To be able to enjoy Kate Winslet’s new Christmas movie, Goodbye June, you have to be able to do a couple of things. First, if you’ve ever suffered any form of bereavement, you may have to approach it slowly, since the film is explicitly about the death of a parent. But the other thing you need to do is not Google the age of any of the cast.

This is for good reason. The titular June is played by Dame Helen Mirren, and her husband is played by Timothy Spall. Fine actors and national treasures, the pair of them. However, Mirren is 80 years old, and Spall is 68. Again, this is fine. You have undoubtedly met couples with bigger age gaps than this, and in all probability they are perfectly happy together.

The problem, however, comes when you factor in the ages of their children. Goodbye June is about four siblings who have to push their differences aside in a moment of extreme familial crisis. One of the siblings is played by Toni Collette. Toni Collette is 53 years old, and you’re already way ahead of me here, aren’t you?

In order to square this circle, you have to accept that Mirren’s character must have been 28 years old when she had Collette, but Spall must have been just 15. And at no point during the film is this mentioned. Perhaps that’s wise – after all, a Christmas movie about a dying parent is heavy enough, so a Christmas movie about a dying parent of a woman who was herself the daughter of a literal schoolboy might be overegging the pudding a little – but it is nevertheless quite weird.

But let’s not be too heavyhanded here. Since the dawn of cinema, actors have been playing older and younger than their actual age. Maybe – hopefully! – Timothy Spall is playing someone a decade older than he really is here. The bigger problem is that, when you start noticing this sort of thing, it’s everywhere.

In the most recent Bridget Jones film, the lead character (played by Renée Zellweger, 56) has a six-year-old. And in Lulu Wang’s Expats, Nicole Kidman (58) has a toddler. Again, wonderful for their characters, and having a baby later in life is great. It’s just weird that nobody mentions this, especially because it’s statistically so rare. Indeed, to return to Goodbye June for a moment, it may be worth mentioning that Collette’s character is also pregnant.

While the number of women in the US over the age of 50 giving birth has grown dramatically over the last few decades – there were 144 recorded births in 1997, compared with 1,217 in 2023 – it still represents a vanishingly small slice of all births. Women over the age of 50 account for just 0.03% of births, so you’d think that something this rare would have at least been acknowledged in the plots.

Things get a little muddier in Eli Roth’s 2023 horror Thanksgiving, since it’s revealed that the character played by Gina Gershon (61 at time of release) was pregnant. This isn’t completely unheard of – in 2019, 74-year-old Erramatti Mangayamma gave birth to twins after receiving IVF – but the pregnancy would almost certainly be the most significant thing about her character. Some forums have tried to explain this away by theorising that her character was never actually pregnant, and that the film’s obsessed villain was simply inventing it, but this is altogether too much thought spent on an Eli Roth film.

What’s the reason for this? In the case of Bridget Jones and Expats, it may be because the film-makers wanted to reflect the growing trend of women giving birth later in life, but then again it may be because Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger can both pass for younger than they really are.

Then again, in the case of Goodbye June, it may be because Kate Winslet had access to Helen Mirren and Timothy Spall and, when you have the possibility of casting actors of their magnitude, you’re willing to fudge the numbers a little.

It’s distracting, but it’s no bad thing in itself. In fact, you could even see it as a corrective to years and years of Hollywood casting women to play the mothers of actors who aren’t all that much older than them. Jessie Royce Landis played Cary Grant’s mother in North by Northwest, for example, even though they were so close in age that she would have had to have him when she was eight.

Similarly, Angela Lansbury would have had to have given birth to Laurence Harvey at the age of three for The Manchurian Candidate to make sense. And the less thought about Oliver Stone’s Alexandra (in which Angelina Jolie played the mother of Colin Farrell, who is just 362 days younger than her), the better. Compared with this, Timothy Spall was practically geriatric when he fathered Toni Collette for Goodbye June. Thank God Hollywood used to be so much creepier.