Children Voicing Children / Live-Action TV

• Despite being the Trope Namer for Dawson Casting, Dawson's Creek does have one exception with Michelle Williams, who really was 17 when she began work on the series. This was likely enabled by the fact that Williams was emancipated by this point, meaning that she was legally considered an adult for purposes of labor laws despite technically being under 18.
• Claire Danes (Angela) and Devon Gummersall (Brian) from My So-Called Life really were teenagers at the time of filmingーalthough the rest of the teenage characters were played by twenty-somethings (including the aforementioned Senta Moses). As the producers knew that Claire Danes were only 13 years old (at the start of filming) yet they still cast her to play a character two full years older than the actress, without any retcons or fudging the numbers.
• Beverly Hills, 90210 did manage to do this in a few cases: Shannen Doherty (19) and Jennie Garth (18) were borderline, but at least they were still teenagers. Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling, both 17, were clear examples. Douglas Emerson, who played Scott Scanlon, was actually 16, making him the only actor the same age as his character, but he was written off in the second season.
• Most of the original cast on Saved by the Bell was close to age-correct, though there was a little leakage into the 20s by graduation from the portion of the cast not from the original Good Morning Miss Bliss:
  • Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who played Zack, was 14 when he started on Good Morning Miss Bliss, playing an eighth-grader, and was 19 at "graduation". Lark Voorhies, who played Lisa, was only a few weeks younger than Gosselaar. Dustin Diamond was three years younger than them, and the youngest in the cast, playing an eighth-grader at age 11 (and a high schooler at 12). If you were wondering why it took so long for Screech's voice to drop, that's why.
  • The two kids from Good Morning Miss Bliss who did not carry over to Saved By The Bell, Max Battimo and Heather Hopper, were 14 and 12 respectively.
  • Mario Lopez (Slater) started out at age 16, graduating at 20; Tiffani(-Amber) Thiessen started at 15, making her the same age as Gosselaar and Voorhies. Elizabeth Berkley is the same age as the latter three.
• In general, Disney Channel is pretty good to do this.
  • The other kids on Hannah Montana, including star Miley Cyrus, were actually in their early-to-mid-teens when the show started, making the casting of Jackson all the more glaring — and baffling, though that only applies when you find out his actual age. At the start of the show in 2006, he was approaching 29. This is funny in that he's more believable as a teen in Hannah Montana than he is as a grown adult in Dadnapped.
  • In Shake it Up, the characters are supposed to be in high school. In fact, the leads Bella Thorne (Cece) and Adam Irigoyen (Deuce) were only 13 years old playing high school freshmen at the start of the series.
  • In Sonny with a Chance and its spinoff So Random!, except for one member of the core cast, Tiffany Thornton, who was 24 years of age when she played 17-year-old Tawni Hart. The show itself pokes fun at this trope in an episode when the characters go to an award show and the category "Best Cast of Adults Portraying Teenagers" is said to be won by Glee.
  • Veronica Dunne is the only cast member of K.C. Undercover to play this trope straightーshe turned 20 not long after the series began its run, which means come season 2 she'll not be a teenager, unlike her character Marisa Clark.
• Super Sentai often does the trope: post-2000 series rarely feature main cast members older than 22-23 maximum, save for some Sixth Rangers who were older than the main heroes. Several recent series have had 15 to 17-year-old characters played by actors of the same age and even teenagers playing characters older than themselves — Shinkenger has 14-year-old Runa Natsui as 17-year-old Kaoru. There are however a few examples of the trope played straight, such as Goseiger where 20-year-old Mikiho Niwa plays 17-year-old Moune.
  • In Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters, Ryuji is played at 28 years old by Ryouma Baba (who turned 27 soon after the start of filming) and at 15 years old by Koudai Matsuoka (a year younger than the character.)
  • At 15 years old, Tsuruhime/Ninja White from Ninja Sentai Kakuranger is currently the youngest female hero in the franchise's history. She was played by Satomi Hirose, who was actually 13 at the time the show began.
  • In Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger, 23-year-old Yumeria Moegi is played by 16-year-old Karin Ogino.
• Married... with Children
  • Christina Applegate was 15 years old and playing a 15-year-old in the first season of (her character's age was said to be 16 a few months before Christina herself, making it a rare case of a teen actor younger than her role).
