This is the third and final installment of our series on age-proofing your career — part one focused on keeping your résumé and work outlook fresh, and part two laid out the new style rules for over-40 Hollywood execs.
Today, Elaine Low and Ankler contributor Degen Pener speak with executives and top Hollywood docs about the relentless pressure across the industry to keep your appearance and energy young, and the psychological and financial costs of both.
“I am not successful enough to get away with being old!”
Jack, a 47-year-old veteran Hollywood writer and showrunner, is joking — but not really. In a business where nobody is likely to call a colleague old to his or her face, ageism can still announce itself in more coded ways: tired, dated, out of touch, no longer hungry. These are descriptors that tap into the existential dread at every studio as younger, newer forms of “content” pull audiences away, and the age gap between executive offices and the mailroom only widens every year. Yes, experience remains an asset but also a double-edged sword — a credential many fear can be wielded against them at any time.
Today, to some, remaining employable increasingly comes with its own maintenance budget. Hair color every few weeks. Botox, lasers and skin tightening several times a year. Trainers, supplements, weight-loss drugs and treatments promising to restore what time has taken away. The goal is not necessarily to look 30. It is to look energetic, current and reassuringly unchanged — of no definable age — without ever appearing to have tried.
“No one is going to call you old,” continues Jack, who — like others who spoke to me for this story — requested anonymity to discuss this sensitive topic. “But if you get the stink of it on you, your ideas just might tantalize them less.”
Being out of touch has always been a grinding fear in Hollywood, and all the shiny things competing for audiences’ attention now have only stoked it. In an industry where a box office phenom like Obsession can rewrite everyone’s game plan, execs and creatives want to present as of-the-moment innovators who know Curry Barker (but please, not Bob Barker). So if a fat graft here or a GLP-1 there can make the difference, maybe the price is right.
Hollywood’s executive and creative class finds itself on an expensive hamster wheel: Look timeless, but never “done”; display experience, but conceal age; spend heavily, then pretend the result came naturally. And don’t forget Pilates, peptides and self-care — because ageism in this town is often cloaked in the language of wellness.
In a contracting industry that’s ejecting 40- and 50-somethings left and right and already giving 30-somethings worry lines about their career future, the appearance of vitality signals not just energy but ambition: You’re still in the game.
But at what cost?
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