Dawson Casting / Film

Straight Examples

• 3 Idiots: The film features multiple flashback scenes in which all of the characters were college students in their late teens to early twenties, alternating between that timeline and the present day ten years later. Using the same actors for both timelines practically guarantees this trope will be employed. At the time of filming, Aamir Khan (Rancho) was 43 and R. Madhavan (Farhan) was 38. Sharman Joshi (Raju) and Kareena Kapoor (Pia) were both in their late twenties and Omi Vaidya (Chatur) was 26.
• 17 Again (2009) stars a 23-year-old Michelle Trachtenberg as the main character's 17-year-old daughter. Zac Efron (21) plays the high-school-aged version of the main character.
• Adventures in Babysitting: Protagonist Chris is supposed to be 17, but her actress, Elisabeth Shue, was 24; ironically, at one point she tells Brad that she can't date him because he's a "kid," while his actor, Keith Coogan, was an actual 17-year-old. Chris' friend was played by Penelope Ann Miller, 23, while her boyfriend was Bradley Whitford, 28.
• Adventures in Babysitting (2016) - 23-year-old Sofia Carson as teenaged Lola Perez.
• Afternoon Delight: 24-year old Juno Temple plays 19 year-old McKenna.
• Airheads: The 36-year-old Steve Buscemi plays the 20-something rock musician Rex. Actually works, though, as he ends up looking more authentic than actual 20-somethings Brendan Fraser and Adam Sandler.
• Most live-action adaptations of Alice in Wonderland have this problem. The titular role is usually played by a woman at least in her late teens. Alice is supposed to be seven. The youngest actress was at least twelve.
  • Alice in Wonderland (2010) plays with the subsequent expectation on the part of the audience, leading us to believe at first that this is just another "adult playing Alice" film only to reveal after she tumbles down the rabbit hole that this is a sequel and the Alice of the story is about to turn 19.
  • Funnily enough, the Disney Animated Canon version had 12-year-old Kathryn Beaumont provide the voice and physical model for Alice, resulting in Alice looking more like she's 12 than seven. Played straight decades later when Beaumont, who was in her sixties at the time, reprised the role in Kingdom Hearts - and would do the same for her other famous Disney role, Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, who is around the same age as Alice.
• All the Money in the World started in the opposite direction of this trope, with 58-year-old Kevin Spacey as 80 year old J. Paul Getty. Then a scandal broke out and he was replaced with 87-year-old Christopher Plummer - who was actually four years older than Getty upon his death.
• The 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses stars a 30 year-old Matt Damon as 16 year-old John Grady and 25 year-old Penélope Cruz as 17 year-old Alejandra. Jesse Plemons played a younger version of Damon's character in a deleted flashback; at 12, he was much closer in age to Damon's version of the character than Damon was, if not necessarily any closer in appearance to a 16 year-old.
• A little-known flick, Ally Farson from 1999, was about a 20-something film student who goes on a killing spree. The movie, like The Blair Witch Project, hyped itself as footage from a real incident, however, Ally is played by a woman who is clearly in her 40s or even 50s.
• Aloha Summer is a 1988 comedy-drama film about a group of teenagers and their experiences one summer in Hawaii. The film stars Tia Carrere (21), Chris Makepeace (24), Don Michael Paul (25), and Yuji Okumoto (29).
• This is the case with some of the films from the American Girl series, in which the actresses playing the roles are a few years older than the protagonists they depict (all of whom are meant to be 9 years old). Shailene Woodley was 13 when she played as Felicity, and it's an even more extreme case with 15-year-old Canadian actress Erin Pitt portraying the 2014 Girl of the Year Isabelle Palmer.
• American Graffiti has 25-year-old Richard Dreyfuss, 27-year-old Paul Le Mat, 25-year-old Cindy Williams and 25-year-old Candy Clark as teenagers that are finishing high school and about to head off to college. Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, however, were both 19.
• Mostly averted in American Pie, where most of the kids aren't too far removed from high school age. Notable exceptions are 25-year-olds Alyson Hannigan and Shannon Elizabeth, and 23-year-olds Tara Reid and Seann William Scott.
• Two out of three movies in the original trinity based on the Amy Fisher / Long Island Lolita scandal... Noelle Parker (Amy Fisher: My Story) and Alyssa Milano (Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story), both in their 20s, as teenaged Amy Fisher. The third being 17-year-old Drew Barrymore in (The Amy Fisher Story.)
• Ana: Ana is 11, played by Dafne Keen, who was at least 14 (aided by the fact she's small and looks younger than her age).
• An American Werewolf in London: The two lead characters who are referred to as "boys" and appear to be college kids in their early twenties were played by 30-year-old David Naughton and 26-year-old Griffin Dunne.
• In the crime drama Another Day In Paradise, 27-year-old Natasha Gregson Wagner plays a teenage runaway. However, her fellow teenage runaway boyfriend is played by 18-year-old Vincent Kartheiser, who looked young for his age to the point that he had to show the director his driver's license to prove he was 18. This makes the characters' relationship kind of... odd, especially since they have multiple sex scenes.
• Donna Wilkes was 23 years old when she played the 15-year-old high school student/prostitute Molly/Angel in Angel (1984).
• Zig-zagged in the 1985 TV miniseries/film adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which had 17-year-old Megan Follows as Anne Shirley starting at the age of 13, and 19-year-old Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert Blythe. By the end of the film, the characters are at least 16 years old, and therefore closer to their actors' ages. In the 2016 Breakthrough Entertainment TV film trilogy, Ella Ballentine, initially age 15, played Anne starting at age 11, the same as in the book.
• Anita: Swedish Nymphet - 23-year-old Christina Lindberg as the titular Anita, who is 16 years old.
• Another Earth starts off with 17-year-old Rhoda Williams, and then skips forwards to 4 years later, when Rhoda is 21. Rhoda is played by 29-year-old Brit Marling.
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. has the sixth grade Laura Danker played by fiften-year old Isol Young; this is so she can look noticably taller and more mature than the other sixth grade girls around her.
• Avatar: The Way of Water has an extreme example; Sigourney Weaver portrays Kiri, who is about fourteen years old during the main events of the film, while at the time Weaver was in her early seventies and also portrays the character's biological mother. Because Kiri is depicted with motion capture she does look like a blue, teenaged Sigourney Weaver rather than a grown woman, though her voice sounds more mature.
• In The Aviator, Gwen Stefani plays Jean Harlow, who was 19 at the time the film shows her; Gwen was 34 during filming, eight years older than Jean when she passed away.
• 21-year-old Georgina Cates lied about her age and pretended to be a teenager in order to play a 16-year-old in the film An Awfully Big Adventure. It worked — the cast, crew and director fell for it. Possibly also a subversion, because when Cates first auditioned and gave them her real name and age, she was told she was too old for the role.
• The Babe Ruth Story, 42-year-old William Bendix (and he looked every day of it) plays the Babe starting at age 18.
  • Likewise, 39-year-old John Goodman plays Babe Ruth from late teens to baseball retirement in the 1992 biopic The Babe.
• Back to the Future:
  • Michael J. Fox plays 17-year-old Marty McFly into his late twenties, having done the first film when he was twenty-three. In Back to the Future Part II, at 28, he played Marty's 17 year old son and similarly aged daughter in the future.
  • Lea Thompson, who plays Lorraine, is just nine days older than Fox. Thomas F. Wilson, who plays Biff, a contemporary of Marty's parents, is just two years older than Fox, while Crispin Glover, who plays George McFly, is three years younger than Fox. All three actors invert the trope in 1985 scenes, where they are playing the characters as they are in their late 40s. But this is justified because the actors also have to play high school age versions of their characters in 1955, whereas in 1985, where Marty originates and when George, Lorraine, and Biff are at the ages Marty knows them as, the actors wear makeup to make them look middle-aged. Though it's also played straight in 1955, with Thompson being 23 and playing a 17 year old Lorraine, Wilson being 25 and playing an 18 year old Biff, and Glover being 20 and playing a 17 year old George. For Part II, 28 year old Thompson was 17 year old Lorraine and nearly 30 year old Wilson was 18 year old Biff (he also played Biff's 19 year old grandson Griff in the 2015 section), while Glover was replaced with 30 year old Jeffrey Weissman as 17 year old George.
  • Then there's an inversion with the 46 year old Christopher Lloyd playing Doc Brown, who is in his seventies. This example necessitated that for Part II, it be explained that Doc went to a rejuvenation clinic that added 30 years to his life so that Lloyd, now aged 50, wouldn't need to wear old-age makeup, as he's predominantly playing the 1985 Doc in the sequels, as opposed to the first film, where he predominantly played the 1955 Doc, who was closer to Lloyd's actual age, being in his forties. They also replaced his spleen and colon.
• Backstage has then-23 year old Isild Le Besco as 17 year old Lucie.
• In one of the funniest scenes in Bad Boys II, young Reggie shows up at Marcus' door to take his daughter out on a date. He is taller than either Will Smith or Martin Lawrence, with a deeper voice too!
  Reggie: I'm here to take out Megan
  Marcus: How old are you?
  Reggie: I'm fifteen, Mr. Burnett.
  Marcus: Motherfucka, you look thirty! Show me some ID.
• The Batman Film Series have quite a bit of this:
  • And 52-year-old Jack Nicholson as Jack Napier (The Joker) — when, in the script, Napier is said to be still in his thirties.
  • Danny DeVito was in his late forties at the time of the filming of Batman Returns. Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin is explicitly said to be 33 years old. And with the makeup, DeVito looks even older. Then again, living in the sewer for years won't leave you looking like a fresh spring chicken...
• The Batman (2022): Selina relates that she was only seven when her mother died. At the end, we see her mother's grave, which dates it to 2004. This makes her nine years younger or so than Zoë Kravitz, her actress, so she's about twenty four or twenty five in the present, whereas Kravitz is thirty three.
• Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Both were born in the early 1940s, and both starred in a series of Beach Movies in the mid 1960s with vague plots about how "school is out, so let's go to the beach."
• Mickey Rooney, born in 1920, 5' 2" with chipmunk cheeks, based his whole adult career around playing teens, until he was almost 50 years old. He went from explicitly underaged characters, and then transitioned into young adult roles by playing characters with no expressed age, but who were still ambiguously young. For example, his character "Peachy Keane" in the 1965 beach party film How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. This image of youth was helped along by the fact that he was a perpetual newlywed in real life.
