Hollywood has earned a well-deserved reputation for playing it fast and loose when it comes to casting co-stars for parent-child roles. Sometimes, these choices defy age logic, but somehow viewers are supposed to just go along with it. On a handful of occasions, the gamble has paid off so significantly that fans don’t bother to question it. And then there are times when viewers have sat back to wonder what these casting directors were thinking when they decided to portray certain co-stars in a parent-child situation.
The five co-stars on this list certainly belong to the latter category. Some of them had less than a decade between them, stretched just long enough to seem plausible. That is, until someone pulls up their birthdays and starts asking tough questions. And some even had way less than that. We’re talking gaps so tiny that these actors could grab happy hour together and no one would bat an eyelid. Let’s dive in.
1. Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrell in ‘Alexander’ (2004)
In what world is a mother just a year older than her son? We’ll tell you. In the world of casting directors Kerry Barden, Mark Bennett, Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Crowley, and Lucinda Syson. They’re the ones who decided that Angelina Jolie should play Olympias, the mother of Colin Farrell’s Alexander the Great in the 2004 historical drama, Alexander. Jolie was 29 while Farrell was 28 when the movie hit theaters. The film follows Alexander from his childhood to his death in his early thirties. So technically, Jolie’s character does get older throughout the movie.
But no one really bought into that dynamic for a second. And that’s even after Jolie tried to defend the choice by saying that there was no perfect age to play Olympias since the character needed to look the same from Alexander’s childhood until his death, so youth won over believability. Fortunately for her at the time, critics were more focused on tearing her apart for her accent and Farrell for his awful bleach job than they were on the age gap. But once people caught on, it became the joke that seems to have outlived the movie itself.
2. Tom Glynn-Carney and Olivia Cooke in ‘House of the Dragon’ (2022–Present)
Olivia Cooke was 28, and Tom Glynn-Carney was 27 when they first appeared on screen together in HBO’s House of the Dragon. That’s one year separating a woman playing a grandmother and the guy playing her firstborn child. Behind the scenes, Cooke has been refreshingly honest about how bizarre it all feels, joking that she and her co-star must be spiritually related since there’s basically no real-life generation between them.
Of course, the show does have an excuse for this casting choice baked into lore. In Westeros, royals marry young and have kids early by modern standards. While that covers some of the awkwardness on paper, Cooke has been quite vocal about what the real problem is. According to the Life Itself star, Hollywood might have a problem with seeing women age on screen. And can anyone definitely say she’s far off the mark?
3. Elizabeth Rodriguez and Dascha Polanco in ‘Orange Is the New Black’ (2013–2019)
Here the bizarre nature of the age gap is mitigated by the storyline’s believability. The bizarre part is the fact that Elizabeth Rodriguez, born in 1980, plays Aleida Diaz, the mother of Polanco’s Dayanara “Daya” Diaz, born in 1982. The two-year gap between mother and daughter sounds like yet another Hollywood distortion of reality, but it’s the one rare occasion where it works for the show rather than against it.
The show’s backstory has Aleida giving birth to Daya as a teenager. So having a mother and daughter who looked like they could be sisters fits the narrative perfectly. Even so, two years is still such a tight window even for a mother and daughter who look like sisters. So, credit to the writers for giving viewers a believable reason instead of just hoping no one would notice.
4. Amy Poehler and Rachel McAdams in ‘Mean Girls’ (2004)
When Mean Girls dropped in 2004, very few people, if any, clocked the fact that the actors who played Regina and her self-proclaimed cool mom, Mrs. George, are just seven years apart, age-wise. Amy Poehler, 32 at the time, deserves some credit for that, really selling the cool mom persona with the fake tan, leopard print, and that desperate try-hard energy that typically embarrasses teenage daughters. Rachel McAdams, meanwhile, was 25 while playing teenage Regina, which is a story for another time. But it lends further credence to Hollywood’s penchant for defying age logic with their casting choices.
5. Nicole Kidman and Jason Momoa in ‘Aquaman’ (2018)
Nicole Kidman was 51 to Jason Momoa’s 39 when Aquaman hit theaters, a twelve-year age gap between mother and son, but perhaps the most believable gap on this list based on modern realities. The weird factor largely comes from the fact that Kidman was the same age as Lisa Bonet, Momoa’s real-life wife (now ex-wife) at the time. The rest comes from the fact that Momoa’s Arthur Curry started the movie as a full adult, so this wasn’t some flashback-only role that could dodge the backlash that inevitably followed.
Kidman’s response to that backlash has become almost as famous as the casting choice itself. She blamed it all on Atlantean biology, saying her character just doesn’t age as humans do. It’s a smooth and even cleverer way to dodge the conversation about how Hollywood treats women once they get past a certain age, but of everyone on this list, she’s the one who walked away from the drama with the cleanest escape route.
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