Hollywood's Age-Gap Boomlet

Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger lead a new crop of May-December romantic comedies.

Nicholas Galitzine and Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You. (Source.)

Hi friends~

I often joke about being an Elder Millennial, but I joke out of deep affection for my micro-generation. Any American born between 1980 and 1985 has seen a lot. We had analog childhoods. We make references that younger people don’t understand. We took it personally when Gen Z ruled that side parts and skinny jeans were out, because that meant that we were no longer the cool kids in town, calling the trends, but we also know from experience that trends cycle back, so many of us held onto those side parts and skinny jeans, the Peter Pan collars and Diane Lockhart statement necklaces.

With each passing and uncertain year, it feels like a privilege to have lived in a world before smartphones and social media, when we didn’t have so much information at our fingertips. I could go places and forget my cell phone without experiencing separation anxiety. I printed out MapQuest directions and somehow got to where I needed to be. I remember going into the office on Sundays to check my email because I did not have a laptop in my apartment. That kind of thing. (I miss it.) Around this time, I had a very weird morning in which I interviewed David Hasselhoff at 30 Rock (about what, I can’t recall) and then headed to New York’s Mandarin Oriental hotel to interview 23-year-old Anne Hathaway at The Devil Wears Prada press junket. When I stepped into her suite, I expected to find a glamorous, media-trained ingénue. Instead, I met a feisty, bespectacled theater kid with big opinions. She looked at me, an unassuming stranger, and declared that I wasn’t an “asshole” like the other reporters. She invited me to sit on the bed with her as she clipped her toenails and said things like, “My goal for the next 10 years is to get into carpentry, because I really want to learn how to make my own furniture.”

I liked Hathaway immediately. I thought she was fun! But I was in the minority, it seemed. In the post-Prada years, after Twitter took off and made everyone a critic, she experienced the highest of the highs (winning an Oscar) and the lowest of the lows: Becoming the target of a phenomenon known as “Hathahate,” where cyber-haters lobbed virtual tomatoes that nearly derailed her career. (She projected one of their worst fears: To be caught caring, or trying too hard, or overtly going after an Academy Award, Bradley Cooper-style.)

“A lot of people wouldn't give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,” she recently told Vanity Fair, crediting Christopher Nolan for tuning out the noise and casting her in Interstellar.

In her thirties, Hathaway pulled back from the public eye. The internet moved on to other targets. She dove into motherhood and worked steadily on stage and screen, though Hollywood stopped sending her the kinds of romantic scripts that she had received in her twenties, when she starred in swoony films such as Becoming Jane, One Day and Love & Other Drugs. She wondered: Where have these stories gone? Why did they stop?

Today, Hathaway is 41 years old, which makes her an Elder Millennial, and has fully cycled back into fashion. Her stans call her “mother,” an affectionate term for an iconic woman, and go nuts every time she walks a red carpet. She has never looked more comfortable in her own skin and that makes her radiant. As for those disappearing romantic scripts, she took matters into her own hands and produced The Idea of You, a love story about an older woman and a younger man that will stream on Amazon Prime Video starting May 2. The film — an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s beloved novel — is the newest in a growing number of age-gap pictures that are mid-budget, funny and star-driven. Last summer, Jennifer Lawrence kicked off the boomlet in No Hard Feelings, an R-rated buddy comedy rather than a meet-cute. Lawrence’s sardonic chaos agent becomes an unlikely mentor to a sheltered 19-year-old boy, and while their age difference is mined for laughs, it avoids the inappropriate.

A lot of people laughed at Julianne Moore’s campy performance in May December, but that was edgy drama with darkly comic undertones. It’s as arthouse as you get. Yet its critical success (alongside the more commercial No Hard Feelings) seems to have opened the door for studios to sign off on May-December plots with a warmer, sunnier and sexier tone. Besides The Idea of You, we have A Family Affair, which hits Netflix this summer and stars Nicole Kidman as a distinguished, Joan Didion-inspired writer who gets entangled with Zac Efron’s character. And next Valentine’s Day (synergy!), Renée Zellweger will return to theaters in the fourth installment of the Bridget Jones series, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The rom-com finds Bridge widowed in her fifties and raising two children. We like her just the way she is, and apparently her fan club also includes 27-year-old Leo Woodall (One Day), who’s rumored to play her paramour.