• Fabiano Anthony Forte often played a restless teenager with a penchant for singing.
• Beaches — Hillary and C.C. meet as 11-year-olds in 1958 and write letters until they reunite as adults. The reunion, Hillary has graduated from college to become a lawyer, dresses as a hippie, and the various vehicles place the timeline circa 1970, in their early 20s. Adult Hillary and C.C. are played by 40-something Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler.
• Beach Party has 22-year old Frankie Avalon and 23-year-old Annette Funicello playing teenagers. John Ashley, who plays Frankie's best friend Ken, takes the cake - he was nearly 30.
• A Beautiful Mind: Russell Crowe was in his late 30s while playing the main character. The movie begins as he enters Princeton University, which the real John Nash did when he was 20 years old. He plays the same character over a 40-year timespan, though.
• The villian of The Beekeeper is stated to be 20 years old and is played by 32 year old Josh Hutcherson.
• All the teens in Before I Fall are played by 20 somethings; and hilariously, so is the only teacher shown in the film. Whom of course barely looks any older than them. To be fair, people as young as 22 can be high-school teachers, so the visual difference between late-teens and early-twenties isn't necessarily that big.
• In the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, which takes place during the final decade of the showman's life, 42-year-old Matt Damon plays Liberace's lover, Scott Thorson, who was in his late twenties when Liberace died.
• Parminder Nagra was 26 when she played 18-year-old Jess in Bend It Like Beckham.
• The Nicholas Sparks movie The Best of Me features a prime example of this trope gone wrong. Twenty-five-year-old Luke Bracey plays a teenaged flashback version of the male lead character—named Dawson, who is played by James Marsden in the present day. Unfortunately, Bracey looks every one of those 25 years and bears little resemblance to Marsden. A review of the film published by ABC News called this particular choice a "cinematic disaster" and "one of the worst pieces of casting I've ever seen." The actress playing the teenaged version of the female lead is also an example of this, but not as bad, being 19 to her character's 17.
• Lampshaded in Better Off Dead when Charles de Mar (played by then-32-year-old Curtis Armstrong) says, "I've been going to this high school for seven and a half years! I'm no dummy!"
• A Bigger Splash plays this twice, with the 26-year old Dakota Johnson playing 22-year old Penelope, who at the end of the film is revealed to actually be 17.
• The Big Wedding: Ana Ayora played 20 year old Nuria when she was around 30.
• In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, the eponymous high schoolers were both played by actors in their twenties.
• The 1996 film version of The Birdcage features Calista Flockhart playing an 18-year-old. She was 31 at the time of filming. Dan Futterman, who plays her (20-year-old) fiance, was about 28.
• Bit: Nicole Maines plays Laurel, who's stated to be eighteen. She was twenty-two at the time.
• Black And Blue stars 42 year-old Naomie Harris as a 27 year-old rookie cop.
• Blackboard Jungle from 1955 may be the Ur-Example, with Sidney Poitier (28 at the time), Vic Morrow (28), and Paul Mazursky (25) playing thuggish high school students. Jamie Farr (21), who played the mentally-challenged, perpetually smiling Santini, and Rafael Campos (19), who played the diminutive, wisecracking Morales, were probably closest to high school age. Made even more ironic by the fact this film is credited with launching teen-favored rock and roll music into the mainstream (even though the man who recorded the title song, "Rock Around the Clock," Bill Haley, was actually a little older than Poitier and Morrow).
• Blame (2017): All of the teenagers were played by actors in their early twenties.
• In The Blob (1958), high-schooler Steve Andrews is played by 28-year-old Steve McQueen (actor) in his first starring role.
• Danielle Harris is a 32-year-old teen in Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet.
• Bloody Birthday - Lori Lethin (26) and Julie Brown (25) as high school students.
• Blow: Ray Liotta and Rachael Griffiths played Johnny Depp's character's parents. Depp is older than Griffiths and only slightly younger than Liotta.
• Blown Away (1993) - Twentysomethings Corey Haim, Nicole Eggbert, and Corey Feldman portray teens in this crime drama / erotic thriller.
• The Blue Lamp: Diana Lewis, who is stated in the film several times to be seventeen, is played by twenty-nine-year-old Peggy Evans.
• Blue My Mind: Mia is meant to be 15, while Mia's actress Luna Wedler at the time was at least 19. The same goes for other characters.
• Boogie Nights: 26-year-old Mark Wahlberg and 27-year-old Heather Graham start off the film as teens, one stating his age explicitly as 17, the other shown dropping out of high school.
• Christine Taylor (Marcia), Jennifer Elise Cox (Jan), and Christopher Daniel Barnes (Greg) were all in their twenties when cast in the mid-90s Brady Bunch movies. Interestingly, Cox is actually older than Taylor in real life, despite playing her younger sister.
  • Their classmates, such as Jack Noseworthy, Alanna Ubach, R.D. Robb, Shane Conrad, are all in their 20s.
• Born in the Maelstrom: Rebecca, who's eighteen, was played by Sasha Lane. She was at least twenty one.
• Boyz n the Hood has 22-year-old Cuba Gooding Jr. and 21-year-old Morris Chestnut portraying 17-year-olds Tre and Ricky, respectively, while Ice Cube, also 21-years-old, portrays the 18-year-old Doughboy.
• Most of the actors in The Breakfast Club were out of high school, with only 2 actually being under 18.
• In Breakfast on Pluto, Cillian Murphy plays Kitten both as an adult and as a teenager, and makes a pretty good teenager for an actor in his early 30s. Of course, playing a 16-year-old is much easier than playing a drag queen.
• Breaking Away: The four lead characters are supposed to be 19. Jackie Earle Haley was 17 at the time, then there's Dennis Quaid (25), Dennis Christopher (24), and Daniel Stern (22).
• In Brick, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Emilie de Ravin, and Meagan Good were twenty-two years old during production, playing high school students, and Brian J. White was twenty-eight.
• Bring It On — Some of the actors are in their 20s, most notably Gabrielle Union (age 27) during the first one, and Christina Milian (age 27) during Fight to the Finish. Though the trope was averted with Kirsten Dunst (age 18) and Eliza Dushku (age 19) in the first film, Hayden Panettiere (age 16) in All Or Nothing and Ashley Benson (age 18) in In It To Win It.
• In the film version of Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart 12-year-old Jonatan was played by Staffan Götestam who was 26 at the time. However the character was aged up intentionally as it seemed a bit improbable on film that a 12-year-old would be entrusted with such a degree of leadership in a La Résistance group.
• In Broken Blossoms, 26-year-old Lillian Gish plays 15-year-old Lucy Burrows.
• The Buddy Holly Story: Gary Busey was 35 when he played Holly, who died at the age of 22.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 23-year-old Kristy Swanson as Buffy, and 27-year-old Luke Perry as her high school boyfriend.
  • Swanson later played a teenager (or at least an early twentysomething) in her early 30s in Dude, Where's My Car?.
• In Bunraku, teenage Momoko is portrayed by 25-year-old Emily Kaiho, who sort of pulls it off by being fresh-faced and petite. Much is made of how Yoshi is the youngest of the protagonists, and inexperienced and hot-headed as a result. GACKT meanwhile is pushing forty (but looks twenty years younger).
• The Burning Bed covers a specific period in Francine Hughes's life from age 15 to age 29. You would think that they would cast someone around the age of 22, someone halfway between 15 and 29. Instead, they cast 37-year-old Farrah Fawcett.
  • Likewise, you also have 39-year-old Paul Le Mat (see American Graffiti) playing Francine's abusive husband Mickey from his time as an 18-year-old high school dropout to his death at the age of 32.
• Call Me by Your Name is a gay romance between a 17-year-old and a 24-year old, and while Timothée Chalamet was 20 during filming, he at least looked like a teenager. Armie Hammer, meanwhile, was 30 and looked 30, making the age difference seem uncomfortably larger than intended (not helped by the 6'5 Hammer towering over his costar).
• Candy in The Candy Snatchers is 16 years old and played by 21-year-old Susan Stennett.
• Carmen y Lola: Carolina Yusta was at least 26 at the time playing Lola, who's 16.
• In Carnal Knowledge, a *34* year old Jack Nicholson plays a college freshman and looks even older. Though he goes on to play the same character at 30 and 40.
• Carrie:
  • In the 1976 version, the eponymous 16-year-old protagonist was portrayed by a 26-year-old Sissy Spacek. She was the same age as P.J. Soles, who played Norma Watson. This was true for most of the teenagers, who were, oddly enough, only a few years younger than 29-year-old Betty Buckley, the actor playing Miss Collins.
  • The sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2, features various people in their 20s, most notably 24-year-old Emily Bergl in the lead role, 27-year-old Jason London as her boyfriend, and 27-year-old Dylan Bruno as his friend.
  • Angela Bettis was 29 when she portrayed Carrie in the 2002 version, with 26-year-old Tobias Mehler as her balding prom date with forehead wrinkles.
  • The 2013 version inverts this with the casting of Carrie; Chloë Grace Moretz was 15 years old during filming, playing a high school senior who would've been 17 or 18. But then it plays it straight with 23-year-old Gabriella Wilde as Sue Snell and 24-year-olds Portia Doubleday and Alex Russell as Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan. Then there are those who don't have their birthdays listed on IMDb (absence of a D.O.B. usually equals a much older actor who is relying on this trope for employment). The contrast between a girl in her mid-teens compared to adults in their mid-twenties highlights this trope.
• A character in the Carry On film Carry On Camping was Babs, a teenage schoolgirl played by the 32-year-old Barbara Windsor.
• In Catch Me If You Can, 27-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio plays real life former con artist Frank Abagnale from age 15 to his mid twenties. However, Abagnale did look much older than his age during that time, which helped him get away with his various cons.
• In Catch That Kid, Corbin Bleu, Max Thieriot, and Kristen Stewart play 12-year-old kids who rob a bank. At the time, the actors were 15, 16, and 14, respectively.
• Charlie's Angels (2000) features a flashback montage at the beginning with Charlie's voiceover, "Once upon a time there were three very different little girls..." They then show three adults dressed as girls up to high school age. In the sequel, three years later, they do it again with 28-year-old Drew Barrymore, 31-year-old Cameron Diaz, and 35-year-old Lucy Liu. Apparently, this is humorous.
