Penelope Cruz is sick of being asked about ageing

The issue of sexism in Hollywood is nothing new. As actresses get older, they are faced with less roles and more and more questions about how it feels to age in the film industry.

Penelope Cruz is the latest famous face to open up about ageism. With an illustrious acting career that started at the tender age of 16, Cruz has had her fair share of movie highs.

But she has also faced inane questions by the media since her early twenties.

Speaking to Gwyneth Paltrow in Interview magazine, the now 43-year-old admitted to being tired of being asked “crazy” questions about her age.

“Journalists have been asking me, since I was, like, 22, ‘Are you afraid of ageing?’” she said. “That is such a crazy question for a 22-year-old girl or, for that matter, for a 42-year-old.”

“I combat that craziness by refusing to answer the question. In fact, when it comes to talking about ageing as an actress, I feel like, ‘What the f**k? I’m not going to give you even two minutes to honour your question. It doesn’t deserve that.’”

Cruz also spoke of the pressures she felt to answer each and every question when she was a young actress but commented that “something changed when I gave birth to my daughter.”

“I started thinking, ‘Come on, it’s 2017. Why do women still have to be talking about this?’ It’s crazy.”

The Spanish actress is far from the first celebrity female to confront ageism head on with several ‘older’ women opening up to the media.

56-year-old Julianne Moore recently told InStyle that “it’s a privilege to age”, adding: “I mean, let’s not talk about this idea of, ‘Oh no! I’m going to be 40!’ You could be dead. So enjoy it.”

“Even in scripts, they’ll refer to a character as ‘ageing.’ Well… everyone is ageing,” she continued.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was told she was too old to play the lover of a 55-year-old man. She was 37 at the time. “It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said while Helen Mirren called the fiasco “f**king outrageous.”

Meryl Streep also hit headlines for saying that when she turned 40, she was offered three roles to play the greatest characters of her career: witches.

Enough with the ridiculousness, Hollywood.

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