Susan Sarandon and Sheryl Lee Ralph Want to Change How People View Aging

What are the myths about getting older that you wish you could debunk?

Ralph: Oh, first of all, people always think, “Oh, it’s just so terrible. I mean, my God, you’re 30, you’re 35, you’re 40. Oh my God, you’re 50. You’re almost dead.” It’s like, really? No. There’s something about having a 60th birthday, and it’s sort of like, “Wow, let me show you something.” Especially if you’re able to speak from wisdom, kindness and true experience. There’s something so liberating about it, and it’s like you really just don’t give a fudge at all, really. It’s like, “No, no, no, let me tell you.” And then people say, “Oh, well, you just want to be young.” No, no, no. It’s a young spirit. Be thankful. Hope that you are able to have and hold on to a young spirit. As you grow wiser, older. It’s truly a gift to be able to carry on…. This whole conversation around ageism, like it’s something terrible. Dying is worse.

Sarandon: The whole concept of time, which is so arbitrary, I think also is really mean to kids as they’re growing up. All of a sudden you’re close to 30, and I thought I would’ve done a lot more by now. And I’m comparing myself to somebody else now. I’m like, just get in your life, and try to live every day. The clock is an individual clock. And so the whole concept of having these benchmarks of what has to happen — you have to be invisible at 70, you have to be a huge success by 30. And it’s a very debilitating thing that’s happened, and I don’t know how to talk us out of it, really. I say this for everybody: You have to find joy in the act of doing it because it doesn’t really matter if it’s recognized. I don’t know how you take that focus off of constantly comparing yourself — because of age — to where you’re supposed to be, or need to be, or shouldn’t [be].

Ralph: Aging is a wonderful thing. The alternative is so finite.

How did you come to embrace this mindset?

Ralph: Why are people not celebrating themselves and living and aging? Most people have never been taught how to love themselves. They’ve never been taught how to appreciate themselves. And as the great drag queen [RuPaul] says, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you going to love anybody else?”

How do you handle working in an industry that has such bonkers beauty standards, where women are basically not allowed to grow old?

Ralph: Hollywood’s beauty standard — it’s not my beauty standard. I live by my own standard. I create the me that I want to see. I create the me that I love. I do me. What do they say? To thine own self be true. I’m true to me. I love me. I love me just the way I am. I believe the more you are able to love yourself the better you can love everybody else. So if that’s what they’re in love with. I’m in love with me. You’re in love with you.

Sarandon: I’m in love with me. I think that this is one thing that has changed, because my mother’s generation — my mother passed a couple years ago at 98 — those women didn’t have much say over their lives. But then as women started to have more choices and more agency over their decisions, I think that we didn’t have the example of women loving themselves, because they weren’t the creators of their lives, really. They weren’t the protagonist in their own lives the way that we have the opportunity to make those decisions. So for better or worse, they’re my decisions.

When has fear gotten in the way of something you wanted to do, and how did you overcome it?

Sarandon: I’m always afraid. I just don’t pay attention. What about you?

Ralph: I would say for me, what’s that song? “First I was afraid, I was petrified, thinking I could never live without you by my side.” Or that I couldn’t do this or that. I couldn’t do that. And then one day it was sort of like a light bulb went off and I said, “It’s OK to fail. It’s OK not to get it right. It is OK to try again.” I used to run track and I tried running hurdles, jumping the hurdles, and I would come so close to the hurdles and I wouldn’t jump because I was afraid of hitting my shin, jumping over the hurt.

Sarandon: I love this metaphor.

Ralph: It’s the truth.

Sarandon: Can I take it?

Ralph: Take it. I didn’t want to hit my shins. I didn’t want to get hurt. And then you have to have the form to get over. And then finally I just was like, “You know what? This sport isn’t for me. Let me try another sport.” And I just worked on it.

Sarandon: What was the one you landed on?

Ralph: I started running. Just running.

Sarandon: I’m going to tell that story, but I’m going to say I was doing the high jump, but don’t tell anyone we’re making this up.

Ralph: There you go.