We can be more interesting because we’re older.”
I hope if audiences like this film, it will encourage film-makers to see that we’re not going to repel audiences because we’re older. “There are a few actresses who seem to get all of them and the rest of us are scrabbling. Hershey may not believe in age but, sadly, others do, and it is she says, “definitely” harder for an female actor to find good roles the older she gets. “Um, I yellowed my teeth, and that was the only ageing we did. But they must have aged her in the movie because she looks about twice as old in it, I say. I tell her she looks about half that, which is true, but she waves the comment away. I believe in age but I don’t believe in numbers. I ask if part of the appeal of the film was how it overturns stereotypes about older people. The film clearly wants to do for older people what Get Out did for people of colour, showing how they are ill-treated by wider society and literalising their worst fears, and it does this pretty well in the first half, but goes utterly bananas in the second (Hershey says the ending is “provocative, and I’m all for it”). Even her adored grandson thinks she’s losing her mind when she begs him to get her out before she is murdered. The film has a great premise: what if the older people who say people are trying to kill them in their assisted living centre aren’t suffering from dementia but telling the truth? Hershey plays Judith, a spunky grandmother, who is ignored by her daughter and treated like a naughty toddler by the staff of the centre. Photograph: Kevin Estrada/Amazon Content Services LLC Hershey in The Manor, part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse series.
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She has the perfect posture of former dance teacher, which is exactly what she plays in her new film, The Manor, the latest horror movie from Jason Blum’s Welcome to the Blumhouse series for Amazon. Hershey, 73, is in Los Angeles, talking to me by video chat, and even at this distance you can still see the same grace and self-possession that she had when facing down Cavett’s disapproval, and when she played the wealthy Hilary Whitney in 1988’s classic Beaches, and as the mysterious Madame Serena in Jane Campion’s 1996 film The Portrait of a Lady, for which Hershey got an Oscar nomination. I just happened to do it in public,” she says.
I think I was going through what a lot of young people were going through in that period. But when you’ve been acting for 50 years, you do a lot of growing up publicly, and a lot of that is misinterpreted, so that’s difficult. “I’m not resentful at all, because the reactions were honest and my reactions were honest. Does she resent the sexism of the 70s, when she was frequently dismissed as some flaky airhead? It wasn’t until the 80s, after she had broken up with Carradine (and dropped Seagull) that things really took off for her. Hershey has been acting since the mid 1960s, but her career was undeniably hampered by the public and media scepticism of her in the 70s, and the assumption that she was merely Carradine’s dippy girlfriend. I knew what my son needed, so I just gave it to him.”
“I wish that I could say I for some political or badass reason, but I was an innocent. Watching this clip now, I tell Hershey, I couldn’t help but delight in how gloriously badass she was. Cavett was clearly far less weirded out by that revelation than he was by breastfeeding. After the show was aired, Hershey was widely criticised for breastfeeding on TV, and this was seen as final proof of her unreliable hippy wackiness, even more so than her decision to change her name to Seagull after a seagull was killed during the making of a film.