Laura Dern, 59, says it took getting older for her to stop shaping herself around what other people find desirable.
“You know, it’s interesting: What they think you want to explore as a female actor is so bizarre. Like to explore sexuality at 20 in my case meant, ‘Tell me who you want me to be, or what you think is sexy or pretty, and I’ll try to mimic that in a film. I don’t know my own self or my own sexuality yet,'” Dern told AARP in an interview published on Monday.
“But at 50, it’s like, ‘This is what’s interesting. This is what’s sexy. That’s what’s unattractive. This is what feels human.’ Vulnerability is sexuality,” she said.
The “Jurassic Park” star added that aging in the public eye isn’t always easy to navigate, but she has no interest in holding on to youth.
“Someone told me I was brave for being willing to age on screen — to be myself at every age and not hide the process of aging, which should be empowering and beautiful, because it has always been in French and Italian cinema,” she said.
Unlike in Hollywood, audiences in European film industries are more likely to see older actors as attractive, Dern said.
When she was younger, men she knew would watch films featuring French actor Emmanuelle Riva in her 70s and still see her as beautiful.
“My friends in LA don’t say that. So I hope that we continue to explore male and female characters at every age with all the depth they deserve,” she said.
Despite how universal the experience is, Hollywood still overlooks stories about growing older, she added.
“We all know what it’s like to be a kid, but we don’t know how to grow old. And we don’t know how to find community around it, and how to talk about our fear of disease, of losing life, of losing loved ones. It’s pretty amazing in a community of storytellers that there are hardly any stories about that, and yet it’s inescapable for us all to face,” Dern said.
This isn’t the first time Dern has spoken about societal expectations around beauty and getting older.
In a 2019 interview with Allure, Dern said she was given very different ideas about aging when she was starting out, but it helped her understand how her career could evolve.
“Once, 20 years ago, someone told me, ‘Have fun now, because once you’re 40 things will change,’ and yet my parents, who were also actors, told me, ‘Well, you love playing complicated, deep characters, but you don’t really get to play those until you’re 40,'” Dern said.
In January, she told The Independent that beauty standards around aging are harsher now than they were in her mother’s generation.
“I remember, when I was a child, hearing her friends talk about the pressure at 70 to get a facelift if you wanted to keep working. But now I’m hearing my 21-year-old daughter’s friends say, ‘You should get Botox now so that you’re never wrinkled,'” Dern said.
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