Laura Dern, 59, Says Older Actors Can Still Sizzle Onscreen

The ‘Big Little Lies’ actor talks to AARP about how age and experience have made her understand what’s truly sexy

Christina Ianzito,

AARP

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Published March 23, 2026

Laura Dern is a busy woman. She recently wrapped up the publicity push for her film Is This Thing On? with costar Will Arnett and reunited with her old Jurassic Park castmates Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum to appear in a Comcast Xfinity Super Bowl ad. And HBO’s Big Little Lies, costarring Dern, 59, Nicole Kidman, 58, and Reese Witherspoon, 49, reportedly has a third season in the works.

Dern was also at the Movies for Grownups Awards with AARP on January 10 to accept the best actress award for her role in Is This Thing On? The ceremony premiered on Great Performances on PBS on February 22 and is available to stream anytime. (Movies for Grownups with AARP raises funds for AARP Foundation, a charitable affiliate of AARP that works to strengthen financial resilience for and with older adults.)

But Dern says she's keeping her schedule a bit lighter these days, because she’s mourning the loss of her mom, the actor Diane Ladd, who died after battling idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) at age 89 in November. (She is working to spread the word about the disease to encourage earlier detection of IPF.)

laura dern holding a bowl filled with banana pudding ingredients and standing beside her mother diane ladd

Laura and her mom, Diane making Banana Pudding

Courtesy Laura Dern

The actor sat down with AARP recently and shared some thoughts on aging, acting and more. Here are a few things we learned.

Her acting and interests have evolved over the years.

I’m excited to dedicate myself to understanding human behavior more patiently. I love living in the gray far more today than I did at 20, so the complexity of character I’m interested in playing and can play has only expanded.

It’s also given her the confidence to know what’s truly sexy.

You know, it’s interesting: What they think you want to explore as a female actor is so bizarre. Like to explore sexuality at 20 in my case meant, ‘Tell me who you want me to be, or what you think is sexy or pretty, and I’ll try to mimic that in a film. I don’t know my own self or my own sexuality yet.’ But at 50, it’s like, ‘This is what’s interesting. This is what’s sexy. That’s what’s unattractive. This is what feels human.’ Vulnerability is sexuality.

Grownup intimacy can be hot.

When [Will Arnett and I] were reading the scene in Is This Thing On? where we were talking about what we didn’t like in the relationship or in each other, and Bradley Cooper, our director, was like, ‘That scene was so sexy.’ And I just loved that. I loved that this filmmaker saw communication as hot and intimacy as erotic. Because it’s not what you get to see in movies, and it only worked because it’s about a marriage of 26 years. You know, it’s not about new infatuation.

She’s not interested in clinging to youth.

Someone told me I was brave for being willing to age on screen — to be myself at every age and not hide the process of aging, which should be empowering and beautiful, because it has always been in French and Italian cinema. I remember growing up with young men, and we’d go see a film with, say, [the late French actor] Emmanuelle Riva at a much older age, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, she’s so gorgeous. She’s so sexy. How old is she? 72? Oh, God, she’s so gorgeous.’ My friends in L.A. don’t say that. So I hope that we continue to explore male and female characters at every age with all the depth they deserve.

Hollywood’s not really getting much better at depicting older people’s lives.

My mom would always say that ageism when you look great isn’t quite as overt, but she’s like, ‘How many movies do we have of 80-year-olds?’ Thanks to Michael Haneke (the 83-year-old Austrian screenwriter and director of, among other films, 2012’s Oscar-winning Amour, starring Riva), we have them more. But it’s very rare to see films about what I’ve just walked through with my mother and her journey with IPF. Where are those stories? Where are the love stories between us and our parents in cinema, in television?

We all know what it’s like to be a kid, but we don’t know how to grow old. And we don’t know how to find community around it, and how to talk about our fear of disease, of losing life, of losing loved ones. It’s pretty amazing in a community of storytellers that there are hardly any stories about that, and yet it’s inescapable for us all to face.

She’s got a lot to look forward to (as do her fans).

There are a couple of projects that Nicole Kidman and I have — a film we’re excited about that’s in development — and another show that I’m working hard at right now. So there are exciting things to come, but I’m taking a little time and then will get back to work.

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