One thing you never do is question a woman about her age. Or a actress about her character's age, apparently, as two Lost producers have discovered. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have admitted to Enterainment Weekly’s Mike Auiello that they were at fault by having a young Charlotte turn up in 1974… when the show previously stated she'd been born in 1979. They also apologised to Rebecca Mader, who played Charlotte, for originally suggesting that she had changed the age of the character from 37 to 28 because, “she did not really want to brand herself as 37, which is what she would have had to been had we stuck to the initial script.”
On her own blog, Mader vehemently disputed the producers' version of the story, forcing them into retreat.
The pair have now admitted in a joint email to Ausiello that, “Rebecca is absolutely right and we apologise to both her and the entire fan community for screwing up the story."
“When we inquired as to how this happened, the intel came back that we used Rebecca Mader's birthday, 2 July 1979 because she was actually eight years YOUNGER than the character as originally conceived/scripted. We misremembered this as having come from Rebecca herself on the set, but in fact, it came several days earlier when our continuity expert Gregg Nations pointed it out and suggested using Rebecca's actual birthday for Charlotte. And so, the mistake was OURS.”
The question now is, are we in for some major retconning or will they just gloss over the matter? Hey, anything is possible with time travel...