  • David Faustino was much the same, playing a 12-year-old boy when he was in fact 12 years old. In both cases, the characters aged at the same rate as the actors. Of course, while Kelly was repeatedly stated to have an active sex life, Applegate wasn't actively portrayed making out on camera until after she turned 18.
  • Katey Sagal was 33 and Ed O'Neill 41 when the series started, though for comedic effect Al and Peg often referred to the other as being several decades older than that. Technically O'Neill was several years too old for his character (since Al knocked Peggy up with Kelly in high school) but the extra years suited his downtrodden, weary, defeated-by-life character well. Sagal, mindful of their age difference, joked at the Reunion Show that Peggy was much younger than Al.
• The Bill features a 19-year-old character, played by an actress who was 17 when she started filming.
• Sarah Michelle Gellar was 16 when she started playing Erica Kane's long-lost daughter Kendall Hart on All My Children in 1993. The character was initially 16 years old but, via a retcon, her age was later changed to 23 due to the continuity errors of Erica having a teenaged daughter from a teenaged pregnancy created. When the character was brought back 6.5 years later, Kendall's birth year and age were reverted back to her original age when she first appeared as a teenager in 1993.
• Freaks and Geeks had a good percentage of its cast close to or of high school age (24-year-old Linda Cardellini and 21-year-old James Franco being exceptions). John Francis Daley, playing a very small and scrawny 14-year-old, was the same age as his character.
  • Also, in Bones, in which a now 24-year-old John Francis Daley plays 24-year-old wunderkind psychologist Lance Sweets.
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is about 28-29 years old by the end of the third season, going by a reference to her having graduated from the military academy six years previously. Katee Sackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
  • For that matter, the fact that she was cast could be considered an example of this trope: the original script for the miniseries described Starbuck as being in her thirties. Katee was 22 when she tried out for the part and eventually got it, despite initial objections from the casting directors that she was too young.
• Firefly has twenty-year-old Jewel Staite playing Kaylee, who is implied to be older than 17-year-old River (played by Summer Glau, who IRL was a year older than Jewel).
• F Troop's "Wrangler Jane", presumably a character in her twenties, was played by Melody Patterson. Melody got the part after lying about her age initially and was only 15 years old at the start of the show.
• That '70s Show
  • The 15-year-old character of Jackie Burkhart was played by the actually 15-year-old Mila Kunis. The story goes that when asked how old she was, Mila said, "I'll be 18 on my birthday." She just didn't say which birthday. The producers liked her so much that they decided to keep her even when they found out the truth. Thus, she was 14 when they started filming the series, but the producers thought she was 16.
  • When the show started, Laura Prepon and Wilmer Valderrama were also teens; however, they aged normally, while their characters did not.
• Supernatural:
  • Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles are actually almost exactly the same ages as their characters, Sam and Dean Winchester. They are each one year older than their characters,^note Although that may have just been an accident. There's a pretty large gap of time between when an episode is being produced and when it airs, and their birthdays might have just happened in the meantime. but the four-year age gap between them is the same.
  • However, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays their father, is only 12 years older than Ackles (something Padalecki and Ackles used to tease him about). This begins to border on squick for those who also watch Grey's Anatomy, considering Jensen Ackles (his son) and Katherine Heigl (his girlfriend) are the same age.
  • Grey's Anatomy watchers might also find it strange Sarah Drew plays 17-year-old Nora in the season 5 episode Swap Meat despite being 30 years old, and playing an age-appropriate doctor in Grey's at the time.
  • This was a big issue with season 10 regular Cole Trenton who was supposed to be 11 years younger than Dean yet his actor Travis Aaron Wade is 3 years older than Jensen Ackles.
• The cast of Skins are generally the same age as the characters they play — which makes it a rather interesting exception given the show's apparent policy of "sex, drugs, and nudity whenever possible."
  • The American version landed in hot water with the Moral Guardians for casting teenaged actors, who accused the producers of violating "child pornography laws" for a semi-nude scene using a 17-year-old actor. They weren't actually doing anything illegal, but the resulting Squick did put a lot of viewers off the show.
• Gilmore Girls featured 33-year-old Lauren Graham as 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore, and 18-year-old (at the time of casting) Alexis Bledel as 16-year-old Rory Gilmore.
• Lucy Griffiths, who played Marian in the BBC's 2006 version of Robin Hood was 18 and playing a 21-year-old character in the first series.
• On The Wire, Jermaine Crawford (Duquan "Dukie" Weems), Maestro Harrell (Randy Wagstaff) and Michael B. Jordan (Wallace) were the same ages as their characters (15, 14, and 16 respectively).
