There’s clearly a new face-snatcher in Hollywood. Older actresses are suddenly turning up to red carpet events and photoshoots with the same face they had twenty years ago.
Lindsay Lohan, 38, looks eerily like she did in her teen star stage, except frozen (she claims it’s just down to good skincare, lol). Christina Aguilera, 44, and Renee Zellweger, 55, look decades younger than they did last year. Nicole Kidman has simply never aged in the first place. Demi Moore, 61, looks snatched to the gods in The Substance, the camp horror flick from A24 about a woman so horrified by her aging body that she births a younger version of herself through her spine. Except of course when she’s covered in her hagsploitation prosthetics, because nothing is as scary as an old lady.
Everyone looks incredible, and no one can emote properly. So it was a revelation to see Keira Knightley in Black Doves with a normal amount of lines on her 39-year-old skin and the ability to make complex expressions as she kicks arse across London. Yes, the posters on the Tube et al have been air brushed to high heaven, presumably to spare commuters the horror of what a woman who is almost 40 looks like. But on camera, rest assured, Knightley looks like a normal, if terribly beautiful, woman.
It’s important to have stars that are aging at a regular, human rate. Not just because it serves as a reality check after doom-scrolling through endless pictures of women who look like they’ve had a Stepford Wives facial (although honestly that helps). It also gives Knightley’s character Helen a real sense of authenticity. Particularly when she quips to Sam (Ben Wishaw) that resetting her own dislocated shoulder is less hardcore than the time “I pushed two human beings out of my vagina in an afternoon”. Helen isn’t some sexy fantasy of a spy, she’s an undercover agent juggling motherhood and a high profile marriage. Knightley’s fine lines and crows feet make Helen feel real.
Knightley, like most stars, has demurred on the topic of whether she has or would get work done, but she has spoken about her determination to reject the narrative around aging in Hollywood. “I feel like it’s just opened up another well of how we can shame people,” she told The Times last month. “I’m going to do what I do and I’m going to feel fine about it.”
When an actor has obviously been at the tweakments, be it plumped-to-bursting fillers or chompy veneers, it can really take you out of the film or tv show. Period pieces and historical dramas can be rendered entirely silly if the cast look like they’ve wandered in from a plastic surgeon’s waiting room. It’s an extension of the meme about actors with “iPhone face”, who couldn’t possibly be believable in anything other than a modern setting because they look as though they have gazed upon the latest technology.
The wholesale rejection of plastic surgery is part of what makes Jodie Foster so magnetic at 62. You wouldn’t believe her as a sad, loser cop in True Detective season 4 if she had a facelift instead of wrinkles. Foster has been vocal about her refusal to get any treatments beyond lasering off a few sun spots. But she’s also said that it put her in a lonely position in the "There's that awkward phase where everybody who's in their late forties or fifties is very busy getting all plumped and shooting shit into their face,” Foster told Interview magazine last year. “I didn't want that life, but I also knew that I couldn't compete with my old self."
Being in competition with your old self is the real rub. Most women recognise the sadness of looking back at old photos and realising how cute you used to be when at the time you were busy feeling flawed and unfinished. For celebrities, neither pathway to aging seems appealing. Endure endless expensive and invasive treatments in pursuit of the chimeric potential of recapturing your youth. Or rejecting it and wondering if every lost job is because you’re a Botox refusenik. All the while there’s the creepy feeling that the entertainment industry wants women to be frozen at as young an age as possible, looking like they did when they likely didn’t have the wisdom and confidence that the years bestow on us.
This obsession with a youthful airbrushed visage has created wildly unrealistic expectations of women of all ages. There was outrage on X this week when accounts purporting to be run by young men (but likely content farmers posting rage bait for engagement) claimed that Sydney Sweeny, 27, was catfishing them because long lens paparazzi shots of her in a swimsuit and no makeup didn’t exactly match her red carpet appearances. If there are men who truly believe women wake up with a natural spray tan, eyelash extensions and blowdry, there may be no hope for them.
