Russell Crowe, Former Gladiator and Chronic Mansplainer Says Actresses Need to Stop Whining About Sexist Casting

by Hannah Baxter

Forget your triple tall morning espresso. There’s a faster way to get your blood boiling: a hearty dose of mansplaining: Russell Crowe, the de facto emissary of all things misogynistic, is at it again.

The 50-year-old star of the upcoming film “The Water Diviner” told Australian Women’s Weekly, “To be honest, I think you’ll find that the woman who is saying that [the roles have dried up] is the woman who at 40,45,48, still wants to play the ingénue, and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21-year-old.” Not one to leave his readers without a pocked rationale, Crowe continued, saying, “Meryl Streep [is one who] will give you 10,000 examples as to why that’s bullshit, so will Helen Mirren, or whoever it happens to be.”

What Crowe fails to recognize is that there is a very real and increasingly noticeable lack of roles for women who are over the-last-comfortable-hill-that-is-forty for women in Hollywood, and in fact are unable to pursue any roles outside of the ‘ingénue’ (that word, ugh).

What’s more, Streep and Mirren are the two classic examples of older female actresses, as they have rightfully earned—being INCREDIBLE and all—but they do not make up for the fact that women, no matter their age, fight tooth and nail for a mere 33% of the speaking roles in films. Stats from this same film study also identified that 26% of female characters wore “provocative” clothing, compared to just 5 percent of male characters.

In sum, we rather wish Russell Crowe would keep the mansplaining to himself and steer clear of the gender politics arena. We liked him better in “Gladiator.”

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