I know Diane Farr from the series Fire Country, where she plays the mom of the hot lead character, Bode ( who fights fires while incarcerated. She has a high ranking job as the California Fire Division Chief and is facing a health crisis (no spoilers!). I watched most of the first season, but I’m not keeping up with it. One of the first things I noticed about the show was the relationship between Diane’s character, Sharon Leone, and her on screen husband, Vince, played by Billy Burke. Sharon is 54 and Billy is 57. They just seem like a lot of couples I know around that age, with regular couple issues. Vince comes across as controlling from what I remember, but that’s authentic and realistic.
Diane has written an essay for Entertainment Weekly addressing age gaps in television and movies. She interviewed a bunch of her famous friends for it, including Sarah Wayne Callies, Liza Colón-Zayas, Chandra Wilson and Marcia Gay Harden. Most of them echoed her point that age gaps are often unnecessary and can be distracting. It’s a long essay and I’m only excerpting some brief parts of it. You can read more at the source.
I currently play Sharon Leone, the matriarch on last season’s No. 1 new TV show, Fire Country. The CBS hit has the highest ratings of any freshman series, on any network, reaching roughly 10 million viewers a week across various platforms. Some say part of its success is the chemistry between me and my onscreen husband, played by Billy Burke — “chemistry” being the word Hollywood uses for a connection and its heat, that can’t be manufactured between actors but will catapult a performance to a cultural moment…
Age parity — hiring women who are the age a character is written, and within the same decade as their male costar — has yet to become a standard in film and TV, or even a consideration despite movement toward racial, gender, sexual orientation, and pay parity…
I’ve played the female lead or romantic interest of the male lead on 10 television series. The two most successful — Rescue Me, a critic’s darling, and now Fire Country, a ratings standout — both paired me opposite actors within five years of my age. On the other eight shows, my love interests were 10 years older; 20 years older; and, twice, older than my father at 25 years my senior. And none achieved the same success.
Sarah Wayne Callies had a similar experience to mine. She rose to fame on Prison Break and then cemented herself in the zeitgeist on The Walking Dead, where both her male leads were within five years of her age. A film studio then cast her opposite Nic Cage, with a 15-year gap between them that was not a part of nor addressed in the story. The film shared none of Sarah’s previous success. “Hollywood does something very false, which is expect us to walk a path of peers when we are patently not,” Sarah tells me. “What we expect women to do is tell a lie…”
Is it possible to be authentic with your costar if you come from different generations, classes, educational backgrounds, and methods of working? Yes. Is it better if people represent the gender, nationality, race, and actual sexual orientation they live? So far, as an industry, we believe it is. So it should also apply to women playing the age a character is written because they have voices worth hearing, and representation matters.
Farr also mentions that she was often the only woman on set when she was younger and that this left her less willing to challenge showrunners or ask for accommodations. There’s so much more to this issue than just an age gap. I agree with Farr’s point of course. It’s more interesting and real to me when characters are around the same age. Maybe among the rich set it’s normal to see a much older man with a woman young enough to be his daughter, but for the rest of us it’s not relatable. The older man younger woman dynamic is not something I’ve seen play out in real life and I don’t know couples like that.
This issue was in the press last week after the outcry over the movie Miller’s Girl, where Jenna Ortega plays a love interest to Martin Freeman! Jenna was just 19 when she filmed that and Martin is of course now 52. The trailer makes it look like a tired Lolita cliche where a femme fatale teenager seduces a teacher and ruins his life. Please, we’ve moved beyond that as a society and I hope the film gets little attention beyond this. That’s what’s going to lead to change in the entertainment industry, our collective lack of interest in those stories.
photos via Instagram and YouTube screenshots/CBS
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