We live at a time when it's possible to know everything about a famous person. A quick trip to Wikipedia gives you a host of factual details about that person, the amount of which is largely dependent on how famous they are, and gossip sites take care of the rest. In fact, you can easily find ten people someone is alleged to be dating, even if they are not actually dating any of them.
So it always surprises me when a person has attained a certain level of success, and a piece of information as foundational as a birthdate is not officially available.
You can debate whether Molly Gordon has attained that level of success yet. I've only seen Gordon in two things, but she made enough of an impression on me that I was able to remember what the first thing was when I saw the second thing. The first thing was the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Life of the Party from last year, and the second thing was Good Boys, which I saw on Friday night. (Actually, she was also in Booksmart, though I apparently didn't make the connection to Life of the Party when I saw that, or even remember that she was in it.)
Gordon has also been in a couple other things that plenty of people have seen but I haven't. She's a regular on the TV adaptation of the David Michod movie Animal Kingdom, plus she's appeared in Ramy (two episodes) and Orange is the New Black (one episode). Those are just the titles that seem worth mentioning.
Yet despite her firmly entrenching herself on the landscape of young working actresses, we don't actually know how old Molly Gordon is.
She's either 23 or 24, according to Wikipedia, because she was born in either 1995 or 1996. Of course, that could also make her 22, since not everyone who was born in 1996 has turned 23 yet. Just to make sure it was not an omission on a website with crowd-sourced information, IMDB confirms the lack of specificity on a birthdate.
What a strange thing that this definitely ascendant performer, who could soon start to find herself the subject of magazine profiles or the modern equivalent thereof, could be anywhere from 22 to 24 years old.
It also makes me wonder how we even know that much about her. Did she coquettishly once tell someone she was born in 1995 or 1996 and leave it at that? Or was it just an estimate somebody ventured based on circumstantial evidence and second-hand information?
It's a bit of an old-fashioned scenario that hearkens back to a time when it was impolite to ask a woman her age. I remember somewhat regularly seeing women on IMDB whose exact birthdates were not known. For an actress in particular, not revealing your exact age might be a strategic move to continue getting cast in roles they might have otherwise considered you to have aged out of. Whether you can play 40 or not should be a function of how you look, if it must be a function of something, but knowing that you're actually 51 is going to be a dealbreaker for some casting agents.
This is also an old-fashioned topic for this blog, I think, as I remember addressing this issue once before, though I can't remember how long ago, or regarding whom. It definitely wasn't someone as young as Molly Gordon. Actresses who came up pre-internet may have successfully hidden their exact ages and the internet may have never caught up with them. But Gordon was born at least a year and as many as two after I got my first email address. The internet should have been on her from the start.
I'm going to see if I can remember to check on this periodically. At some point, Molly Gordon or a person who represents her will come forward with this information, and Wikipedia will update accordingly. And it will interest me to try to tie it back to some particular moment when her seemingly inevitable stardom (she's both talented and pretty) breaks through a particular ceiling of her previously enjoyed obscurity. You can't really be a big star and not have your birthday be a matter of public record, and it will happen for her at some point.
In the meantime, casting agents will continue to have no definitive evidence that she can't be cast to play a senior in high school.
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