• Many Nickelodeon shows using a live-action cast actually used actors around the same age as their characters.
  • Notably, The Adventures of Pete & Pete actually paid attention to how old the characters were and raised their ages accordingly. The producers later commented that the kids essentially grew up on the set because they'd been doing the shorts and television series for so long.
  • Drake & Josh had the title actors be the appropriate age, with Miranda Cosgrove playing a 10-year-old. But the show's timeline was different than real-time, and the actors were hitting their 20s when the characters were still in High School. Cosgrove especially was about 14, still supposedly about 11 or 12.
  • Same situation for Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, sort of. Devon Werkheiser and Daniel Curtis Lee were both 13 when they started the show which is fine for 7th graders. However, for the next 2 years, the show never went past 8th grade and ended with the 2 boys 16 years old still playing 8th graders. Lindsey Shaw on the other hand was 15 playing a 7th grader when the show started, a true Dawsons Casting. She ended the show playing an 8th grader at age 17.
  • Melissa Joan Hart was fifteen when she started playing Clarissa Darling, and her character aged up accordingly.
  • Also on Zoey 101: the characters grew from 8th (season 1) to 10th grade (seasons 3/4), along with the main cast who were 13/14 when the show started. Victoria Justice is two years younger but was seemingly placed in the same grade.
    • What made it notable was that the amount of fanservice also grew each season.
• Heroes
  • Claire was 17 years old — and played by 16-year-old (when the series started) Hayden Panettiere — until the writers noticed fans enjoying the chemistry displayed between Claire and 26-year-old Peter and writers docked her age down one or two years to make them less comfortable with the pairing until The Reveal of Peter and Claire being related.
  • The kids who play Molly Walker and Micah Sanders are about the same age as their characters, or at least they were until the show took some time off. Micah is supposed to be eleven, and the actor is now fourteen, which is very noticeable as puberty has begun to kick in and his voice changed. The deepest voice on an eleven-year-old ever.
• In Home Improvement the actors playing the kids were all of the appropriate age: Zachary Ty Bryan (Brad) was the same age as his character, Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Randy) was a year older than his character and Taran Noah Smith (Mark) was a year older than his character.
• Arrested Development had Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat at almost the exact age of 14-15.
  • Season 4 continues this but plays around with this and Older Than They Look. George Micheal becomes the target of sex offenders due to his youthful looks despite being and perhaps because he's 22. Maeby is still in high school, purposely posing as a senior for the last five years. Of course, she's barely fooling anyone.
• Tyler James Williams, the young Chris Rock on Everybody Hates Chris, was 12 when he began playing his middle-school-aged role. Unfortunately, he hit puberty... and his voice ended up being noticeably more baritone than that of the adult Chris Rock, who narrates the show.
  • Not to mention one of the early jokes of the show was that Chris' younger brother was taller than him (mirroring Chris Rock's real-life younger brother who grew taller than him at an early age). After puberty, Williams was much taller than the other actor, not to mention his constant bully (though the bully remained much bulkier than the skinny Williams).
• Holly Tyler of What I Like About You was exactly the same age as her portrayer Amanda Bynes (starting at 16 in the pilot), AND aged in real time to boot (both were nearly 20 in the finale).
  • In What a Girl Wants, Bynes was a sixteen-year-old playing a seventeen-year-old.
• Neil Patrick Harris was more or less the same age as his character when he was in Doogie Howser, M.D., although the show does illustrate why this trope exists — he really grew from season one to season two. However, Max Casella was 22 years old when he began playing 16-year-old Vinnie.
• Most of the Boy Meets World cast (with the already-mentioned exception of Trina McGee) were fairly close to the ages of the characters they portrayed. In the first season, Will Friedle was 17 and playing a 15-year-old and 11-year-old Cory, Shawn, and Topanga were portrayed by Ben Savage (13), Rider Strong (13), and Danielle Fishel (12). But the timeline actually moves faster in the BMW universe than in real life: The gang takes five years to graduate high school instead of seven, making Savage and Strong the same ages as their characters (and Fishel a year younger). Matthew Lawrence joined the cast in the fifth season at age 17, playing Shawn's older brother, despite being two months younger than Strong.
  • In fact, even though only two years of college are shown, it is strongly implied that at least three years have passed; Eric, Jack, and Rachel are all graduating despite (apparently) being Juniors. This makes Maitland Ward, who joined in the sixth season at age 21.
