The actress begins with girlfriend Justine Bateman – who wrote a non-fiction book titled ‘Face: One Square Foot of Skin’ for an honest discussion about aging in Hollywood.
To promote her new book, Face: one square foot of skin, a creative non-fiction story about how society reacts to women as they get older, the actress hired writer and filmmaker Justine Bateman to set up friend Carrie-Anne Moss to moderate a conversation on behalf of 92nd Street Y in New York.
The extensive conversation saw Bateman criticize her naturally aging face (‘I had to get rid of this idea that my face was something that was awful and needed to be fixed,’ she said) as the low Moss expanded on life. as an actress over 40 in Hollywood.
“I heard that at 40 everything changed,” says Moss, who is now 53 and preparing for the release of The Matrix 4 in which she repeats her role as Trinity. “I did not believe in it, because I do not just believe in jumping on a system of thought that I do not really connect with. But literally the day after my fortieth birthday, I read a text that came to me and I met with my manager talked about it and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s not that role [you’re reading for], it’s the grandmother. I may be exaggerating a bit, but it happened overnight. I went from girl to mother to beyond the mother. ‘
Moss said it was partly a difficult transition to process because male actors avoided the same trajectory. Moss said she never wants to stay in the business when she feels she has to change everything about herself to stay in it. “You do not feel that you have become very old and suddenly you see yourself on screen,” she said, adding that it was a kind of brutal witness to the process. “I would look at these French and European actresses and they just had something to them that felt so confident in their own skin. I could not wait to be that. I strive for it. It’s not easy in this business “There is a lot of external pressure.”
Moss praised Bateman for writing Face, which serves as a sequel to her 2018 book exploring Hollywood and popular culture, Fame: the hijacking of reality. For FaceBateman, 55, said she was compelled to investigate the unfair expectations of women, especially women in the public eye like her, as they get older. “I find it psychotic that we have had any conversations about our faces,” she said. “It’s normalized. Time-out, time-out! It’s not a fact. It’s an idea we can catch up and make a faith or not. I’m so, fuck it.”
And because she resisted the generally accepted practice, critics from all corners went to the message boards to paralyze her appearance. But that would still not let her choose surgery, she said. Instead, she looked inward to fix the triggers and cure all the uncertainties that made her react to such vitriol in the first place. “It does nothing to make me happier or freer. It does everything to bump it all up. It does everything to dampen my life. I’m going to do the opposite, then I’ll have the opposite result.”
A version of this story first appeared in the April 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to sign up.