Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson Have an Older-Man Problem

(Photo: Maya Robinson and Photos by Kopaloff/FilmMagic/Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage/teve Granitz/WireImage)

Emma Stone is a mere 26 years old, but in the last cinematic year, she’s had four onscreen love-interests who were over 40, including two male characters who were impotent. Jennifer Lawrence is Hollywood’s most in-demand young actress, but ever since she won her Oscar, it’s hard for her to find a screen lover who isn’t approaching middle age. And Scarlett Johansson has been paired with older actors so often that when she romanced Mark Ruffalo in this summer’sAvengers: Age of Ultron, their 17-year age difference was theleast nitpicked aspect of their union. These three young, smoky-voiced actresses are often referred to as wise beyond their years, and in 2015, they’ve all got the graying love-interests to match that perception. It isn’t news thatHollywood likes to pair its older men with younger women, but as these charts will show, there’s surely something unusual going on when the three hottest actresses in the 30-and-under bracket are routinely steered toward men of a certain age.

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2011 was a breakout year for Emma Stone, who spent that annum filming The Amazing Spider-Man and topping the box office with her twofer of Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Help. It was also the year that the then-49-year-old Jim Carrey found himself so intoxicated by Stone that he put out a YouTube video fantasizing about a potential sex life with her that would eventually produce “chubby little freckle-faced kids.” People recoiled from Carrey’s proposal at the time, but maybe he was onto something: Aside from theSpider-Man franchise that paired her with real-life beau Andrew Garfield (who’s only five years older), Stone has since spent her tenure on the A-list beaming at men old enough to be her father, including Gangster Squad’s Sean Penn (54 at the time of release), and Colin Firth (53) in the comedy Magic in the Moonlight, from noted May-December advocate Woody Allen. Last winter, she wooed the impotent Edward Norton (45) in Birdman, and a few weeks ago, she squired the similarly flaccid Joaquin Phoenix (40) in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, which played at Cannes. And then there’s this past weekend’s troubled Aloha, where the petite Stone feels so ill-matched with her 40-year-old screen lover Bradley Cooper that Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny wrote how Cooper “comes off as a sad, broken old man who is attracted to her youth like a vampire.” Yikes!