Rachel Lindsay has made it known that she’s a huge fan of Clare Crawley, but she’s not such a huge fan of how ABC is promoting her season of The Bachelorette.
The latest piece of promo turned quite a few heads, mostly because of the classic movie it references. A new poster features Clare in jeans and a blazer. She’s leaning against a wall, while in the foreground, a man is putting on a sock. It’s a gender-flipped version of the poster for The Graduate, which is a 1967 movie about an affair between 21-year-old Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) and the much older Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Benjamin then falls for Mrs. Robinson’s much more age-appropriate daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). The tagline at the top of the poster reads, “It’s about time.”
The movie has made “Mrs. Robinson” synonymous with an older woman who dates younger men, and it all makes sense when you consider that at 39, Clare is the oldest Bachelorette in franchise history and most of the men who were named as her potential suitors were quite a bit younger, with ages ranging from 25 to 40.
Rachel appeared on the latest episode of EW Live on Sirius XM, and while she admitted she hadn’t seen The Graduate, she didn’t love that so much attention was being paid to the reference the ad was making.