• Chaos Walking (2021): In the books, Todd is almost thirteen years old at the start of the series; Tom Holland was twenty-one during principal production and twenty-three during reshoots. Likewise, Viola is thirteen in the first book, while Daisy Ridley was twenty-five when she was first cast and twenty-seven during the reshoots. The film ages the characters up to their late teens, as it's doubtful Ridley and Holland would've been able to believably portray thirteen year olds, though they still qualify for Dawson Casting.
• Cherry Falls has its high schoolers played by Brittany Murphy (23), Kristin Miller (24), DJ Qualls (21), Natalie Ramsey (25), Douglas Spain (26), Bre Blair (20), Clementine Ford (21) and Gabriel Mann being 28 (but ironically looking very close to his character's age). The film's focus on teen sex, and the third act taking place during an orgy likely meant that casting older actors was a necessity.
• In Cherrybomb (2009), the three 16-year-old protagonists are played by Kimberley Nixon (who was 22 at the time), Rupert Grint and Robert Sheehan (both of whom were 20). It generally gives the audience a bit of a jolt when Sheehan's character confirms how old they are towards the end of the movie, firstly because the cast are blatantly older than this, and secondly because we've just watched said character engage in a sex-and-drugs orgy and violently murder someone.
• Child's Play:
  • Christine Elise was 25 in Child's Play 2.
  • Katherine Heigl's friends in Bride of Chucky, in their late 20s.
• Sally Ann Howes was in her mid-30s when she played the 20-something Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Years later, she would describe herself as having been "the world's oldest virgin".
• The film adaptation of Christine has a standout example in Buddy Repperton, who not only looks older than a high schooler, but older than the actor playing him. William Ostrander was 23-24 during filming, not even the oldest member of the cast playing a high schooler (that distinction goes to Stuart Charno, 25-26, who plays Don Vandenberg). Yet viewers often describe Buddy as looking at least 30.
• A Christmas Story - Twelve-year-old Peter Billingsley portrays nine-year-old Ralphie Parker. This isn't such a big deal in the sequel featuring Ralphie as an adult (even though he's now 51 playing 42), but it's rather noticeable for growing children. Had they just left the age ambiguous, it would be fine, but they insisted with the line, "Honors and benefits, already at the age of nine." Ralphie's younger brother, meanwhile, is played by nine-year-old Ian Petrella.
• Chronicle follows three Seattle high school seniors who form a bond after gaining telekinetic powers from an unknown object, and the three main characters are played by people in their mid-twenties, along with many of their schoolmates.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • In Prince Caspian, 25-year-old Ben Barnes was cast as the 17-year-old titular prince. (He's 13 in the book.)
  • In Dawn Treader, Eustace is supposed to be 10. He's played by 17-year-old Will Poulter. The main four get some of this as well, though not as bad. In the first book, they're 13, 12, 10, and 8. In the first movie, the actors playing them were 18, 17, 14, and 10.
• In the Soviet 1947 Cinderella movie, the titular heroine is played by Janina Żejmo, who was nearly 40 at the time. The actresses for the stepsisters were younger, but still both over 30.
• In City of Ember one of the two 12-year-old leads is played by Saoirse Ronan, who was 13 at the time of filming. The other is played by Harry Treadaway, who turned 23 during production.
• Played straight, averted, and inverted in Click. Jonah Hill portrays the 17-year-old version of Adam Sandler's son at age 21, while 15-year-old Lorraine Nicholson portrays the 14-year-old version of Sandler's daughter, and Katie Cassidy portrays the 27-year-old version of Sandler's daughter at age 18.
• Clifford has 40-year-old Martin Short playing a 10-year-old boy, with no real effort being made to hide his age other than his clothes and camera angles to make him look smaller than his co-stars. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert trashed the film, noting that Short looked creepy in the role.
• Clockstoppers has some conspicuously twenty-something teenagers. Jesse Bradford was 22 portraying lead character Zak Gibbs, Garikayi Mutambirwa was 23 portraying Zak’s friend Meeker, and Paula Garces was 27 portraying Francesca, Zak’s love interest. Their characters are inferred to be 17 in the film.
• Malcolm McDowell was 27 when he played Alex in A Clockwork Orange. In the original novel, Alex is 15 years old.
• Clueless: Stacey Dash was 28 portraying a 16-year-old in the movie and then came back for the TV show where she played a 16-year-old until she was 31. (Dee, Stacey's character, lampshaded this in one episode when she mentioned when they were 27 they'd be "old enough to play teenagers on TV.") The rest of the teen cast had an average age of 21, but 19-year-old Alicia Silverstone and 18-year-old Brittany Murphy work fairly well as 16-year-olds.
• Four years after Carrie, then-30-year-old Sissy Spacek played Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter — starting at the age of 14.
• The Conspirator features 42-year-old Norman Reedus playing Lewis Payne who was 21 at the time of his death.
• Cool as Ice: Kristin Minter was 25 when she played the fresh-out-of-high-school Kathy.
• The 2015 zombie-child flick Cooties has an Obvious Stunt Double scene as the teachers escape the school Clint trips a child zombie that - judging by the hips - had definitely been through puberty (the cutoff for turning into a zombie in this movie). You can see it in the trailer, here, at 1:50.
• Corvette Summer stars 26-year-old Mark Hamill as a high school graduate.
• In the 1996 film The Craft, 16-year-old coven member Rochelle was played by nearly 30-year-old Rachel True, though she certainly didn't look that old. The other three 16-year-old girls were all played by actresses in their 20s, but were all at least half a decade younger than True - Robin Tunney as Sarah was 23, Fairuza Balk (Nancy) 21; and Neve Campbell (Bonnie) 22.
• Inverted with Emma Stone in Crazy, Stupid, Love, she was 21 playing a character who was at least 25.
• Critters: 24-year-old Nadine Van der Velde as teen girl April.
• Cry-Baby: Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker (27-year-old Johnny Depp) is the leader of a gang of "Drapes", which includes his teenage mom sister Pepper (22-year-old Ricki Lake), facially disfigured Mona "Hatchet Face" Malnorowski (34-year-old Kim McGuire), wild and free-spirited Wanda Woodward (22-year-old Traci Lords), and Milton Hackett, the nervous son of overzealous religious activists, (24-year-old Darren E. Burrows).
• Cry_Wolf features Lindy Booth (in her mid-20s at time) as an 18-year-old.
• The lead in Cuck is stated to be 29 and is played by a 40 year old actor who definitely looks closer to the latter than the former; although this is probably a deliberate choice given the physically and emotionally unhealthy lifestyle lead by him in the film.
• The Dam Busters is a dramatisation of a famous bombing raid in World War II, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson. In the film, Gibson is played by Richard Todd, who was 36. Gibson was 24, and most of his crew were younger.
• Dangerous Minds features 21-year-old Renoly Santiago and 29-year-old Wade Domínguez as a couple of many 20-something students.
• Darby and the Dead: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their twenties.
• David and Lisa from 1962 starred then 26-year-old Keir Dullea and 19-year-old Janet Margolin in the title roles — respectively sixteen and thirteen.
• David Lynch loves this trope.
  • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me takes place days before the TV show and all the 20-something actors (mentioned in the TV section) are a few years older, with some flashbacks taking place years before the TV show, and Sheryl Lee playing 15. There were some additions to the movie that weren't in the TV show, such as 24-year-old Moira Kelly as 17-year-old Donna Hayward, and 27-year-old Pamela Gidley as 17-year-old Teresa Banks.
  • In Wild at Heart, 23-year-old Laura Dern plays her character as a 13-year-old in flashbacks. Dern had trouble passing as a teen when she was one, for instance when she was 19 in Blue Velvet.
  • In Dune (1984): Sting (then 33) and Kyle MacLachlan (then 25), play Paul Atreides and Feyd Harkonnen, notwithstanding that both those characters are between the ages of 15 and 18 for the entirety of the original novel. To be fair, the makers of the TV miniseries of Dune also went for this trope as well, citing the availability of credible 15-year-old actors to play the lead part.
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) has 24-year-old Lindy Booth as 17-year-old Nicole.
• Jake Gyllenhaal was 23 when he was cast as a teenager in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow.
• Dazed and Confused sometimes plays it straight: Christine Harnos (25), Parker Posey (24), and Sasha Jenson (28) portrayed incoming high school seniors despite being older than age-appropriate Matthew McConaughey, who played a twenty-something graduate.
  • Christin Hinojosa, who played incoming high school freshman Sabrina, was 17 at the time of the film.
  • Subverted by Cole Hauser, who looked like your usual over-aged jock despite being only 18, making him one of the youngest "teens" in the cast.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice sees Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Thomas Wayne, Bruce's father. While he's six years older than Ben Affleck, who plays Batman, the movie has a scene where Bruce laments that he's older than Thomas was at the time of his death and in one of Bruce's nightmares, Thomas's tombstone says he was born in 1942 and killed in 1981, which given BvS was filmed in 2014, means Morgan was 11 years older than Thomas Wayne.
  • Aquaman (2018) revealed that Thomas Curry and Queen Atlanna met in 1985, retroactively making Arthur around 30-31 at most in BvS. Jason Momoa was nearing 40 during the filming of Aquaman, where Arthur would at most be 33. Patrick Wilson as Ocean Master is a bigger example as the character is the younger half-brother of Aquaman, yet Wilson himself is six years older than Momoa.
• In Dead End Drive-In Ned Manning was in his mid-thirties when playing the teenage hero Jimmy, or "Crabs". Reportedly he even lied about his age to the film's director.
• Dear Evan Hansen: Ben Platt, who played the teenaged title character on Broadway, reprised his role for the 2021 film even though he was 27 during filming. Despite shaving obsessively, growing out his hair to conceal his mature hairline, and wearing a ton of makeup (which many thought made him look older), he still looked like a grown man attending high school and was roundly mocked for it. His fans counter that he originated the role of Evan onstage^note Admittedly, he was 21 when the musical first opened in DC and could still pass for a teenager, and theatre in general is more forgiving of this trope than film and won a Tony for it, and they felt an adult actor would do the emotionally-heavy role far more justice than an actual teenager. However, detractors will still counter by arguing it to be a case of Nepotism, considering that his father Marc Platt is the producer of the movie. Ironically, in 2012, nine years before Evan Hansen was released as a film, an 18-year-old Platt played a college student in Pitch Perfect.
