe in just jumping on a thought system that I don’t really align with. But literally the day after my 40th birthday, I was reading a script that had come to me and I was talking to my manager about it. She was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s not that role [you’re reading for], it’s the grandmother. I may be exaggerating a bit, but it happened overnight. I went from being a girl to the mother to beyond the mother.”
Moss said that was a tough transition to process because men don’t face this discrimination.
“You don’t feel like you’ve aged much and suddenly you’re seeing yourself onscreen,” she said, adding that it’s “kind of brutal” witnessing the process. “I would look at these French and European actresses and they just had something about them that felt so confident in their own skin. I couldn’t wait to be that. I strive for that. It’s not easy being in this business. There’s a lot of external pressure.”
She then went on to praised Bateman for writing Face, which serves as a follow-up to her 2018 book that examines Hollywood and popular culture, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality.
You can read about the rest of the chat here.
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