Question
The Lost City stars Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum as the romantic leads. The movie was filmed in 2021. rel="nofollow noreferrer">Sandra Bullock was born on July 26, 1964 and Channing Tatum was born on April 26, 1980, making an age gap of sixteen years with Bullock the senior of the two.
The Slate (amongst many other sources) has analysed the entrenched tendency of Hollywood to cast older male romantic leads opposite younger women - sometimes much younger.
There have been many romantic movies where the male lead is far older. Is this the biggest age gap between romantic leads in a movie where the actress is the older? I am interested in the actual age of the actor/actress pairing, not the character's implied age.
Based on some interesting responses below, I am looking for couples where in-movie the age gap is seen as immaterial and hardly commented on, as in the many cases where the male lead is up to 30 years older and none of the characters react negatively or critically to the age gap.
The only indirect reference to the age gap in The Lost City is an exchange between the two leads as they try inexpertly to climb a volcanic landscape:
LORETTA SAGE: I'm getting too old for this.
ALAN CAPRISON: You're not old, you're beautiful.
No generation-jumping
I am going to explicitly exclude answers where there is an obvious generational leap that is part of the plot (e.g. romance between a peer and his peer's parent).
No gigolos
I also exclude answers where there is an obvious power imbalance between the partners that corrupts the romance (the 'gigolo' scenario).
No man-eaters
The scenario where the female character exploits vastly greater sexual experience / wealth / mystique to fascinate the younger male is excluded.
Answer
In Moonstruck (1987), there is no discussion about the characters' ages. Nicolas Cage (born January 7th, 1964), who plays Ronny, is 17 years younger than Cher (born May 20th, 1946), who plays Loretta.
And at the heart of the story, there is Cher's astonishing discovery that she is still capable of love. As the movie opens, she becomes engaged to Mr. Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), not so much out of love as out of weariness. But after he flies to Sicily to be at the bedside of his dying mother, she goes to talk to Mr. Johnny's estranged younger brother (Nicolas Cage), and is thunderstruck when they are drawn almost instantly into a passionate embrace.
I guess Ronny is referred to as Johnny's younger brother, and one might infer that Johnny and Loretta are close in age, but there is no suggestion that there is a large age difference between Ronny and Johnny.
Answered By - Michael Clase