• Dean Koontz's Phantoms — 25-year-old Rose McGowan plays a character that was 14 in the book.
• Demolition High (1996) - 25-year-old teen Corey Haim unites with fellow students against terrorists.
  • Demolition University (1997) - 26-year-old teen Corey Haim unites with fellow students against terrorists.
• Deux. This French film stars Isabelle Huppert as twin sisters in an extremely confusing storyline that jumps crazily backwards and forwards in time and space, with no attempt to make Huppert look appropriately older or younger. There are a couple of lengthy sequences in which she appears as a schoolgirl, despite being in her late forties. In addition her/their mother, played by Bulle Ogier, is seen in flashback as a young heavily pregnant woman despite being in her sixties.
• Devil in the Flesh — 25-year-old Rose McGowan plays a teenaged murderess.
• Diana: 45-year-old Naomi Watts as Princess Diana, who died at age 36.
• In Dirty Dancing, Jennifer Grey (now 27) plays 17-year-old Frances (Baby). She did look the role, though. Johnny is 25 years old, and played by 35-year-old Patrick Swayze, who unfortunately looked his age, making it look a bit squicky.
• Disco Pigs brought us Cillian Murphy, then 24, playing a 16-year-old. He was pretty convincing until he was shirtless . (Not that most of the audience probably minded much. Or at least, they normally wouldn't have, but the monologue he delivers while shirtless can come across as rather ... icky). It is rather justifiable, as he actually looked very convincing, and he did play the character in the stage play version at 19 years of age.
• Pretty much every teen in the Divergent series is played by an actors well into their 20's. The only one who's closest to their characters' age is 16-year-old Caleb, who's portrayed by then-19-year-old Ansel Elgort.
  • 18-year-old Four is played by 28-year-old Theo James. Word of God specifically cast the latter due to Ability over Appearance. Eric, who's in Four's generation, also counts, being played by 27-year-old Jai Courtney. They left the two's ages deliberately vague as a result.
  • 16-year-old Tris is played by 23-year-old Shailene Woodley. Keep in mind that she's supposed to be the younger non-twin sister of Caleb (though no more than eleven months, since they partake in the same Aptitude Test), and yet Ms. Woodley is four years older than Mr. Elgort.
  • Not to mention Tris' fellow 16-year-old colleagues: Al (played Christian Madsen, who was 22), Christina and Will (Zoë Kravitz and Ben Llyod-Hughes, respectively, who were both 26), and Peter (Miles Teller, who was 28).
  • The Divergent Series: Insurgent adds more Dawsons into the "16-year-old" lineup: Marlene and Uriah (Suki Waterhouse and Keiynan Lonsdale, respectively, 22) and Lynn (Rosa Salazar, 29).
• Doctor... Series:
  • The medical students in Doctor in the House (1954) are all played by 30 to 40-year-olds.
  • The 17-year-old Fellowes from Doctor at Sea was played by the 25-year-old James Kenney.
  • Leslie Phillips was 42 at the time he played the 35-year-old Dr. Grimsdyke in Doctor in Clover and 46 when he played the also-35-year-old Dr. Burke in Doctor in Trouble.
• Dora and the Lost City of Gold: 11-year-old (at the time of filming) Malachi Barton plays 6-year-old Diego. Averted with Isabela Moner, who was 17. The older Diego, Sammy and Randy were played by actors in their early to mid 20s however.
• Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead — 21-year-old Keith Coogan as the main character's 16-year-old brother.
• Double Dragon (1994) - Mark Dacascos, Scott Wolf, and Alyssa Milano were all in their mid to late 20s when they were cast as teens.
• The Double 0 Kid (1992) - 21-year-olds Corey Haim and Nicole Eggbert portray teens playing having a cloak-and-dagger cat-and-mouse game with terrorists.
• In Draft Day, Josh Pence (31) plays Bo Callahan, while Chadwick Boseman (36) plays Vontae Mack. These are supposed to be college football players entering the NFL draft, who are usually 21 to 23 years old when drafted.
• In Dragonball Evolution, high-schooler Goku is played by 27-year-old Justin Chatwin.
• Zig-zagged in Dreamgirls. The Dreams are teenagers for the first act, even though Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson were both 24 during filming. However, there's an 8-year Time Skip before the second act that brings the characters' ages roughly up to the actresses' at the time. But then there's Anika Noni Rose, who was 33 during filming. It also doubles as Irony as She Is Cast; Lorell is implied to be the youngest of the Dreams and is by far the mousiest and has no problem singing backup. Rose is not only the oldest of the three leads, but she's also the most accomplished as an actress, with a Broadway career going back to the late 90's and winning a Tony in 2004.
• Drive Me Crazy: 23-year-old Melissa Joan Hart stars as a teenager with prom problems. Co-starring 23-year-old Adrian Grenier as her high school sweetheart.
• Drop Dead Gorgeous from 1999 stars 28-year-old Denise Richards as a teen beauty pageant contestant.
• In Dr. Minx, Jason Harvey and Randy Boone play college students who live at home with their parents, despite the actors being in their 30s. Makes the casting of Edy Williams as the 'Mrs. Robinson'-style older woman verys strange, as she was actually between them in age.
• In the 1994 sequel to 1978's Drunken Master, Jackie Chan played the same character at roughly the same age, and was 8 years younger than Ti Lung, who played his father.
• Dune and Dune: Part Two feature then-25/27-year-old Timothée Chalamet as 15-year-old Paul Atreides. That said, it is widely agreed that he was much more convincing than Kyle MacLachlan was at passing for someone 10 years younger, due at least partially to his physique and a script that gave him more opportunities to show to his character's youth.
• The Duff has 26-year-old Mae Whitman, 25-year-old Robbie Amell, 24-year-old Bianca A. Santos and 20-year-old Skyler Samuels as high schoolers.
• Jim Broadbent stars as Kempton Bunton in The Duke, which is about the theft of The Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Bunton claims not to know his year of birth, believing it to be around 1900, but the real Bunton was born in 1904, making him 57 at the time of the theft in 1961, whereas Broadbent was 70 at the start of filming in late 2019.
• Dum Plin features various actresses in their early to mid 20s playing high schoolers participating in a teenage beauty pageant!
• Earth Angel (1991) was a movie about a prom queen who dies in the 1960s and then has to do a good deed 30 years later. It was seemingly influenced by movies such as Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, and like those movies, needs actors that can pass as both teenagers and middle-aged people. Of course, no real teens were cast, and most of the actors were in their 30s and 40s, most notably 42-year-old Erik Estrada.
• All of the "kids" from Easy A are between 21 and 25 years old. This actually presents a minor problem, as one of the characters is supposed to be too old for high school, having been held back repeatedly, but appears indistinct from the other actors. Additionally, they had gotten age-appropriate actors for the flashbacks, and this meant that, in the four years between the past and present, the characters seemed to have aged ten years.
• Election: 23-year-old Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick.
• Elliot Page^note before he came out as trans and non-binary has been frequently cast as a teenager (14 years old in Hard Candy, 15 years old in The Tracey Fragments, 16 years old in Juno, and 17 years old in Whip It), despite being 17 to 22 respectively at the time of their production. Ditto for his roles in An American Crime (where he played 16-year-old Sylvia Likens) and X-Men: The Last Stand (where he played the teenage Kitty Pryde). In fairness, he's 5'1'', and looks far younger than his actual age, even in his 30s.
• Eloïse's Lover: The young characters are meant to be in high school. All were at least twenty, and many older than that (Ariadna Cabrol, who played Eloïse, was twenty seven).
• Teen idol Elvis Presley, in his 20s and beyond, would portray characters that were explicitly adolescent, such as in King Creole and Love Me Tender, or age-unspecified young adults who live with their parents, aren't yet married, headed for college or the military, are newcomers on the entertainment scene, hold down jobs suitable for high school dropouts, and enjoy youthful beach parties.
• Elvis And Me starts off with explicitly-stated 14-year-old Priscilla, portrayed by 25-year-old Susan Walters.
• Encino Man: 21-year-old Sean Astin and 24-year-old Pauly Shore as average high school geeks who discover a caveman named Link, played by 24-year-old Brendan Fraser. The two friends succeed in passing off Link as an Estonian exchange student at their school, and Link dates a girl named Robyn, played by 23-year-old Megan Ward.
• Endless: Alexandra Shipp (29), Nicholas Hamilton (20), Eddie Ramos (29) and Zoë Belkin (27) all play recent high school graduates.
• In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, the lead role of about-16-year-old Kaspar Hauser was played by 41-year-old street musician Bruno S. Werner Herzog has commented that he was chosen for the role because his life had parallels with that of the historical Kaspar Hauser, and also because he gave the impression of being outsider to society at large, one that was a stranger to his own body.
• The Entity features mature-looking, Hispanic, 21-year-old David Labiosa as the teen son of young-looking, Caucasian, 32-year-old Barbera Hershey. When they are first introduced, the audience is to believe that they are a married couple... until he calls her "mom" and she nags him about a letter from his high school counselor. This is foreshadowing of future events in the movie.
• Ever After: 18-year-old Danielle is played by 23-year-old Drew Barrymore. Her two wicked stepsisters, of approximately the same age, are played by 20-year-old Melanie Lynskey and 28-year-old Megan Dodds. "Prince" Henry, is played by 33-year-old Dougray Scott. The character of Henry, in this particular movie, is based on Henry II of France, who married Catherine de' Medici, a member of the ruling family of Florence, on 28 October 1533, when they were both fourteen years old. He was king by 28.
• Ernest Goes to School - Of the actors playing teenaged high school students, whose ages are in their twenties (and whose ages can actually be found on the internet) there is 22-year-old Gabe Khouth as Rodney and 22-year-old Jason Michas as Donald.
  • The Ernest movie Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam Film - Jim Varney and Myke R. Mueller (both in their 30s) play teen versions of their respective characters (Dr. Otto and Lance Sterling), as well as pre-teen versions of their characters and also baby versions of their characters that are both able to talk at birth to comedic effect.
