Motion pictures are more likely to star a man named "Chris" or a talking animal than a woman over 60 years old, according to Age Without Limits, a British charity campaign.
"Among the 100 highest grossing films for 2023, 2024 and 2025, six films featured someone called Chris as the lead actor compared to just five featuring women over 60 as the lead character," it reported. "Films are also four times more likely to have a talking animal as the lead character than a female actor over the age of 60, our research reveals."
Here's Dame Emma Thompson (whose recent Dead of Winter got strong reviews), one of the few older women recently leading the cast of a movie in wide release: "Women are half the population and we get older. So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are. I want to see more films centre ageing women, we are compelling, relatable, and overdue for centre stage. Older women don't need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world, cinema just needs to catch up."
Cast Aside research, published by the Centre for Ageing Better in 2023, found only one in three speaking characters were aged 50 or over. The sample of 1,200 characters in nearly 50 popular films produced since 2010 exposed a representation gap with women 65 years and over were "more than three times less likely than men of the same age to be featured in British films."
Researchers also found that empowered, active and rounded older female characters were rare, with older women much more commonly portrayed as passive, pitiable, ridiculed for failing to act their age and often irrelevant to the main plot.
Recent films starring women included Jennifer Saunders in Allelujah (2023), Nia Vardalos in My big Fat Greek Wedding (2023), Diane Keaton in Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023), Demi Moore, in The Substance (2024) and Jamie Lee Curtis in Freakier Friday (2025).
Meanwhile, we had Chris Pratt in The Super Mario Bros Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 and Garfield Movie, Chris Pine in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Chris Hemsworth in Transformers One, and Christian Friedel in The Zone of Interest.
This summer, we have The Devil Wears Prada 2 to look forward to, starring Meryl Streep. There's also Wicker, though Olivia Colman is just 52 years old.
