Acting After 30: Will You Crumble Into a Pile of Dust?

So, I wonder how many of you out there can relate to this story…

Once upon a time, few years ago, I was at a film festival after-party shindig of some sort, I can’t remember exactly what it was. I DO remember that there was an awesome snack platter, great wine, and all of it was free, so that’s where I was hanging out. 

At some point in the evening, sometime after listening to two guys tell me the entire plot of their sci-fi spec script and sometime before I told somebody else the entire plot of mine, a well-meaning friend introduced me to a casting director from LA. 

Wow, right? This could have been my MOMENT. My moment to say, “Hey, cast me in your thing as long as it’s not too gross! You’ll want to cast ME. I’m INTERESTING!” 

I already had the endorsement of our mutual friend, who unfortunately couldn’t stick around for long enough to talk me up, but I did my best to make a good impression. It started out exactly like most of my conversations with people do:

“So your name’s Meg?”
“Mig. With an I.” 
“Nice, what’s that short for?”

Admittedly, I can’t remember which joke I told, but it was either…

“Well my parents were really big into fighter jets but the hospital wouldn’t let them pick ‘F-18.” 
“Milligram. I was born terribly under weight.” 
“It actually stands for ‘Most Inconvenient Guest.’ My parents weren’t expecting me!”

Whatever it was, it got a laugh.

Then it was his turn to talk about himself, and I became very excited about the project he was working on. It had to do with a girl who inherits her mother’s old music store, finds her old songs, and in doing so learns about her father she had never met. Come to think of it, it was kinda like hipster Mamma Mia. 

I asked him when auditions were, where I could send my reel, whether the project was union or non-union, how many peanuts do we get paid, all the standard questions. Before he answered any of them though, he had a question for me. 

“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” 

“25,” I said, with all of the pride and enthusiasm that comes with being the same age (if not gender) of most protagonists in most stories. 

“Ah,” he said with a soft chuckle. “So you’ve only got 5 years left to live.” 

“…What happens in 5 years? Do I turn into a pile of dust?” 

I laughed. That’s the thing to do when somebody says something like that, right? Laugh? He had that soft chuckle thing going on earlier, so it seemed like a laugh was what he was going for. 

But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he said:

“Basically? Yeah. Yeah you do.” 

Then he set his drink down and started talking with his hands, like he was about to launch into a TED talk or sell me an exciting new software program.

The Speech

“Look, you seem like a nice girl, and it’s good that you have one of those faces where you could be 15 or you could be 30, but the thing is that you’re breaking into this business way too late. Women just don’t make it in acting after 30. Meryl Streep is an anomaly. You’re going up against 18 year olds who’ve been in shampoo ads since they were 6. And these girls are starving themselves and slaving away at the gym to stay sexy, and there you are eating the entire snack table. And there’s nothing wrong with that! If you want to eat snacks, make films, drink wine, be funny, do it, but don’t try to go up against those other girls. You’ve only got 5 years left to catch up with them, and you’re not gonna win. Then, when you hit 30, there won’t be any roles left. You’d be lucky to get a callback for a soccer mom in a soap ad, but it’s probably gonna go to a girl who’s been in the game longer. And she may even be younger than you are. It sucks, but it’s just a reality of this business. If you’re a woman, and you’re 30, there just aren’t roles. Especially when it becomes noticeable that you’re 30. That’s it. Your acting career is dust in the wind… But hey, if you want to make your own little passion projects, you can always act in those. You’re funny. Most girls aren’t funny. Maybe you could consider being a writer, but you probably should steer clear of the acting game. That’s my advice.”

—Anonymous Casting Director / Authority on What Women Should Do with Their Acting Careers, circa 2015

I think back on that moment as if it’s a choice-based video game, and I have three dialogue options. 

Guess which one I picked? 

I’ll give you a hint; my response was:

“Well hit me up in a few years if ya need to cast a pile of dust in anything…” 

And then I DID FINGER GUNS, because apparently I was already over 30, and also a dad in the 90s.