• The Eye Creatures: John Ashley was 30 when he played high school student Stan Kenyon.
• EuroTrip - From 2004, it's a film about recent high school grads around the age of 18 who have an adventure through Europe. It stars 23-year-old Scott Mechlowicz as Scott and 25-year-old Jacob Pitts as Cooper. Their friend Jenny is played by 19-year-old Michelle Trachtenberg, which is good except that she's often in the same shot with Travis Wester, who played her twin brother at age 27, so the contrast is often glaring.
• Face/Off: In the second half of the movie, 43-year-old John Travolta plays 30-year-old Castor Troy. Averted in the first half where 33-year-old Nicolas Cage is playing Castor.
• The Faculty: Most of the main teens are played by people in their early 20s, with a couple of exceptions.
• The 2009 Fame remake has numerous examples: Victor (played by Walter Perez, age 27), Denise (Naturi Naughton, 25), Marco (Asher Book, 21). The actors closest to the actual age of the characters they play are Kherington Payne (Alice) and Kay Panabaker (Jenny), both 19.
• Olesya Rulin plays a 16-year-old girl in Family Weekend despite being twice that during filming. Matthew Modine's father character is probably supposed to be younger than him as well; he's old enough to be Rulin's father, if on the young side at 21, whereas he would have fathered a 16-year-old at 37.
• FA Qs, from 2005, follows hairy-chested, tired-looking Joe Lia as teen runaway named "India" as he interacts with various other street youths who also clearly in their 20s. Though Joe Lia's exact age remains a mystery, he graduated from University of Southern California in December of 2003.
• Fat Girls, from 2006, follows the antics of Texas teen outcasts in their senior year of high school. Every cast member is in their 20s.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Sean Boswell is a 17-year-old, played by a 24-year-old who looks 34-years-old.
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High - Of the main cast of actors playing students, the youngest is Phoebe Cates at 19. The oldest is Robert Romanus at 26.
• Fatal Beauty: Zack Jaeger is a juvenile delinquent who is too young and cute to be a threat... played by 25-year-old James Le Gros.
• The Fault in Our Stars:
  • Shailene Woodley was twenty three playing Hazel at sixteen.
  • Ansel Elgort was borderline, being twenty and playing an eighteen-year-old (and amusingly is listed as nineteen at one point by Isaac).
• Fear (1996), 20-year-old Reese Witherspoon, 24-year-old Alyssa Milano, 25-year-old Mark Wahlberg, 27-year-old Todd Caldecott, 33-year-old Gary Riley.
• Feed (2017): Tom Felton, Troian Bellisario, Ben Winchell and Tiffany Boone play teenages just finishing up high school. All were older than that, with Bellisario (at around 31) the oldest and Winchell (about 22) being the youngest among them.
• Female Trouble: Mink Stole, in her late 20s, plays a 14-year-old, and it's heavily lampshaded.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off merits notation. Matthew Broderick was 23 at the time of filming, Jennifer Grey (Ferris' younger sister) was 25, but Alan Ruck (Cameron) topped them both by turning thirty a few weeks after the film was released. By glaring contrast, fellow cast member Kristy Swanson celebrated her 16th birthday shortly before the premiere.
• The Final Destination series is knee-deep in this trope. As an example, 28-year-old Kerr Smith and 29-year-old Amanda Detmer as high school sweet-hearts.
  • Somewhat averted, however, by the fact that (contrary to the popular belief that all the films center on teenagers) only the characters in the first and third film are supposed to be teenagers. The characters in the second, fourth and fifth films are actually meant to be in their twenties or older.
• Fired Up! has 23-year-old Sarah Roemer, 27-year-old Nicholas d'Agosto, 30-year-old Eric Christian Olsen, and 30-year-old Danneel Ackles playing high school cheerleaders.
• First Girl I Loved: Both Dylan Gelula and Brianna Hildebrand are older than their characters, though not by much. Anne, Gelula's character, isn't given a specific age but likely in her late teens and Gelula was 21-22 at the time. Sasha, whom Hildebrand played, is 18. At the time she was 19-20. Matéo Arias played Clifton, who is likely also supposed to be about the same age. He was 19.
• Flight of the Navigator: 20-year-old Matt Adler as 16-year-old Jeff Freeman.
• Flashback (AKA The Education of Fredrick Fitzel) - Principal photography took place in 2018. Dylan Rhodes O'Brien (born 1991), Maika Monroe (born 1993), Emory Isaac Cohen (born 1990), Keir David Peters Gilchrist (born 1992) as both their adult and teenaged version of their characters.
• The Flint Street Nativity is an extreme example, with adult actors playing primary (elementary) school children, on a set where everything is twice as big as normal. It's not really supposed to be convincing, so much as just have you accept that that's how they're doing it.
• Another really bad example comes from the rather poor film adaptation of the novel Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews, in which actors that look like adults are cast as characters who, in the book, were 14 and 12. This even breaks the plot; the male lead is large enough to simply physically overpower his abusive grandmother while the rest of his siblings simply walk out the front door of the mostly empty mansion.
• Kevin Bacon was 25 when he played teenager Ren McCormack in Footloose. Ironically, he had played 18-to-19-year-old Chip Diller in Animal House when he was in fact 19 years old.
• Tom Hanks played the title character in Forrest Gump. Hanks was 37, playing Forrest from his teens to age thirty. Robin Wright played Forrest's friend Jenny over the same time frame; Wright is ten years younger than Hanks, though their characters were the same age. At least she was the right age for her character by the end of the movie.
• In For Your Eyes Only, Lynn-Holly Johnson, 22-23 at the time of filming, played the 14-year-old Bibi Dahl. This was likely done to reduce the squick of her infatuation with Bond.
• Foxfire: 20-year-old Jenny Lewis, 21-year-old Angelina Jolie, 23-year-old Hedy Burress, 25-year-old Sarah Rosenberg, and 29-year-old Jenny Shimizu as high school students.
• The Founder: The film takes place in 1954, and Ray Kroc is said to be 52 by the end, like in real life. He's played by the 65-year-old Michael Keaton. Similarily, Joan, who was in her late-twenties at the time, is played by the 41-year-old Linda Cardellini.
• Freedom Writers - 21-year-old Jaclyn Ngan, 27-year-old April Lee Hernández, and 30-year-old Will Morales playing high school students.
• Friday the 13th — You'll be hard-pressed to find a real teen in any installment of this teen slasher series.
  • One inversion came in part 2. Marta Kober was 17 at the time of filming (even though she was supposed to be in her early to mid-twenties like the rest of the counselors), which made her sex scene/death difficult.
• From Dusk Till Dawn - 23-year-old Juliette Lewis as teenaged Kate Fuller.
• Fun Size: A high schooler (19-year-old Victoria Justice) goes with her best friend from school (baby-faced, but tired-looking, 23-year-old Jane Levy) to a Halloween party to be with a "boy" from school (26-year-old Thomas McDonell). Chelsea Handler plays the mom, 11 years older than Thomas McDonell.
• Ginger Snaps centres around the lives of two fifteen year old sisters; the older sister Ginger was played by Katharine Isabelle, who was about 19 as of the film's release, while her little sister Brigitte was played by the younger-looking actress Emily Perkins, who was actually four years older than Katharine. This is pushed further in the 2004 sequel, in which no more than a year has passed since the events of the first film. Katharine Isabelle was 23 and Emily Perkins was 27 by the film's release.
• Girlfight: Diana, who's 18, was played by Michelle Rodriguez at 21 or 22.
• Girl in Gold Boots. Buz is supposed to be college age, but the actor is clearly in his early 40s.
• In Girl, Interrupted 27-year-old Winona Ryder played the titular 19-year-old. Critics at the time mentioned that whilst Ryder did look younger than her age this was still pushing it more than a bit.
• Girls Just Want to Have Fun - The only teenaged actor in this teen movie is Shannen Doherty, who is playing 12-year-old.
• The Giver has 24-year-old Brenton Thwaites as 16-year-old Jonas.
• Glass (2019) - Kevin Crumb and Joseph Dunn are supposed to be 24, though Joseph is played by babyfaced Spencer Treat Clark, who was about 30 at the time of filming, and Kevin is played by James McAvoy, 8 years older.
• In Goodfellas, Henry Hill and Tommy DeVito are played by child actors in the opening fifteen minutes, then the film jumps forward a few years and they are replaced by 34-year-old Ray Liotta and 47-year-old Joe Pesci. The story covers a period of nearly twenty-five years, so the choice of actors makes sense (it's considerably harder for someone in their twenties to make a believable 40-year-old than in the opposite situation), but it does produce a bit of an "er, what?" moment when the narration identifies Ray Liotta as a "21-year-old kid." It's especially jarring when you realize that Pesci is meant to be in his early twenties during the famous "What do you mean I'm funny?" scene. It is worth noting that Tommy never comes within 10 years of Pesci's age. Similarly Jimmy, played by Robert De Niro who was well into his forties by that point, is first introduced as a 28-year-old. Fortunately, they whiten his hair in the later parts to age him.
• The Goonies: 26-year-old Steve Antin plays the high school bully Troy.
• In Grace Of Monaco, 45-year-old Nicole Kidman plays Grace Kelly during the early '60s. At the time Princess Grace was in her early thirties.
• The Graduate: 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman as recent college graduate Ben and 27-year-old Katharine Ross as college-aged Elaine. 36-year-old Anne Bancroft played Ben's middle-aged paramour Mrs. Robinson—also Elaine's mother—making her an example in the other direction.
• An (in)famous movie example: 33-year-old Stockard Channing (in other words, old enough to have actually attended high school in the 1950s), as 17-year-old Rizzo in Grease (not to mention most of the rest of the "teenagers" in the cast; of the central teen characters, only one was actually a teenager — then-19-year-old Dinah Manoff). Even more audaciously, Manoff is paired with Channing as her Lancer...and it works. The sequel features a full cast of 20-somethings like 24-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer.
