Elizabeth Banks has said that Hollywood roles felt scarcer to her after a certain age, but she also argues that women can create opportunities rather than wait for the industry to offer them. Her comments describe her experience, not a statistic about how many roles she personally lost. They also connect to a wider representation problem: research reviewed by the Geena Davis Institute found older women appeared less often than older men in a study of top films released worldwide in 2019.
What has Elizabeth Banks said about aging in Hollywood?
In a May 30, 2025, Los Angeles Times interview with Ashley Spencer about The Better Sister, Banks recalled comparing her career prospects with those of male co-stars Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper, who went on to play superheroes. She said, “I’m never going to get that, especially once I got over a certain age.”
That is qualitative testimony about how Banks understood her own opportunities; it is not a count of roles she was offered or passed over. In the same interview, she said women can respond to limited opportunities by making their own work, and described the industry as changed in part because women changed it. Her point is not that every barrier has disappeared, but that women’s agency is part of how the landscape shifts.
How does Skincare relate to Banks’s remarks?
In an August 15, 2024, Forbes interview, Banks discussed playing Hope Goldman, an aesthetician whose work and prospects are bound up with appearance and novelty. “The woman I play is aging, like me, in an industry that really values the new,” she said.
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The distinction matters: Banks was describing the character and the film’s themes, while noting a circumstance she recognized. Hope Goldman’s story should not be treated as an account of Banks’s own life, and the remark is not an endorsement of skincare products. The film offers a dramatic setting in which age, beauty, and the pressure to remain current intersect.
What does screen-representation research show about older women?
The Geena Davis Institute’s 2024 report, Women Over 50: The Right To Be Seen on Screen, reviews previous research rather than reporting a new 2024 sample of films. It summarizes a study of top films released worldwide in 2019 in which older male characters outnumbered older female characters two to one.
The Institute’s review also says that women characters aged 50 and older were more likely than male characters of the same age to be depicted through stereotypes such as senility, frailty, or frumpiness. These findings concern on-screen representation in the cited research; they do not measure casting decisions today or establish how many jobs any individual performer receives. The Institute argues that more diverse, complex portrayals of older adults can shape social perceptions of aging.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Does Banks describe aging only as career decline?
No. In an October 27, 2022, Vanity Fair interview with Joy Press about Call Jane, Banks described the film as “the coming of age of a woman who’s 40.” She was speaking about the character’s development in a story also concerned with collective action and abortion health care. That framing treats a woman’s life at 40 as a beginning of change, not merely as a point at which opportunities close.
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Taken together, Banks’s comments touch on three different things: her own sense of career opportunity, a fictional character facing an industry that prizes novelty, and screen stories that can either narrow or expand the roles imagined for older women. Keeping those layers separate makes the larger issue clearer without turning one actor’s experience into a universal rule.
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