To promote her new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, a creative nonfiction tome on how society responds to women as they age, actor turned author and director Justine Bateman enlisted the help of pal Carrie-Anne Moss to chair a discussion on behalf of New York’s 92nd Street Y.

Anne Moss highlighted Hollywood ageism and double standards, stating that she was given a grandmother part in a script the day after her 40th birthday.

Prior to the offer, Moss believed that women leaving Hollywood at such a young age was fiction. Then she turned 40, and the position of grandma became a reality.

“I had heard that at 40, everything changed,” Moss, who is due to reprise her iconic Matrix role in the forthcoming fourth installment of the series, said. “I didn’t believe in that because I don’t believe in just jumping on a thought system that I don’t really align with. But literally the day after my 40th birthday, I was reading a script that had come to me and I was talking to my manager about it. She was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s not that role [you’re reading for], it’s the grandmother.’ I may be exaggerating a bit, but it happened overnight. I went from being a girl to the mother to beyond the mother.”

Bateman also discussed how she overcame criticism for her naturally aging face (“I had to get rid of this idea that my face was something that was horrible and should be fixed,” she said).

Face, Bateman’s book, focuses on the many demands put on women, particularly as they get older. The 55-year-old actor and filmmaker formerly worked as an actress, so she is familiar with Hollywood’s ageism problem when it comes to women.

During the discussion, Moss mentioned the enormous difference in how male performers are handled and seen as they age, adding that she didn’t want to have to change herself for the industry through surgery, although the transition in her career was ‘sort of brutal.’

‘You don’t feel like you’ve aged much and suddenly you’re seeing yourself onscreen,’ she said. ‘I would look at these French and European actresses and they just had something about them that felt so confident in their own skin. I couldn’t wait to be that. I strive for that. It’s not easy being in this business. There’s a lot of external pressure.’

Moss applauded Bateman for authoring Face, which is a follow-up to her 2018 book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, which investigates Hollywood and popular culture. Bateman, 55, said she felt forced to delve more into the unreasonable expectations put on women, particularly women in the public eye like herself, as they become older for Face. “I find it psychotic that we have leapfrogged any conversations that we should be cutting up our faces,” she said. “It’s become normalized. Time out, time out! This is not a fact. This is an idea that we can either pull in and make a belief or not. I’m like, fuck that.”

She has resisted the widely recognized practice, and people from all walks of life have rushed to message boards to attack her appearance. However, she claims that it will not persuade her to have surgery. Instead, she turned inward to address the triggers and mend the vulnerabilities that had prompted her to react to such hatred in the first place. “It does nothing to make me happier or free. It does everything to tamp all that down. It does everything to mute my life. I’m going to do the opposite, then I’ll have the opposite result.”

Moss worked on the project alongside “Matrix” co-director Lana Wachowski and co-star Keanu Reeves. Last summer, Moss told Empire magazine that a fourth “Matrix” picture was “never on my radar at all,” and that “when it was brought to me in the way that it was brought to me, with incredible depth and all of the integrity and artistry that you could imagine, I was like, ‘This is a gift.’ It was just very exciting.”

Beginning December 21, Warner Bros. will distribute “The Matrix 4” in cinemas nationwide and on HBO MAX. Filming began in February in San Francisco under the moniker “Project Ice Cream,” and while work was interrupted due to COVID-19, the actors and crew were able to conclude in November.