  • Other examples include Olivia Newton-John (29) as Sandy, John Travolta (24) as Danny, Jeff Conaway (28) as Kenickie, Barry Pearl (28) as Doodie, Michael Tucci (32) as Sonny, Kelly Ward (22) as Putzie, Didi Conn (27) as Frenchie, Jamie Donnelly (31) as Jan, Dinah Manoff (22) as Marty, Eddie Deezen (21) as Eugene, Susan Buckner (25) as Patty Simcox, Lorenzo Lamas (20) as Tom Chism, Annette Charles (29) as Cha-Cha, and Dennis C. Stewart (29) as Craterface.
  • Some of the actors were barely younger than Frankie Avalon (38), an actual teen idol from the late 1950s that makes a guest appearance.
• Grimsby features Sacha Baron Cohen (44) and Mark Strong (52) playing brothers, with Cohen's character actually being the older of the two, despite clear physical evidence to the contrary. It could be argued that this is all part of the joke, however.
• A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints:
  • The actual teens - who are sixteen at the youngest were twenty (Shia LaBeouf), twenty-two (Melonie Diaz, Martin Compston), twenty-four (Eleonore Hendricks).
  • Channing Tatum is a borderline case. Antonio is never seen in school with the others and his age isn't stated, other than that he's Giuseppe's older brother. The actor was twenty-six, meaning that Antonio could just be an early twentysomething hanging around with teens.
  • Dito in the present day portions is meant to only be his mid-thirties, but Robert Downey Jr. was already in his forties (but of course did not look it). Eric Roberts was likewise in his fifties playing Antonio's older self (fifteen years have passed, so Antonio should be somewhere in his thirties or early forties).
• Hackers: 17-year-old Jesse Bradford is the only teen actor. The other leads are played by people in their early 20s, ranging from 20-year-old Angelina Jolie to 25-year-old Matthew Lillard.
• Hairspray (2007): 21-year-old Amanda Bynes as Penny, 21-year-old Brittany Snow as Amber, and 20-year-old Elijah Kelly as Seaweed.
• Hairspray (1988): 27-year-old Michael St. Gerard as Link.
• The Halloween Series, about a guy who kills high school seniors.
  • Halloween (1978):
    • 20-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis
    • 28-year-old PJ Soles
    • 29-year-old Nancy Kyes
    • For an additional scene shot for the television version in 1981, the three above actresses were 23, 31, and 32 years old respectively.
  • Halloween II (1981):
    • 23-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis
    • 21-year-old Lance Guest (assumed to be about the same age as Curtis)
    • 32-year-old Nancy Kyes
  • Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers:
    • 23-year-old Kathleen Kinmont
    • 24-year-old Sasha Jensen
    • 25-year-old Ellie Cornell
  • Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers:
    • 23-year-old Wendy Kaplan
    • 20-year-old Tamara Glynn
    • 26-year-old Ellie Cornell
  • Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers:
    • 20-year-old J.C Brandy (playing a 14 year old)
  • Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later
    • 19-year-old Josh Hartnett:
    • 19-year-old Jodi Lynn O'Keefe
    • 24-year-old Branden Williams
  • Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007):
    • 29-year-old Danielle Harris
    • 29-year-old Kristina Klebe
  • Halloween II (2009):
    • 31-year-old Danielle Harris
    • 20-year-old Scout Taylor-Compton
  • Halloween (2018):
    • 24-year-old Andi Matchiak
    • 24-year-old Dylan Arnold
    • 23-year-old Virginia Gardner
    • 26-year-old Miles Robbins
  • Halloween Kills:
    • 27-year-old Andi Matchiak
    • 27-year-old Dylan Arnold
• Happy Birthday to Me - 25-year-old Matt Craven as one of many 20-something teens (though they're technically college students, so it's not quite as bad).
• Harper Valley PTA - 14-year-old Susan Swift plays 14-year-old Dee Johnson, who is interested in a classmate named Carlyle, played by 20-year-old Brian Cook.
• Harold and Kumar in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Played straight with John Cho, who, at 30, played a character two years out of college — but averted with Kal Penn, who was a relatively age-appropriate 26. By the time the sequel came around, this trope was played straight with both actors (35 and 31 respectively, playing their characters at 24-25 since the action picks up right where the first film left off).
• Harry Potter:
  • Daniel Radcliffe's age matched that of his character in the first film (as was the case with most of the main cast), but as the books are all set 1 year apart whereas some of the films were released at longer intervals than that, the gap between them gradually widened. By Deathly Hallows Part 2 he was 21 to Harry's 17. Originally all the books from Goblet of Fire onwards were going to be Divided for Adaptation, but ultimately only the final book was, as otherwise Radcliffe would probably have been about 30 by the time they finished.
  • Moaning Myrtle (a ghost who died in her teens) was played by then-37-year-old Shirley Henderson in Chamber of Secrets (her being a ghost, her appearance thusly being quite worked-over already and somewhat obscured by the opticals involved, probably helped hide the fact). The fact that she would be appearing across at least two films and would need to not visibly age meant an older actress was probably necessary. Henderson was so convincing as a teen that many believed that Myrtle was played by Daniel Radcliffe in a wig.
  • David Tennant (then 33) was the right age to play Barty Crouch Jr. in Goblet of Fire - in the present-day sequences. However, he also plays Crouch in a flashback to Crouch's trial, which took place when the character was 19.
  • A convoluted example involves Tom Riddle, who appears as a 16-year-old in two films made seven years apart. In Chamber of Secrets, 23-year-old Christian Coulson played Riddle. By the time Half-Blood Prince rolled around, Coulson was pushing 30 and the part was recast with actual 16-year-old Frank Dillane.
  • Deathly Hallows Part 2 features an inversion, where the Distant Finale has everyone being played by the same actors as before, only with special-effects applied to try and make them look like they're in their late thirties, around 37 or so, despite only being in their early 20s.
  • This trope was done unintentionally with the actors playing James and Lily Potter. When the movies began, Lily and James were played by 34-year-old Geraldine Somerville and 43-year-old Adrian Rawlins, respectively. And the roles were never recast, leaving them both in their 40's and 50's by the time the movies ended. This is a glaring example of Dawson Casting, as Lily and James were barely in their 20's when they died. But it's unintentional because ages for James and Lily at the time of their deaths were not revealed until near the end of the book series, years after most of the movies had been produced. (It's not as bad as some, given that they only appear very briefly in any of the films.)
    • A similar issue is Alan Rickman - 54 at the time the first movie was made - as Professor Severus Snape, who's the same age as Harry's parents and therefore 32 in the first book. Even worse are the flashbacks in the eighth movie, where Rickman (then 64) plays Snape at around age twenty.
• The best example has to be Hating Alison Ashley, which centers around a year 9 (though it was grade six in the book) camping trip. The actors in the movie version were 20 and 21 at the time of its release.
• Havoc and its pseudo-sequel Normal Adolescent Behavior feature 23-year-old Anne Hathaway and 24-year-old Amber Tamblyn and their equally early 20s friends.
• Heathers mostly avoids this trope, with a notable exception being 23-year-old Lisanne Falk playing high school junior Heather McNamara. Explained in part by the fact that Falk lied about her age to casting directors and claimed to be 19. Her real age was not uncovered until filming had wrapped.
• He Got Game: All of the Lincoln High School players are visibly well into their twenties, with some of them making for the world's oldest-looking juniors. Paradoxically, the youngest-looking of them - Booger, identified as a senior - has the oldest actor: Hill Harper was THIRTY-ONE, almost exactly twice the age his character is supposed to be!
• Heaven Is for Real - According to this the real Burpos started their adventure in 2003. The real Todd Burpo was 34. The movie, starring Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo, came out 2014. Greg Kinnear was 49. The real Colton Burpo was 3 years old when the story began and is portrayed by Connor Corum, who was around 6 or 7 years old (his only birthdate information being 2007).
• In Hellgate, Ron Palillo plays one of four college students who encounter evil in a ghost town. He was 40 at the time.
• Some of the stars of High School Musical are in their twenties. Most were at a reasonable age at the start, but the time of the films moves differently then real time. Monique Coleman obviously fits at age 26, though she doesn't look it. However, by the third film, it was very clear that she wasn't 18.
• The Hills Have Eyes (2006) - 25-year-old Emilie de Ravin as teen Brenda.
• Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers - Samantha is implied to be an underaged minor who ran away from her abusive home and is lying about being older. She states her age as being 21 years old to a skeptical man who then asks to see some ID. She's played by 30-year-old Linnea Quigley.
• Hook: The 19-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow plays the 12-year-old Wendy Darling in the flashback scenes, though Paltrow also plays Wendy as an adult before becoming the elderly Wendy as played by Maggie Smith.
• Anne Marie from House of Whipcord is said to be nineteen. Penny Irving was actually thirty-two!
• Household Saints is a 1993 movie about three generations of women, but focuses mostly on the courtship of teenagers Catherine and Joseph (played by 34-year-olds Tracey Ullman and Vincent D'Onofrio). The focus then shifts to the future, when their teen daughter meets her boyfriend (played by 26-year-old and 27-year-old Lili Taylor and Michael Imperioli).
• The Howling (1981): Robert Picardo was 28 when he played the "kid" Eddie Quist.
• Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte - Bette Davis plays a teen or young adult at the beginning before the story skips ahead 40 years. Bette was in her 50s. Pains were taken to hide Bette's withered visage in shadow, or film her from behind.
• I Am Number Four: the two leads, 14 in the book, are played by a 21-year-old and a 25-year-old.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer:
  • Ryan Phillippe was the most notable of the cast; being twenty-two. This wouldn't be an issue if the film were a direct adaptation of the book, where Barry is slightly older than the others (already in his junior year of college), but he's implied to have just graduated too.
  • Sarah Michelle Gellar was borderline; twenty playing Helen at eighteen or nineteen in the prologue. But after the Time Skip of a year, their ages match.
  • Freddie Prinze Jr likewise was twenty-one. Again, after the year's Time Skip...
  • Jennifer Love Hewitt by contrast was actually younger than Julie; sixteen to Julie's eighteen (and nineteen after the year's time skip).
• I Love You, Beth Cooper was filmed the year Hayden Panettiere, as the titular high school cheerleader, turned 19. So far so good. Unfortunately Paul Rust as Denis, the "I" in the title, was almost 30. (The film has a scene where Denis can't buy beer because he doesn't look old enough, a moment which fulfils director Chris Columbus' quota of irony for the next few decades.) The end credits feature high school pictures of the main cast and the above-the-line crew; Panettiere is just about the only one of the former (and it's safe to say the latter, unless there's something 20th Century Fox isn't telling us) who looks the same as she did working on the movie!
