'Otherhood' director on women in film and the power of 'extraordinary, ordinary stories'

Common wisdom is that if you're an actress over 30, it's time to pack it in.

Not to give up, per se. But the rich leading roles have too often if not entirely been shuffled over to younger actresses, bastions of beauty and promise instead of reminders that time is unrelenting and coming for us all. After a certain age, actresses find a dearth of compelling roles, and that's if they're even still getting scripts and auditions.

But as with so many archaic Hollywood norms, that's changing. There are more roles now than ever for women of varying backgrounds and ages, including those in Cindy Chupack's Otherhood, now streaming on Netflix. Chupack, who cut her teeth in the sitcom world with Modern Family and Sex and the City, has been telling the untold stories of women for decades, giving a spotlight and validation to these stories.

"I have a lot to say and a lot of experience to draw on, and that’s always been the things that are most interesting to me," Chupack tells Mashable in a phone interview. "And underrepresented for a long time on television and in film as legitimate stories to tell – not just the heroic stories or the dire stories or the tragic stories, but the extraordinary ordinary everyday stories of heroics that it takes just to get through the different stages of life that women go through."

"I used to joke I’m downwardly mobile, because I would take a job that was less money if it felt like the right place for me to do something I would love writing about," she adds.

Otherhood (based on William Sutcliffe's novel Whatever Makes You Happy) is the story of middle-aged moms Carol (Angela Bassett), Gillian (Patricia Arquette), and Helen (Felicity Huffman), who decide to drive to New York and assert their importance after their adult sons barely acknowledge Mother's Day.

All three actresses have experienced motherhood. Arquette has two children, ages 30 and 16. Bassett told the Otherhood team that she's become cooler in her 13-year-old son's eyes since Black Panther. Huffman's name is now synonymous with the college admissions scandal that shook Hollywood this summer, an episode which Chupack says the star handled "as admirably as she could have." ("Parenthood is complicated!" she adds, when we point out the parallels of a mother going to lengths for her child).

Chupack herself has an 8-year-old, and while Otherhood is about a different stage in life, she was drawn to stories about parenting that mirror her and her friends' experiences.

"I've noticed with my friends there’s this mourning what you used to be when your kids go off and you’re not solely defined as mother as much anymore," Chupack says. "When they go off and that becomes less of your identity and then there’s a bit of an identity crisis of who you are... it’s a really rich period in life to reconnect with who you were before you had kids or find a new version of who you want to be now."

The concept of "otherhood" itself came from Chupack, in a discussion with producer Cathy Schulman, who was instrumental in connecting Chupack to the script in its early stages. Schulman had produced Bad Moms and noticed that, more than its entertaining premise, the film was about a specific stage in those women's lives. She identified the same trend in Otherhood, and giving it a name helped Chupack and her team zero in on what audiences would understand and relate to.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The project was in development for over five years when Chupack, then rewriting the screenplay, was signed on direct and helped move things forward. She recalls an early push to make the central women younger – closer to the Bad Moms age demo – for marketing purposes, or older a la Grace and Frankie or Book Club.

"Then suddenly it became clear that like there’s this whole group of women that there’s not really roles for that are right there in the middle, and that’s what this movie was about," Chupack recalls. "There was just this wealth of actresses who were just the right age and really didn’t have roles and were underrepresented, so it felt great."

Chupack is excited about the wealth of stories being given a platform by streaming services like Netflix. In previous decades, she explains, it was harder to push for a film that wasn't a surefire blockbuster or Oscar darling.

"Just having more female storytellers, more female directors, more females behind the scenes, there’s gonna be room for these stories and every story should be specific to those characters – not trying to say how it is for all women, but hopefully start a discussion and get people thinking and relating. And I do feel like it’s a nice time – we’re such a divided country right now and I’m happy to be doing a film that is about something so universal. We all have mothers, so many of us are mothers – it’s hopefully universal values and feelings that will remind us we’re not so different."

Otherhood is now streaming on Netflix.