Riley Weston: the screenwriter who successfully pretended to be a teenager
Hollywood is rife with problems, from its racial and gender biases to its depiction of class, disability, and sexuality. The industry has always swayed in favour of straight, white men – their stories and perspectives dominating the mainstream and perpetuating patriarchal standards and hegemonic masculinity. While women are afforded less equal opportunities in Hollywood, there’s even less space for those who aren’t young.
It’s no secret that there is a widespread societal fascination – fetishisation, even – of youth. You only have to be aware of the fact that categories like ‘school girl’ and ‘teen’ are highly consumed on pornographic sites, preventative anti-wrinkle creams are marketed to us before we’ve even hit 25, and plastic surgery treatments are on the rise, to understand that youthfulness is highly valued.
When it comes to media, ageism is a real issue, especially when it comes to women. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that those over 50 accounted for “less than a quarter of all characters in top-grossing domestic films and most-popular television shows from 2010 to 2020”. For many female actors, as they get older, they find that the roles start to dry up, while the same can’t be said for men. Unbelievably, Maggie Gyllenhaal once revealed that she was told that, at age 37, she was “too old” to play a 55-year-old man’s love interest in a film. Additionally, there are considerably fewer female writers and directors in the industry due to structural sexism, leaving Hollywood an overwhelmingly male playground.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that certain actors and writers have gone to drastic measures to try and beat the system. In the 1990s, Riley Weston caused a scandal when she posed as a teenager to get a job, successfully becoming part of the writing crew for Matt Reeves’ show Felicity. Before then, she had starred in several shows and movies as an actor, playing various minor characters.
Yet, after struggling to get anywhere significant, she decided to pretend to be much younger than she actually was. Changing her name from Kimberlee Seaman to Riley Weston, she told people she was 19 when she was actually 32. She hoped that, due to the industry’s bias towards younger women, she would be more likely to land a job if she appeared to be a teen, not a grown woman.
She struck gold when she began working on Felicity – people were amazed that such a young woman already had such a knack for screenwriting. Weston managed to trick everyone around her, fabricating documents, using phrases popular with teenagers, and even bringing her mother to work with her on occasion. She did all she could to appear as though she was a recent high school graduate, convincing everyone to the point that she even guest-starred in Felicity as a teenage character.
Everyone was none the wiser until the truth finally emerged. She was outed by a former peer, who exposed Weston for using a fake name – and a fake age. Weston didn’t try to hide it in the end, admitting to Entertainment Weekly that she “misled a lot of people, and that was very wrong”. To Weston, lying about her age seemed to be one of the only ways she could break into an industry with its odds stacked against women, particularly those over the age of 30.
She admitted she was “frustrated” by the misrepresentation of young people on screen, and by posing as a teenager, she inadvertently proved that getting your start in the industry is much easier if you’re young. Since then, Weston has explored screenwriting, acting, and singing – she even published an award-winning work of fiction – yet she remains best known for her fraudulent yet rather humorous trick.