Hallmark Lawsuit Claims Age Discrimination Against Actors
Hallmark, the company known for greeting cards and cheesy Christmas movies, is now, according to Variety, the subject of an age discrimination lawsuit. A former casting director is suing the company, claiming she was fired for her age. To support her case, she’s accused the company of a pattern of age discrimination against their actresses.
Penny Perry, the 79-year-old former Hallmark casting director filed the lawsuit after she was fired in April. Perry, who worked at Hallmark for nine years, is an established casting director who has cast hundreds of projects including Cocoon and The NeverEnding Story. She alleges that executive VP of Programming Lisa Hamilton Daly called her “too long in the tooth” and wanted a younger casting director who would hire younger actresses.
A Pattern Of Behavior
In order to establish Hallmark as having a pattern of age discrimination for her lawsuit, Penny Perry has shared other stories, all centering around Lisa Hamilton Daly. According to the casting director, she was told to stop casting “old people,” particularly as leading ladies. Hamilton Daly allegedly talked openly about replacing actresses with younger women as part of her vision for the company.
According to Perry’s Hallmark lawsuit, Hamilton even singled out a pair of actresses she wanted to replace. One of those actresses is 60-year-old Holly Robinson Peete, who Hamilton Daly allegedly called too old to play leading roles. The other is 42-year-old Lacey Chabert, with Hamilton Daly reportedly describing the need to find a replacement for her because she was getting older.
More To The Lawsuit
While age discrimination is at the center of the Hallmark lawsuit, Perry also claims the company failed to accommodate her disability. The casting director suffers from multiple sclerosis and is legally blind in one eye. She tied that lack of accommodation to the larger hostile work environment for older employees.
In the Hallmark Lawsuit filing, Perry claims that Lisa Hamilton Daly tried to force her out of the company before firing her outright. Hamilton Daly joined the company in 2021 and soon after began excluding Perry from meetings, moved her office to a new floor, and relegated one of her casting assignments to a consultant. Despite this mistreatment, Perry claims her performance reviews remained strong in the months before her firing.
Hallmark has firmly denied the accusations made in the lawsuit against them. In their public statement about the legal action they claimed that “Lacy and Holly have a home at Hallmark.” Aside from their comments about the specific actresses named and a blanket denial, the company has refused to comment on the discrimination allegations.
An Ongoing Problem In Hollywood
The Hallmark lawsuit centers around a larger, well-known age discrimination problem in Hollywood. SAG-AFTRA has frequently tried to combat age discrimination, pushing for initiatives like allowing actors to remove their ages from IMDb. Women are particularly vulnerable to age discrimination, with actresses like Olivia Wilde and Maggie Gyllenhaal publicly discussing the issue.
It will be interesting to see how Penny Perry’s Hallmark lawsuit plays out, as it taps into such a big problem in the industry. If the casting director wins in court, it could lead companies to be mindful of age discrimination against both cast and crew. If nothing else, it has brought the issue out into the open and painted at least one executive as openly discriminatory.
Source: Variety
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