After that, I found somebody shy and polite, and you’d best believe I subjected that poor sucker to the entire plot of my sci-fi spec script. Partly it was because it was just easier to talk about something ridiculous, like humans putting their garbage into space and the garbage turning into sentient life forms that invaaaade, leading a woman to come face-to-face with the drawings of her ex-boyfriend she thought she’d thrown away and gotten rid of once and for all, except now they are an ALIEN! (SPOILER ALERT, they bone!)

Partly, I secretly hoped the casting director might overhear me and realize that I had, in fact, been writing for years before his brilliant idea that I should be a writer. Eons. Millennia. I was certainly old enough, right? 

Eventually I left, and no amount of smiles and nods from strangers over how clever “Attack of the Space Garbage” sounded could wipe away that feeling that I was not good enough. There was no turning back time. 

There was a fierce wind blowing, and I just kept thinking to myself how frail and insubstantial I felt. Because here’s the saddest part of this story…

…This was the third year in a row that I had been 25 when I met a casting director.

No, I’m not a vampire (I don’t think…) I lie about my age. A lot of us do. I had figured 25 would be a safe number. I’d thought wrong.

Can You Imagine?

Our society idolizes and obsesses over youth and beauty, like a bunch of morons. Really, it’s kind of stupid when you think about it. Here we all are, deteriorating at a (thankfully) slow pace a little bit more each day, trying desperately to stop the wrinkles, fight the gravity, fit the standard, fool other people into thinking we’ve existed for a shorter amount of time than we actually have.

Can you imagine if the world were different? What if one day your girlfriend came running out from the bathroom excitedly, screaming, “Babe look I just got my first wrinkle! Take a pic I need to put it on Instagram! #firstwrinkle #agingisfun #stillalivebitches #ispeakinhashtags.” 

I get it though. I do. The cosmetics companies need to sell stuff and who am I to stop them? After all, painting your face is fun and more people should do it for that reason. It’s when you get into this whole mindset of “I need to look perfect. I need to look younger than 25 foreeeeeeverrrrr!” that things start to get bad. 

Since that conversation, I’ve spent a lot of my precious, dwindling time worrying that I look old. Every time I saw any sign at all in the mirror that I was aging, I’d freak out. There were even plans I canceled with people because I thought I was looking old that day. And sometimes these were plans for evening hikes— it didn’t matter, insecurities are a beast. An ugly beast. No talking furniture included.

Aftermath

So, here we are in 2019. I just turned 30. So far, no dust. But you know what? Just last year, some of my favorite movie characters crumbled into piles of dust, and I have a feeling they’ll be okay.

A lot has happened since that night I met the casting director. MeToo happened. The seediest of the seedy assholes in the business are being called out. Misogyny is slowly but surely becoming less of a norm. 

45 year old Olivia Colman and 48 year old Regina King took home Oscars the other night. Oscars which they were able to hold in their non-disintegrated hands.

Countless movies all over the world have been made since that night at that festival. Quite a lot of them featured actresses who didn’t throw in the towel when the big 3-0 hit.

During the last few years, I’ve played some great, non-dusty roles. I’ve also worked with and met casting directors who were professional, kind, and who had better, more polite, and less patronizing ways of telling me if I wasn’t right for a role.

You know what hasn’t happened in that time?

Dude’s hipster Mamma Mia movie.

Happy Birthday to Me. 

And happy birthday to all of you who’ve felt the need to lie about being younger than 30. Let’s be okay with this third decade of life. Let’s be okay with being ourselves. 

P.S. I know, “Attack of the Space Garbage” hasn’t been made yet either, so I know I’m one to talk. But you’d best believe that it will one day have a cast of mostly 30-something year old women.  Some of them will get to play actual sentient garbage, so hey, those people saying “roles for 30 year old women are garbage” wont be entirely wrong!