  • The reason this exists was perfectly demonstrated in the episode "Better than the Average Cory", where we meet 13-year-old artist Alexandra Nechita (playing herself), who strikes up a friendship with Cory's little sister Morgan, who is the same age (and played by also 13-year-old Lindsay Ridgeway). Nechita looks several years older than Ridgeway, to the point that one reviewer could not believe they were the same age, even though they were.
  • On the other hand, the use of accurately-aged actors added a nice flavor of realism to the physical changes during puberty for the main characters. For example, Topanga grows breasts over the summer at the same time that Danielle Fishel grew them during the hiatus between seasons. And in season 1, Rider Strong is more than six inches taller and considerably larger-boned than Ben Savage (to the point where their difference in size was the subject of a few gags), although both the actors and their characters are only a few months apart in age. Fast-forward to season 3, and not only have both actors grown considerably, but Savage has shot up to a couple of inches taller than Strong, as well as becoming noticeably bulkier than the latter.
• Willa Holland really was fourteen when she played fourteen-year-old Kaitlin Cooper on The O.C.. Actually, she didn't turn fourteen until just after her first episode aired, but that's fine because Kaitlin was eleven two seasons earlier, anyway. (Though humorously played by an actress who was the same age)
  • Mischa Barton was 17 when Marissa was 16 in the first season.
• Malcolm in the Middle does this by a couple of years; at the beginning, 14-year-old Frankie Muniz played (approximately) 11-year-old Malcolm; 9-year-old Erik Per Sullivan played his 6-year-old younger brother Dewey; 20-year-old Christopher Masterson played his 16-year-old brother Francis; but his older brother Reese was played by 13-year-old Justin Berfield (who was taller than Frankie, and remained so throughout the entire series, to the producers' probable relief).
  • Invoked and deconstructed in one episode, an adult woman in her early 20s poses as a student in order to bust drug dealers. Nobody is fooled.
• Growing Pains had their Cousin Oliver characters played by actors around their ages. By the final season in 1991, Ashley Johnson was eight, playing the suddenly six-year-old Chrissy Seaver. Luke Brower was fifteen years old, played by sixteen-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio.
• Matthew in One Life to Live is canonically about a year older than actor Eddie Alderson.
• Castle: The whole Castle family falls under this trope. When filming began, the actors portraying Richard Castle and his mother (Nathan Fillion and Susan Sullivan) were 37 and 66. Richard's daughter Alexis is eighteen, as is her actress Molly Quinn. That makes Castle a young father, but it does work out.
• Lie to Me: Cal Lightman's daughter is 15/16; the actress playing her 18.
• Although the flagship character of Caprica (Zoe Graystone) is played by someone about six years older than the character, Tamara is herself a semi-exception. Genevieve Buechner is older than Tamara Adama but she's much closer than her colleagues to her character's age, being only 18 while her character is about 15.
• A Deleted Scene from the Pilot of The X-Files shows Scully as a teacher at Quantico, and it has been noted by many fans that she looks much younger than her students.
  • Gillian Anderson was actually four full years younger than her character on The X-Files. She lied to the producers of the show to say she was 27, to make her seem more credible as an FBI agent with a medical degree.
  • David Duchovny was only a year older than his character, Mulder.
• New Zealand series The Tribe did this with every one of the actors playing characters the same age, give or take a year.
• Ramona, a short series based on the Ramona Quimby books, subverted this surprisingly well. Ramona is 8 years old and in third grade, as was her actress at the time. (On the other hand, another adaptation of the source material, Ramona and Beezus, plays the trope very straight!)
• Breaking Bad's high school-age Walter White, Jr. is played by high school-age RJ Mitte, who was 15 at the show's outset. However, the show eventually played the trope straight as only two years passed in-universe over the show's five-year run, so Mitte was 4 years older than his character at the show's end.
• The George Lopez Show does this with Max, who is played by Luis Armand Garcia. They are both the same age. Played somewhat straight with Carmen (Masiela Lusha), in that Masiela Lusha was 17 at the start of the show, and Carmen was supposed to be 13-14.
• All characters on The Wonder Years had ages to match their roles, with star Fred Savage being 11 years old when the show first began. Following this trope, Fred Savage has had trouble finding work as an adult after his lauded childhood acting career (acting work, that is — he's been considerably busier as a director).
