It's no secret that Hollywood has an ageism problem, especially when it comes to women. Goldie Hawn put it best as Elise in The First Wives Club: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood — babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy."
Some women have been told they're "too old" for love interest roles in their late twenties, and others have been made to feel they're too old for "interesting" roles in their thirties and beyond. On the flip side, however, teenage actors are sometimes considered too young for the kinds of roles they want to play.
Here are 19 celebs who lied about their ages to further their careers:
1. When Mila Kunis auditioned for That '70s Show, she lied to the show creators and claimed she was 18 so they'd think she was old enough. She was actually 14 at the time.
She told Vanity Fair, "You have to sign a contract before you get the job, and in my contract, I had to put an asterisk for 'studio teacher.' They were like, 'What do you mean?' And I was like, 'Oh P.S., I'm 14.' But at that point, if you talk to the creators, they were like, 'We loved you at that point, so what did we care?'"
Her true age has been such a conspiracy theory among fans that it sparked a meme about how she's "lived a thousand lives."
Jokingly addressing the reports on Twitter, Rebel said, "OMG I'm actually a 100-year-old mermaid formerly known as 'CC Chalice'....thanks shady Australian press for your tall poppy syndrome."
4. When Laverne Cox was 28, the guy she was dating broke up with her for being "too old." So, for the next two years, she claimed to be 22 on dating apps and online. However, she felt uncomfortable with the lie, so she simply said she was "over 21" from 2002–2019.
On The Ellen Show, she said, "Then IMDb found out my real age, so it started appearing places, and it was freaking me out. I was having such anxiety, and so I started talking to my therapist about it. I started unpacking all the stories I had about being older. The stories were like, I wasn't hirable, I wasn't datable, I wasn't F-able...and then I worked through all that."
5. When Paloma Faith released her debut album, she told her record label she was 23 instead of 27. However, she was forced to admit the truth earlier than she wanted to because a fan kept changing her age on her Wikipedia page.
In an essay for iNews, she said, "Every time I set my age to 23, they would change it back to 27. Eventually, they provided my birth certificate to Wikipedia, so I was blocked from editing my own page – it really brought home to me how much my age was going to be a factor in my career."
6. When Agyness Deyn began modeling, she claimed to be 18. However, in 2007, her former classmates called her out for lying by creating a Facebook group named "Agyness Deyn You're Not 18" and alleged they could "verify she is 24." In 2012, she admitted to being 29.
7. After 14 years as a struggling actor, then-32-year-old Riley Weston began pretending to be a 19-year-old writing prodigy, which got her a job as a writer on the WB series, Felicity, and a $300,000 development deal with Touchstone Television. However, while working on a story about her, Entertainment Tonight uncovered the truth.
In a statement, she said, "I could not be one age in the acting world and another in the writing world, so I chose to maintain the ruse. In a business fraught with age bias, I did what I felt I had to do to succeed."
8. Mariah Carey's true birth year has long been debated both in the press and on social media, with evidence supporting both 1969 and 1970 as the correct answer. Mariah herself, however, wants to "remain eternally oblivious to age."
She told Complex, "I don't have a birthday. I was just dropped here. It was a fairyland experience."
9. In 2013, Jessica Chastain told the Independent, "I will never say my age because I'm an actress, and I want to play different ages."
