Can Gen X Women Play Gen X Women, Please?

5 min readDec 17, 2022

It was the publicity photo that filled me with rage. In it, star reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, stand like bookends around actors, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, who are leaning on a ladder. I’ve got nothing against ladders or any of the people involved but still the photo made me mad. Here we have two of our Gen X heroes, two women who heroically chased down a thorny story, putting themselves at risk and for no reason at all, other than “Hollywood” they are being portrayed by two younger fresher faced women. It’s not as if this story happened twenty years ago so they need to demonstrate younger selves. These events took place in 2017. It’s not like they’re ancient history. Why are we looking at women in their 30s when it was women in their 40s who broke this story?

Now — I’ve done the research and it turns out Mulligan and Kazan are not technically THAT much younger than Twohey and Kantor. There’s a not quite ten year gap. But to my eye it is much larger. Mulligan and Kazan can (and have recently) played characters much younger than they are — so they do not read as women who will soon be greeting their 40s. And maybe more significantly, there is a generational divide in that nearly ten year gap.

It feels meaningful to me that Gen X women broke this story and that they broke it in their 40s. I think women in their 30s couldn’t have done it. This is not because women in their 30s aren’t capable or smart or even experienced. It’s because, I think, something shifts for a lot of women in their 40s that allows for the kind of tenacity and not giving a fuck that was necessary to break that New York Times Weinstein story.

The fact that it was Gen X women who broke this story matters. It was largely Gen X women who were the victims of Harvey Weinstein and these ground shifting conversations happened between women who shared a generational history.

I know Hollywood loves to cast particularly beautiful movie stars to play regular people. This is not new or news. But to my eye, it looks as though they cast two beautiful girls to play two powerful women. And the women they’re portraying are also very beautiful! I imagine their beauty was helpful in their careers. Congratulations to everyone on looking gorgeous. But I wish they’d made a different choice for this film. I’ve been impressed with Carey Mulligan for a long time now. Promising Young Woman was a tour de force for her. I am usually thrilled to see her in anything. Not this time though.

There are so few women in their 40s on screen. As I’ve said before, there are so few, many people have no idea what women in their 40s could even look like. Couldn’t we have had this one? Couldn’t Generation X have seen ourselves as we actually are instead of played by younger women who look like they just got out of college? The eldest Millennials have entered their early 40s. I think they might be powerful and plentiful and loud enough as a generation to remain visible — but could we, Gen X, not be erased even as we stand here?

I think age is an important factor in the reporting that happened around Weinstein — at least for the women at the New York Times. I think women any younger than 40 could not have broken this case. I think a reporter who is also a woman would need a lot of experience under her belt, both of journalism but also at negotiating being a woman, both with other women and at not taking the usual bullshit from men. Harvey Weinstein targeted young women. He used tricks and tactics that young women are especially vulnerable to, or at least were when the events of this story took place. I think it’s incredibly significant that this a story about what happened twenty years ago as well as what happened now.

I understand why these younger actors wanted to play these reporters. The reporters are powerful women who are incredibly good at their jobs. Those are shoes it could be very powerful to step into and live in for a while — but if I were to watch this movie, I feel like I’d watch it the way I watch little girls playing kings, like “Good for them! They’re going to grow so much from this!” In other words, it’ll feel like watching some playacting, not authentic powerful women taking down a monster. The movie will be like the Shutterbugs’ lil’ 911 instead of Spotlight.

There are so many actors in their 40s, who are the age of those reporters, who I would have loved to have seen do this. I think younger women would also benefit from seeing actors older than them. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that if things go well, they too will be in their 40s one day and they’ll want to see their peers kicking ass, just like I do.