• Pretty Little Liars did this with Sasha Pieterse who began playing the role of Alison DiLaurentis at age 14, one year younger than the character. As The Other Wiki puts it, "being only 14 at the time, she is the youngest actress on the show, all her co-stars being in their late teens to early 20s." With the five-year Time Skip, she's now four years younger than Alison. (It helps that Lucy Hale looks younger than Sasha Pieterse, despite being seven years older.)
  • She was 12 when she got the pilot.
• In Earth 2. 8-year-old Uly Adair and 10-year-old True Danziger were played by actors aged 8 and 10 respectively.
• The kids on Full House.
• Buffy
  • Unlike almost all of her costars, Michelle Trachtenberg was the same age as her character, Dawn (14 years old when she first appeared on the show).
  • At the time of Faith's first appearance in "Faith, Hope and Trick", Eliza Dushku was actually seventeen, Faith's age at the time (she had to apply for legal emancipation so she could work on the show unencumbered by child labor laws).
• Taylor Momsen was fourteen when Gossip Girl premiered, the same age as her character Jenny. This ended up pulling the plug on the planned Jenny/Nate romance in season two since Chace Crawford (in his twenties) wasn't comfortable with a storyline that would have him regularly making out with a then fifteen-year-old.
• Most of the actors and actresses playing kids on The Secret World of Alex Mack were within a few years of their characters' ages.
• In Young Blades, 16-year-old Robert Sheehan plays the nearly 16-year-old King Louis XIV.
• In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Luke Smith and Maria Jackson were played by actual teenagers. This demonstrates one of the advantages of Dawson Casting because both actors had to leave the show for academic reasons.
• In The West Wing, Elizabeth Moss is at least a year younger than Zoey Bartlet.
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun, Tommy was Really 700 Years Old, but his fake Earth age was always the same as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's real age (both were fourteen in the first season). Both his girlfriends were played by actresses (Shay Astar and Larisa Oleynik) born in the same year as him. However, there was the interesting situation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt looking younger than he actually was, especially in the early seasons. August looked like she was a good year or two older than Tommy, but actually, Shay Astar is seven months younger than Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
  • The episode "The Dicks They Are A-Changin'" has a series of flashbacks showing Mary Albright as a young student at Berkeley during the '60s. Rather than use a Timeshifted Actor, the episode features a middle-aged Jane Curtin playing her character's younger self.
• On South of Nowhere Chris Hunter was 18 at the time of filming playing the 17- to 18-year-old Glenn. It's notable because he was three years younger than the actress playing his younger sister.
• In the Made-for-TV Movie Birds Of Prey David Janssen plays an ex-WWII pilot who now flies a traffic helicopter. The film was made when Janssen was 41, and he was 14 when the war ended!
• The Lifetime Original Movie Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy cast Hayden Panettiere (21 at the time of filming) as Miss Knox (20 at the time of the incident).
• Totally done by BBC children's dramas Byker Grove and Grange Hill, where all the actors playing children were about the same age as their characters. Some were even a year or so younger.
• Effectively done in one case on Glee, in which Chris Colfer was not only 18 years old when he was cast as 16-year-old Kurt Hummel, but went through a rather dramatic late burst of puberty after being cast, supplying a very effective visual of Kurt growing up (literally, as he gained about three inches in height) on screen. As Colfer still looks Kurt's age (19) in Season 4, it's becoming disconcerting to see Kurt standing next to his on-screen stepbrother Finn, who is supposed to be roughly the same age but was played by Cory Monteith, who was closer to 30 than 20 and starting to show it.
• In the UFO (1970) episode "Destruction", Sarah Bosanquet is said to have "ten years' service" at her job, which is a little tricky given that actress Stephanie Beacham would have been about twenty-three at the time of production.
• Done by Ariana Grande for the duration of Victorious (she began playing Cat on the show aged 16, and was 19 when it ended)... if not the spinoff.
• The children on Blackish are played by similarly aged actors. For example, fifteen-year-old Zoey is played by a fourteen-year-old.
• Sadie Calvano, who plays Violet on Mom, was 16, the same age as her character, when the show premiered in 2013. Spencer Daniels, who plays her boyfriend Luke, is a slight case since he was 20 when the show began.
• Bay, Vanessa Marano's character on Switched at Birth, was born in 1995. Vanessa herself was born in 1992. Sean Berdy (Emmett) is also about right since he was born in 1993.
