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Outta the way, Big Dick Energy! Old Lady Energy just trotted onto the playing field, flexing her well-toned muscles and showing them off to great advantage at the 2025 Golden Globe Awards. As one of the winners giving off that energy, actor Fernanda Torres said in her acceptance speech, “This is such an amazing year for female performances!” What she didn’t say was that it was an amazing year for performances by women over 50, 60, and 70.
The evidence? Demi Moore (62) for The Substance; Jodie Foster (62) for True Detective: Night Country; Jean Smart (73) for Hacks; and Torres (a baby, at 59) for I’m Still Here. Not to mention—but what an honorable mention—the other nominated actresses, seven of them in their 50s (Pamela Anderson, Nicole Kidman, Karla Sofía Gascón, Kathryn Hahn, Liza Colón-Zayas, Naomi Watts, and Sofia Vergara), along with Tilda Swinton (64), Allison Janney (65), Isabella Rossellini (72), and Kathy Bates (76). Oh, and the estimable Viola Davis (59), decorated with the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
Look at those numbers: Sixteen actresses all over 50! Finally, a whiff of change is in the air. Foster, in an interview for People, said, “This is not my time. I had my time. This is their time,” referring to younger players, which is the kind of generosity more likely available when one feels a certain contentment with her career. She went on to say that working in her 60s is more satisfying and fun than it has been in the past 20 years, a sentiment undoubtedly shared by the winners and nominees at Sunday’s awards show.
But why this A-team of older women now? There have been recent precursors signaling a change. Before Hacks, Grace and Frankie tackled the challenges of aging head-on with honesty and a kind of big-hearted resolve. With more opportunities through social media, women are able to portray their lives as complex, full, even enviable as we age. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s award-winning podcast, Wiser Than Me, for example, in which she interviews iconic older women, shines its light on the value of accumulated years. (Louis-Dreyfus happens to know the dark side of accumulated years, too: Nine years ago she, along with a few other notable and slightly maturing actresses, was featured in Amy Schumer’s “Last Fuckable Day” video, satirically celebrating/mourning their passing from sexually desired to…human husks.)
Maybe the impact of a more widely held recognition—that middle-aged and older women are not completely robbed of their lifeforce, their generativity, their creative juices at menopause—has at last begun to infiltrate Hollywood. And speaking of creative juices (or maybe simply juices) our concepts of what middle-aged women look like are very different from what they were even 5 or 10 years ago. To wit: Demi Moore, a grandmother IRL, plays a 50-something-year-old woman in The Substance, with a body not very unlike her 20-something-year-old antagonist’s. Despite the fact that we’re incapable of reproducing (without a lot of help) after menopause, Hollywood has reluctantly begun to admit that some women may still be appealing, sexually, even when they can no longer make babies. (Of course, some women, like Moore, can still look like they could make babies, which makes it easier for Hollywood to take a risk with them. And more difficult for us to reconcile with our very different-looking bodies.)
It would make sense if part of the reason for a more robust representation of older women is that there are more women writing scripts for them. But according to The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, women made up only 17% of writers for the top 250 films of 2023, only a slight increase from 13% in 1998. And just three years ago, a story in the online newsletter The Conversation noted research from 2019 found that older women are often relegated to supporting roles in films—or are consistently portrayed as grumpy, frumpy, or senile.
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