Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26509198-20160713214402/@comment-1916997-20160716021514

Nightlily wrote: Eskaver wrote: Well, if you give them the money then I'm sure they would do it for you. Have a spare 100k lying around? Okay, calm down. This is a completely innocent discussion about a character's age, and casting choices. There is no need to jump down someone's throat like that. Snide remarks are not acceptable.

Anyway, this is my own, personal opinion: Barbara playing a 30-something Cora in "Bleeding Through" is exceeding the bounds of reason, even on television. Barbara Hershey was 68 when the episode was filmed (it was filmed in February this year, and Barbara was born in February 1948), and even with a bit of "it's television and all that" leeway, there is no way that a character is in their early thirties when the actor is almost 70. Lana Parilla can pull off a very young Regina (like in "The Stable Boy"), but that is because Lana herself is still relatively young, and not an older woman. The same thing can't be said for Barbara (and no, I am not saying this to criticize her; she is a great actress, and I have nothing against her).

Is it so unreasonable to assume that Cora could have been about forty when she gave birth to Zelena? That would make her in her early fifties in "Sisters", which is far more reasonable than her being in her early thirties. Esk may have been a bit crude, but he has a point. Sometimes they just have to work with what is more cost effective. In a perfect world we would have a set of actors for each character that would be in age increments of 10 years, and they would all look and act and sound the same, and would be avalible whenever we needed them. But that's just not how it is going to work. So we deal with a 60-something year old actor playing a 30-something year old.