Laverne Cox has revealed that she’s stopped lying about her age for the first time in two decades.
The Orange is the New Black actor appeared on The Ellen Show on Wednesday (16 February) and mentioned that she will be turning 50 on 29 May.
She then stated that she has been debating whether or not to throw a party to celebrate, as she’s just getting used to saying her age out loud in public.
Cox explained that she’d started being “elusive” about her age 22 years ago when she was rejected for being older than her partner.
“I was 28 years old and I was dating a guy that was 21 and he broke up with me because he said I was too old,” she told host Ellen DeGeneres. “And I was like, ‘Oh, if I’m too old, I’ll just be 22.’”
For the next few years, Cox gave her age as 22 when asked, but when she reached a point where she felt uncomfortable lying, she switched her answer to “over 21”.
“So I was ‘over 21’ from 2002 to 2019,” Cox continued, as the audience laughed at her revelation.
However, when IMDB “figured out” her date of birth and published it, the Inventing Anna star was worried about what it would do to her career and romantic prospects.
“I was freaking out, I was having such anxiety,” she told DeGeneres. “I started unpacking all the stories about being older; the stories that I ‘wasn’t hireable’, ‘wasn’t dateable’, I wasn’t ‘eff-able’ over a certain age.”
Once she’d worked through those fears with her therapist, Cox first said her age publicly at a speaking engagement in January 2019.
“I thought the sky was going to fall,” she said, “But it was like nothing. And it was a reminder that in our heads, we might have shame about something… and no-one really cares.”
Inventing Anna is streaming now on Netflix.