Zellweger in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).

When I spoke with A Family Affair’s director, Richard LaGravenese, for a Hollywood Reporter story on the new rom-com revival, he said he was surprised to learn that in some test screenings, “millennial women were upset by [Kidman and Efron’s 20-year gap] and wanted him to be with a younger girl that he dates in the beginning. And I didn’t really understand that because the age thing makes no difference. What matters is who you have a connection with and who you can be your authentic self with. And in the film, Zac [plays] a movie star [and] can only be really himself with Nicole because she doesn’t care about him being a movie star and everyone else does.”

I was curious to hear what Dr. Deborah Jermyn, a film-studies professor at the University of Roehampton London who has published two scholarly books on famous women aging in the spotlight, had to say about this romance boomlet. She suggests that the entertainment industry is banking on audiences’ built-in attachments to stars like Hathaway, Kidman and Zellweger.

“We don't necessarily want to see them leaving romantic roles or roles where they're a desirable woman protagonist,” Jermyn tells me, saying of the perks of popular demand: “They don’t have to [suffer] what happened to Meryl Streep when she turned 40 and got offered the role of a witch. Perhaps [these performances] will very slowly, tentatively, change some of our expectations of what women’s cells do as they age.”

Meanwhile, I can knowledgeably report that The Idea of You is excellent. (Yes, really.) It landed in trusted hands: Those of director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) and screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein), who both partnered on the screenplay. With wry charm and intelligence, Hathaway portrays Soléne Marchand, a single mom who falls for 24-year-old Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the sweetheart frontman of the fictional boy band August Moon. He sweeps her off her feet and melts her doubts about his youth. Here’s what I wrote last week in THR:

At a time in a woman’s life when she starts to feel invisible, this handsome, nice, younger man truly sees and appreciates Soléne as her cheating ex-husband cannot. She’s got a cool rom-com job (chic Silver Lake gallerist), but in a refreshing reversal of the time-honored sad singleton trope, she is no hapless damsel in distress. She knows her own worth, and past disappointments have made her cynical. She accidentally walks into Hayes’ trailer while accompanying her daughter to his Coachella concert. Sparks fly. She laughs off his attempts to flirt; I relished seeing Hathaway in this light and so will my fellow elder millennials.

“Anne’s character doesn’t need Hayes,” Showalter says. “Anne’s character is just fine and she’s sexually active. She’s a sexual human being. She knows who she is. She’s not down in the dumps. She has some baggage, some emotional wounding as we all do, but she’s not in need of getting her groove back. She’s already got her groove.”

Showalter told me that he was drawn to the idea of the The Idea of You, and how it handles the hoopla around older women dating younger men — a dynamic that remains a source of controversy and fascination. “There’s definitely a double standard,” he said, “and I don’t like that.” He mentioned the exes Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde as a high-profile example of the double standard playing out in real life, with Wilde garnering the lion’s share of negative criticism. (Recently, Robinne Lee gave a must-read statement to Becca Freeman’s Book Enthusiast newsletter, emphatically denying the widely held perception that she based Hayes on Styles.)

For her part, Hathaway explained to V Magazine, “One of the points that the movie makes is something that really resonates with me: We have limited ideas of appropriate ways for women to be happy. And we react harshly and punitively when we feel that women have stepped outside those boundaries. I think that needs to stop, so I made a movie about it.”

Personally, I’m glad she made a romance about a woman who has probably used MapQuest at some point in her life — and definitely a landline phone. Maybe she played The Oregon Trail in fourth-grade computer class. Maybe she’s been to a Blockbuster. Maybe she worked at Blockbuster. (Hmmmm. I doubt it.)

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Thanks, as always, for reading, subscribing, etcetera!

Yours in bouquets of newly sharpened pencils,

Erin