In a recent interview, Kelly McGillis got surprisingly blunt about her departure from mainstream Hollywood. The actor, who rose to fame as Charlie—Tom Cruise’s love interest in Top Gun—was not cast in the upcoming sequel Top Gun: Maverick, but instead replaced by Jennifer Connelly. Yet McGillis was not insulted by this. Instead, she got refreshingly pragmatic, assessing the situation for what it was. “I’m old and I’m fat and I look age-appropriate for what my age is, and that is not what that whole scene is about,” the 62-year-old told ET. “But...I’d much rather feel absolutely secure in my skin and who and what I am at my age as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff.”

It was a candid take on Hollywood’s obsession with youth and casting female love interests who are much younger than their male counterparts. (For the record, Connelly is 48, while Cruise is 57—not the most egregious age gap in Hollywood history, but depressingly par for the course.) McGillis, a Golden Globe–nominated actor who also starred in films like Witness and The Accused, joins a long line of women speaking with razor-sharp clarity about how the industry operates, what it demands of its female stars—and how it disposes of them once their youth dissipates.

It’s a condition summed up perfectly by Bette Davis, all the way back in 1962. The two-time Oscar winner placed an ad in Variety after observing that roles had dried up as she hit her early 50s. “Thirty years experience as an actress in motion pictures,” her ad read. “Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood (has had Broadway).”

In more recent years, Kathleen Turner has taken up that torch. In an interview with Vulture, the Oscar nominee spoke about being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in her late 30s—“the last of my years in which Hollywood would consider me a sexually appealing leading lady,” she said. “The hardest part was that so much of my confidence was based on my physicality. If I didn’t have that, who was I?”

The actor, who has since veered toward theater, also lambasted the lack of good material for older woman on the big screen. “The screen roles are usually stereotypes: the evil stepmother, the bitter spinster.… That’s why, knowing where my career could grow as I got less desirable for the camera, I focused on theater. I remember I got sent a screenplay once where the character was described as ‘37 but still attractive.’ That pissed me off.”

Similarly, Oscar-winner Emma Thompson spoke about this issue in a 2018 interview, saying she’s managed to narrowly avoid this pitfall because she’s more of a character actor. (Thompson is also an Oscar-winning screenwriter who can write her own parts.) “We’re constantly watching films where older men have wonderful roles and older women really don’t,” the then 59-year-old said. “But I’m a character actor, don’t forget. If you’ve got form and you’re a character actor, you’re much better off because you’re not fighting the way you once looked.”

Some female stars prefer to leave the business rather than sticking it out for that long, however. In the 1980s, Meg Tilly was a breakout star, thanks to her Oscar-nominated turn in the drama Agnes of God, costarring alongside Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft. But she eventually stopped acting to raise her children. “I didn’t allow myself to miss it,” she told People about leaving the industry. “In those days, the females [were] kind of the fire hydrant that all the men wanted to prove themselves on. You’d get hit on a lot. That was challenging, dealing with different egos and having to work with people who still wanted to get the girl.”

Tilly eventually made a big return in the Netflix drama War Machine, playing the mild-mannered Jeanie McMahon, the wife of Brad Pitt’s character. In real life, Tilly, now 59, is four years older than Pitt—so it shocked her that she was cast opposite him. “It’s unheard of though, right?” she said. “At the screening, women kept coming up to me and saying how much they appreciated an age-appropriate wife for the female lead. I must have heard it 50 times.”

It’s that kind of representation older women often have to fight for. When cast as the series lead in How to Get Away With Murder, Oscar-winner Viola Davis pushed to have her character, Annalise Keating, portray raw sensuality onscreen, because roles of that nature tend to desexualize women of a certain age and size.

“We’ve been fed a whole slew of lies about women,” she said in a 2016 interview with Elle. “If you are anywhere above a size 2, you’re not having sex. You don’t have sexual thoughts. You may not even have a vagina. And if you’re of a certain age, you’re off the table.”

But perhaps no actress has been as ruthlessly blunt about the industry as Ellen Pompeo, the Grey’s Anatomy star and one of the highest-paid women in television. In a 2018 essay for the Hollywood Reporter, Pompeo shrewdly explained why she preferred financial power over creative freedom, and how the industry distorts the latter.

“I’m not necessarily perceived as successful, either, but a 24-year-old actress with a few big movies is, even though she’s probably being paid shit—certainly less than her male costar and probably with no backend,” Pompeo said. “And they’re going to pimp her out until she’s 33 or 34 and then she’s out like yesterday’s trash, and then what does she have to take care of herself? These poor girls have no real money, and the studio is making a fortune and parading them like ponies on a red carpet. I mean, Faye Dunaway is driving a fuckin’ Prius today. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a Prius, but my point is, she had no financial power. If we’re going to invoke change, that has to be part of it.”

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