'The Matrix' star Carrie-Anne Moss said she was offered a role as a grandma the day after she turned 40

• Moss said she didn't believe things change for actresses at 40 until it happened to her.
• She said the day after she turned 40 she was offered a grandmother role in a movie.
• "I went from being a girl to the mother to beyond the mother," she told her friend, actress Justine Bateman.

Actress Carrie-Anne Moss didn't believe that everything changes for actress after turning 40. And then it happened to her.

"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," Moss told friend and author Justine Bateman at a 92nd Street Y chat (via The Hollywood Reporter) between the two to promote Bateman's book "Face: One Square Foot of Skin," which examines how society responds to women who age.

"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."

Moss, 53, told Bateman, who is known best for starring in "Family Ties" in the 1980s (and the older sister of actor Jason Bateman), that it's been hard to watch how Hollywood seems to throw aside actresses when they hit a certain age while actors continue to work prominently for decades more.

"You don't feel like you've aged much and suddenly you're seeing yourself onscreen," Moss told Bateman. "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."

Bateman, who after gaining fame in the 1980s and has since moved on to directing and producing, told Moss a major reason why she decided to write "Face" was to point out the ageism that movies and TV glorify and that now women having surgery to look younger has become commonplace.

"I find it psychotic that we have leapfrogged any conversations that we should be cutting up our faces," Bateman said of plastic surgery. "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, f--- that."

Moss certainly won't be a grandmother in her next role. She will be reprising her role as Trinity in "The Matrix 4" when it comes out at the end of this year.