• I Shot Andy Warhol is about Valerie Solanas, the person who shot Andy Warhol, and the movie starts off about her early life. Born in 1936, Solanas graduated from high school in 1954, graduated from the University of Maryland in 1958, and did nearly a year of graduate work at the University of Minnesota, making her 25 at the very oldest. She is played by 33-year-old Lili Taylor.
• The Identical has 40-year-old Seth Green and Blake Rayne playing the teenage versions of their characters for part of movie.
• If These Walls Could Talk — 23-year-old Hedy Burress plays a high school student.
• In Her Skin: 15-year-old Rachel is played by 27-year-old Kate Bell. Ruth Bradley, who plays her former babysitter, is four years younger than her!
• In the Heart of the Sea has a 59-year-old Brendan Gleeson playing a 44-year-old Thomas Nickerson and a 17-year-old Tom Holland playing 14-year-old Thomas Nickerson.
• In the Heights has 24-year-old Leslie Grace playing Nina, who has just finished her freshman year of college and so is probably about 19, and 31-year-old Corey Hawkins playing her boyfriend Benny, whose age isn't given but is implied to be about the same age.
• In the Name of the Father had Beatie Etney play 17-year old Carol Richardson while at least 30 herself at the time of filming (however she's later aged up as her character spends 15 years in prison).
• All the adult characters in In Time have physically aged exactly 25 years, but Amanda Seyfried was the only cast member who was actually 25 at the time of filming. Cillian Murphy was 35. The premise also allowed for some justified inversions of the trope, such as actors in their twenties or thirties playing characters with triple digit ages as well as 26 year-old Olivia Wilde playing Justin Timberlake's 50 year-old mother.
• Indiana Jones: Harrison Ford is older than the title character in every movie. While vague in the first two movies, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would reveal that Indiana was a teenager in 1912 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles gives him a canon birth year of 1899. While Ford was nearly the same age as Indy in Raiders, every subsequent film has widened the gap between them: Temple of Doom was released 3 years later but set 1 year earlier, making Ford 41 and Indy 36. By Dial of Destiny he was nearly a decade older than Indy (79 vs. 70). His appearance as Indy in his 40's in the prologue is a semi-example, as although his aspect was digitally de-aged, his voice wasn't, resulting in a bit of Vocal Dissonance.
• The 2006 version of The Initiation of Sarah, featuring 25-year-old Summer Glau as 18-year-old Lindsay.
• While The Innocents does avert this with child actors playing Miles and Flora, the governess in the novella is stated to be twenty. While she could be a little older in the film, she's still mentioned to be "young and pretty" and is on her first job. Deborah Kerr turned forty not long after filming (although she certainly looked as though she could be mid-twenties).
• In Inside Daisy Clover, the eponymous Daisy Clover is 15/16 (there's a prison threat from her producer to the actor who romances her), and Natalie Wood was 26.
• Interstellar has a minor case with child Murph - she starts at 10, Mackenzie Foy was 12 - but a much bigger with her father Cooper. Adult Murph complains in a video message to Cooper that she now has the same age as when he left, and Cooper hasn't returned. The characters being in the mid-30s is logical, but while Jessica Chastain was 36, Matthew McConaughey is 8 years older than her.
• The protagonist of In the Cut constantly insists that Mark Ruffalo's detective looks way too young to be a detective even though he was 38 at the time and looks very much like it.
• In the 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King's It, 16-year-old Seth Green, who had reached, or was close to his adult height of 5'3" at that time, played Richie Tozier, one of the tallest in a group of 12-year-old outcasts called the Loser's Club. 17-year-old Jarred Blancard played bully Henry Bowers, who is presumably a year or two older than Richie and the rest of the Loser's Club.
• I, Tonya has 27 at the time Margot Robbie narrate a flashback to when she is "15 years old" only to almost comedically jump scare the audience with... normal Margot Robbie, with no attempt to make her look younger.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie, Bernie and other teenagers are played by actors in their twenties.
• It's a Wonderful Life - 38-year-old Jimmy Stewart as a college student. 25-year-old Donna Reed as 18-year-old Mary Hatch. They are supposed to be a couple years apart in age. Though they play the same characters through the next decade and a half of their lives, so eventually Donna's significantly younger than her character and Jimmy's about the right age for his character.
• Almost every live-action adaptation of Jane Eyre. Jane is supposed to be 19 when she starts working for Mr. Rochester, yet she has been played by: 26-year-old Joan Fontaine (1943 film), 28-year-old Susannah York (1970 film), 23-year-old Sorcha Cusack (1973 miniseries), 28-year-old Zelah Clarke (1983 miniseries), 24-year-old Charlotte Gainsbourg (1996 film), and 25-year-old Ruth Wilson (2006 tv miniseries).
• In her first two movies Jessica Chastain played teenagers - the title character in a filmed version of the stage play Salome, and the title character in her first movie to be released (Jolene) who goes from 15 to 25. She was in her very, very early 30s when she made them.
• Johnny Be Good — 20-year-old Anthony Michael Hall and 24-year-old Robert Downey Jr. as high school seniors.
• The "teen" cast of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle isn't too bad, with one 17-year-old and two 19-year-olds. But Ser'Darius Blain, who plays young Fridge, was 29 at the time of filming - and, even worse, is eight months older than Karen Gillan, the youngest member of the "adult" cast.
• Justin Long made a career throughout his 20's, of playing almost exclusively characters a good 10+ years younger than he is. He can make it work though, since he has a rather youthful face. He pretty much stopped once he turned 30.
• Just One Of The Girls (1993) - 22-year-olds Corey Haim and Nicole Eggbert portray teens in this cross-dressing romance. 26-year-old Cameron Bancroft plays a high school bully.
• Ralph Macchio was in his early twenties when he first played the 17-year-old Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid. By the time The Karate Kid Part III, Macchio was still playing teen-aged Daniel despite being in his late twenties. (His boyish good looks and the fact that his voice remained in a higher register after breaking helped.)
  • He played a college freshman in My Cousin Vinny while in his early 30s and still somehow looked convincing.
• In the movie Keith done in 2008, Elisabeth Harnois played a 17 year old although she was about 29. Her co-star Jesse McCartney was only 21, also playing a 17 year old.
• Kick-Ass - All the high schoolers are played by people in their 20s. They are brought back for the sequel several years later, still as high schoolers, with the exception of Evan Peters, who was replaced by Augustus Prew, who was born in the same year. The oldest among them would be 28-year-old Clark Duke.
• Kidulthood stars Noel Clarke, who was 29 when playing the 18-year-old leading man Sam. At 32, Clarke returned to play a 24-year-old Sam in the sequel Adulthood.
• Killer Joe casts 22-year-old Juno Temple as the adolescent Dottie. However it is very justified as 1) it plays into Dottie's character as a young girl who is trying to be older than she is while also being very childlike, 2) Temple looks young for her age and 3) there is absolutely no way in hell that an actual child actress or teen actress would be allowed to film some of the scenes required in this movie.
• A Killing Secret stars 28-year-old Ari Meyers as a high school student.
• Kiss of the Damned: Riley Keough (22-23 at the time) plays Anna (17).
• The Kissing Booth: Most of teens were played by twentysomethings, the most prominent being Lee (Joel Courtney, 21). The only ones played by actual teenagers are Elle (Joey King, 17) and Noah (Jacob Elordi, 19).
• Kundo: Age Of The Rampant:
  • 36-year-old Ha Jung-woo plays Dolchi from the ages of 18-20. One scene has his sister telling children that he's only several years older than them.
  • 43-year-old Ma Dong-seok plays Tianbao from the ages of 20-22.
• La Bamba: 17-year-old Ritchie Valens (24-year-old Lou Diamond Phillips) is a normal high school student who becomes a rock 'n' roll superstar. He meets and falls in love with fellow high school student Donna Ludwig (22-year-old Danielle von Zerneck). It probably helped that the real Valens could have plausibly passed for ten years older than he really was, as shown in the photo on Valens' page on this wiki.
• Saoirse Ronan was 22 years old when she played a 17-year-old in Lady Bird.
• Land Of Bad has 33 year old Liam Hemsworth as a 27 year old soldier.
• The Langoliers, from 1995. Kimber Riddle, born 1966, as rebellious Bethany Simms. Christopher Collet, born 1968, as nerdy Albert "Ace" Kaussner.
• Jackson Rathbone age 25 plays 15-year-old Sokka (at least in the series) in The Last Airbender.
• Randy Quaid was 23 when The Last Detail was made. It is never specifically stated how old his character is, but he isn't old enough to drink.
• The Last Dragonslayer: 15-year-old Jennifer is played by the 24-year-old Ellise Chappell.
• Last Exit to Brooklyn - 21-year-old Ricki Lake as Donna, an unmarried teen mother.
• The Last Starfighter — 24-year-old Lance Guest and 25-year-old Catherine Mary Stewart as a teen couple. Their group of friends are in their mid-twenties, as well, but the only one with a real speaking part was 25-year-old Peter Nelson as Jack Blake (the obnoxious guy in the cowboy hat).
• Everyone in The Last Summer, which stars high school graduates about to enter college. The youngest actor was KJ Apa, who was 21. The oldest was Sosie Bacon, who was 27.
• The 1981 Italian zombie flick Le Notti del terrore (US title: Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror) has a disturbing example with a then 25-year-old midget (Peter Bark) playing a 10-year-old child with a serious mother fixation. He not only doesn't look like a child at all,◊ but was cast apparently so they could have a scene where the zombified child comes back to see his mother, who offers him a bare breast and is killed when he starts chewing the nipple off. Ew.
• Leather Jacket Love Story: 25-year-old Sean Tataryn as 18-year-old Kyle.
• Lemora: A Child's Tale Of The Supernatural — 13-year-old Lila Lee is played by 18-year-old Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith.
• Les Misérables (2012): Amanda Seyfried (26) and Samantha Barks (22); their characters Cosette and Eponine are supposed to be in their late teens. Same can also be said for Aaron Tveit, who is nearly 30 when Enjolras is said to be in his mid-20s at most.
