Last night we were watching a movie and one of the stars was Matthew Modine. The movie was from the 1980’s, so he was very young. This is the way I remember him. But when I look him up online, I find that he is no longer young. Now he’s much older. In a way it’s kind of sad, because there’s a part of my brain that wants to believe that actors never age, that in the next movie they put out, they’ll look exactly like they did in the first movie. There’s something about Hollywood that makes you want to believe in magic, and part of that magic would be that people don’t age. Some stars try their hardest not to age, but eventually it catches up with everyone. And the magic is gone. Eventually, everyone gets old.
Unless you’re a vampire. We’ve been re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in tonight’s episode, Angel says “I’m not getting any older.” This was in direct opposition to my Matthew Modine revelation. But of course, it’s a fiction. 
There are no vampires, there is nobody on this earth who does NOT get older. Angel in this 1999 TV episode might be able to say “I’m not getting any older,” but David Boreanaz, the actor who plays him, is now on another TV show, and he has gotten older. He’s aging well, that’s to his credit, and to the credit of Hollwood makeup artists as well, I’m sure, but there’s no doubt he’s older.
I’ve heard it said that Brent Spiner, the actor who plays Data on Star Trek the Next Generation, at some point decided he was not going to play that role anymore, because Data, as an android, is not supposed to age, and it would eventually be obvious, no matter how much makeup they might put on him, that he himself had aged. He didn’t want to risk appearing ridiculous.
For the same reason, if they should ever decide to do a Buffy movie, or additonal TV episodes, we couldn’t really have the same actors and actresses who played the vampires coming back at this point, ten to fifteen years later, reprising their roles. So I guess we will just have to be happy with the existing footage. Which never gets old.
This is everything I want to say about Matthew Modine. I fell in love with him when I first saw him in Baby it’s you. Then when I looked him up, I was so sad. I mean, he doesn’t look atrocious now. But he’s not as beautiful as he was :'(
Well, the great thing about movies is that in some way, our favorite actors will ALWAYS be as beautiful as they once were, we just have to turn on the TV and/or slip in a DVD, and we can go back to that magical time when they were younger…and we were younger too!! 🙂