• Modern Family: The show notably does this for everyone except Haley. Sarah Hyland was eighteen at the time her agent tried to get her the part for sixteen-year-old Haley, and the casting department tried to deny her before she even auditioned. Her agent assured them that she didn't look eighteen. In fact, there were some notable flame wars claiming that Sarah was too young for the role.
• Dylan Sprayberry as Liam on Teen Wolf was 15 when he first appeared on set and finished the series at age 18. Especially noticeable as he is the only main cast member actually to be of high school age. Compared to the rest of the male teenage cast (except for Stiles), he was noticeably less sexualized, which would have been awkward given that he was a minor.
• Danish kids' show Klassen attempts to do this trope so much by season 3. It's about a bunch of sixth graders, and in the Danish school system, most kids are 12 when they start sixth grade (a few are only 11 if they turn 12 during the fall). In the first two seasons, almost all of the cast members are 13 or 14. One year later when filming for season 3 started, the original cast members (now 14 or 15) were considered too old to play sixth graders, and all of them were written out of the show to be replaced with a bunch of new actors. In the hope that they could keep their role for more than one year before getting too old, most of the new actors are 11, some of them 12. While technically not too young to play sixth graders, the new season 3 class does have a disproportionately high amount of 11-year-olds compared to a Real Life sixth-grade class, in which most kids would be 12.
• Somewhat done for the most part in Stranger Things with the younger kids, as the actors playing Will and Eleven actually were 12 and the others were 13 or 14 in the first season.
• Raising Dion: Dion and other kids are played by child actors that are around the same age as their characters. Ja’Siah Young was 8 when filming the first season.
• Northern Rescue: Zigzags this. Seventeen-year-olds Maddie and Gwen are played by Amanda Williamson and Elianna Jones (who were about eighteen and twenty respectively during filming but look a little younger) while Maddie's fifteen-year-old brother Scout is played by Spencer McPherson, who was twenty or twenty-one during the filming of season one.
• American Housewife: Meg Donnelly (Taylor), Daniel DiMaggio (Oliver), and Julia Butters (Anna-Kat) were all born within a year of their respective characters.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (and its sequel) plays this trope right, though not an entirely obvious one.^note We are talking about an actor who was bald by the age of twenty. In Encounter At Farpoint, Captain Picard was 59. At the time of filming, Patrick Stewart was 46.
• The works of Rick Siggelkow, including Shining Time Station, The Noddy Shop and Ace Lightning, feature child actors playing the kid characters.
• Edutainment Shows broadcast on NHK generally cast child actors to play any kid characters:
  • The "big sister" in Inai Inai Baa! is always played by a female child. Usually, a pre-teen is cast, but there are some cases where she was younger, like how Yuki was 5 years old when she began her stint as host on the show.
  • Miitsuketa!! has Sui-chan played by a female child actor.
  • Cooking Idol Ai! Mai! Main! has then ten-year-old Haruka Fukuhara playing the protagonist in both the anime and cooking segments.
  • Kitchen Sentai Cookrun also features child actors playing the protagonists, but contained a very interesting case of this trope. While the actress who played Cumin in the first season was 7 years old, the character herself was a kindergartner.
• Runaways (2017) has one actual teenager among the title group, 15 year old Allegra Acosta as Molly.
• CBC Kids usually features real-life children in their music videos and segments. Some of them have notably gone on to pursue acting careers in Canadian entertainment.
• Game of Thrones cast actual teenagers or children for the roles of the younger Starks (Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Rickon), the Baratheon children (Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen), Robin Arryn, and Hot Pie. Since the show disregarded the books' Webcomic Time in favor of real time pacing, they went this trope.
• In SeaChange, Kerry Armstrong played 50-something Heather Jelly at the age of 40 with the aid of a grey wig.
• In Star Trek Wil Wheaton and Cirroc Lofton were actual teenagers (15 and 14 respectively) when they began playing the teenage characters of Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• The animated Mushimushi-kun segments of Inai Inai Baa! have the titular character voiced by a young child.
• In the 1995 adaptation of The Kindaichi Case Files, Tsuyoshi Domoto and Rie Tomosaka were only 15 and 14, respectively, when they started playing 17 year old Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase.
  • Another Kindaichi example, in the 2001 reboot, Jun Matsumoto was 17 years old when he started playing Hajime. Taken a step further with Anne Suzuki who was only 13 years old playing the 17 year old Miyuki.

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