• Liar Liar - 9-year-old Justin Cooper as 4-year-old Max Reede. A lesser example is the 38-year-old Jennifer Tilly as the 31-year-old Samantha Cole.
• Liberal Arts: 19 year olds Zibby and Dean are respectively played by 23 year old Elizabeth Olsen and 29 year old John Magaro.
• Life After Beth: The gravestone reveals that Beth was 21 when she died. At the time of filming, Aubrey Plaza would have been 29, if not 30.
• The Life Before Her Eyes — 19-year-old Evan Rachel Wood and 22-year-old Eva Amurri as high school students. Also of note, Uma Thurman, in her late 30s, playing a character in her early 30s.
• One of the main reasons, if not the main, for the lukewarm reception of The Lilac Sphere. While Natalia Guseva, aged eleven to twelve during the filming of Guest from the Future, perfectly fit the part of eleven-year-old Alice, this time she was fifteen years old herself and portraying Alice at ten.
• On the far end of the trope is 66 year-old Sally Field playing the twenty-years younger Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln.
• The 2012 sexually explicit mainstream German film Little Thirteen features 18-year-old Muriel Wimmer in the lead role. The title of the film is your first clue as to why this trope applies.
• Adaptations of Little Women tend to cast older actresses, who play the March sisters across several years (at the start of the story, the sisters are all between 12 and 16, and it follows them through their early to mid twenties):
  • Little Women (1933) most notably has Amy played by Joan Bennett - who was twenty-three starting off playing her at age twelve! Katharine Hepburn (26) as Jo (starts at 15), Frances Dee (23) as Meg (starts at 16), and Douglas Montgomery (24) as Laurie. Jean Parker was a little better; eighteen playing Beth at thirteen.
  • The 1949 version has June Allyson playing Jo when she was thirty-one. Janet Leigh (21) and Elizabeth Taylor (16) as Meg and Amy were less extreme examples. Margaret O'Brien by contrast was only 11 playing Beth; and they made Beth the youngest sister to accommodate her (as she wouldn't have suited playing Amy as well).
  • The 1994 film has Winona Ryder (22) as Jo, Trini Alvarado (26) as Meg, and Samantha Mathis (24) as older Amy. They did however have Kirsten Dunst (12) playing Amy in her younger years, and Claire Danes (15) as Beth.
  • The 2019 film justifies it with the Anachronic Order structure - where we can assume that the teenage characters looking like their twentysomething actresses come from Jo's memories and imagination. Still, Florence Pugh was 23 playing Amy at 13! Emma Watson likewise was nearly 30 when she played Meg.
• A particularly ironic example is Logan's Run in which the film's hook is that it's about a society where people are killed once they reach 30. Predictably, much of the cast were well into their thirties and looked it as well.
• Any adaptation of Lolita. Justified in that Vladimir Nabokov insisted that this be done for any adaptation of his book on the grounds that it would be cruel to make such a young actress even pretend to go through what Lolita went through.
• The satirical 1966 film Lord Love a Duck has high-schoolers played by 23-year-old Tuesday Weld and 38-year-old Roddy McDowall.
• The Lonely Lady: Pia Zadora and Ray Liotta, both 29 at the time, start off the film as a High School students. It's not clear how old Zadora's character is meant to be by the end of the film, though.
• In The Lost Boys 21-year-old Jason Patric played 16-year-old Michael, and 15-year-olds Corey Haim and Corey Feldman played 12-year-olds.
• A Loud House Christmas has 22-year-old Lexi DiBenedetto as 17/18-year-old Lori, 11-year-olds Aubin Bradley and Mia and Ella Allan as 8/9-year-old Lucy and 6/7-year-olds Lana and Lola, 10-year-old Lexi Janicek as 4/5-year-old Lisa, and 4-year-old Charlotte Ann Tucker as 15-month-old/2-year-old Lily, as well as 24-year-old Matt Van Smith as 17/18-year-old Bobby.
• In perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this trope, The Lovely Bones cast 22-year-old Rose McIver as the character of Lindsey Salmon, who is supposed to be a 13-year-old girl. The incongruity was made even worse by the fact that the character of Susie Salmon, who is Lindsey's 14-year-old sister, went to 15-year-old Saoirse Ronan, who actually looked like she was about the right age — so the audience was treated to a 22-year-old playing the younger sister of an obviously-younger 15-year-old. This led to widespread confusion among audience members as to which sister was supposed to be older. Justified, though, as the movie starts out with Susie being murdered and the rest is all Posthumous Narration. Most of the scenes with Lindsey in them take place a few years later, and since Lindsey was only a year younger than her sister to begin with, she's already passed Susie's terminal age. Susie continues to appear in the "in between" after her murder, so it required an actress who would stay fourteen.
• All three teenage characters in Madame Web (2024) are played by actors^*(Celeste O'Connor is non-binary) at various points in their 20s during filming, with Sydney Sweeney and Celeste O'Connor being the most extreme cases, being probably at least a decade older than their characters are supposed to be.
• The title character of the film Madeline's Madeline is seventeen years old but was played by the 20-year-old Helena Howard.
• Malavita: Dianna Agron was twenty six playing Belle, a teenager. John D'Leo, then eighteen, plays thirteen year old Warren.
• The Maltese Falcon features 38-year-old Elisha Cook Jr. as the "boy" Wilmer, who is described as "about twenty."
• Mamma Mia! averted this with 21-year-old Amanda Seyfried as 20-year-old Sophie, but most of the characters of her mother's generation were played by actors in their late 50s, though the characters could only logically be in their early to mid forties ^note Donna refers to having been kicked out by her mother when she got pregnant, which implies she was a relatively young mother; it doesn't make sense to think of this happening to her as an adult close to 40, as she would have been if she were the same age as her actress Meryl Streep. The sequel establishes that Donna got pregnant shortly after finishing college, and Tanya and Rosie are the same age. Her former boyfriends could be a bit older, but there's nothing to suggest a 10-year-plus age gap with any of them. Colin Firth at 48 was the only one who was about the right age for his character.
  • By the sequel movie, Seyfried is invoking this too; it's unavoidable since it was made ten years later but only five years passed in the story, so Seyfried's now 31 playing Sophie age 25.
• The Sci Fi Channel movie called Mammoth, featuring 25-year-old Summer Glau as the hero's daughter, who celebrates her 16th birthday at the start of the film. This was 4 years after she was in Firefly.
• Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom - 40-year-old Idris Elba portrays Nelson Mandela from age 24 onward.
• Anna Paquin was roughly 23 when she played a seventeen-year-old in Margaret. Due to the film going through a lengthy period of The Shelf of Movie Languishment, she was 29 when it was finally released in 2011.
• Margarita with a Straw: Leila is supposed to be in her late teens/early twenties when the film begins (it was never stated precisely, but she's a college student). Her actress at the time was around 29 to 30.
• Both played straight and averted in the animated movie Mars Needs Moms. When it was released in 2011, Seth Green, who did the motion capture for 9-year-old Milo, was 37. He was originally slated to voice the character as well, but the creators realized he sounded too mature for a kid, and had him dubbed over by 11-year-old Seth Dusky.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a few cases, mostly due to Older Than They Look.
  • Iron Man shows that Tony Stark was born in 1970... when his portrayer Robert Downey Jr. was already 5.
  • Ant-Man: Scott has a Vague Age that certainly places him in his mid to late-30s at best. Paul Rudd was 45 during the movie's shoot.
  • Black Panther (2018): While no specific age is ever stated (the movie appears to be going for late teens), Shuri is young enough that her competence to lead Wakanda's technological innovation is repeatedly called into question due to her age. When the movie came out, Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, was 24.
    • Not to mention that Shuri's brother T'Challa is played by 40-year old Chadwick Boseman. Unless they have a 20+ year age gap between the siblings, which seems unlikely (though not impossible), T'Challa is also quite a bit younger than the actor who plays him, which is supported by the fact that a deleted scene shows him being a child in 1992, when Boseman would have been about 16 at the time.
  • Pietro and Wanda Maximoff are described as "kids" in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Wanda specifically is stated to be high school-aged judging by a remark Hawkeye makes in Captain America: Civil War. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen were 24 and 25, respectively, when Age of Ultron was made and visibly so. This was later retconned by WandaVision, which revealed their birth year as 1989 (the same year as Elizabeth Olsen), making their real-life and in-universe ages very close.
  • The Russo Brothers were specifically looking for a “more age appropriate actor” when they cast Spider-Man for Captain America: Civil War, but Tom Holland was still 19 years old when he started playing 14 (or possibly 15) year old Peter Parker. And two later MCU characters compound the discrepancy, as Holland is the same age as Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova) and Hailee Steinfeld (Kate Bishop), but in the same year Peter Parker was graduating high school, the actresses' characters were a woman in her late twenties and a college senior. Though in the case of the latter, Kate and Peter were born around the same time, but Peter was dead for five years as a result of the Blip while Kate was not.
  • Black Widow (2021) reveal that Natasha Romanoff's assignment to be accepted onto S.H.I.E.L.D. was attempting to kill Dreykov, head of the Red Room that creates Black Widows, by luring him into a building rigged to explode using his child, Antonia, as bait. When Antonia turns out to be alive as the Taskmaster, she's played by Olga Kurylenko, who is actually older than Natasha herself, Scarlett Johansson. Granted, she is visibly scarred from that explosion, so the injuries made her look older.
  • Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Simu Liu (32) plays 24 years old Shang-Chi and Meng'er Zhang (34) plays his younger sister, 20 years old Xialing, despite being noticeably older than Liu.
  • In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, 18 year-old Cassie Lang is played by 25 year-old Kathryn Newton.
• In Mask, the then-24-year-old Eric Stoltz played the 15- to 16-year-old Rocky Dennis. Granted, with all the makeup he had to wear to deform his face, it's less noticeable. Somewhat averted with Laura Dern, who was about 18 around the time it was filmed.
• Played With in Matchstick Men. Alison Lohman plays an adolescent girl a number of years younger than her actual age, but it turns out that she's actually a lot older than she had claimed. Lohman played a teenaged girl in Flicka when she was 25.
• Despite playing teen characters, all the actors in The Maze Runner Series are in their twenties except for the twelve-year old Blake Cooper as Chuck.
• Mean Girls had 24-year-old Rachel McAdams and 21-year-old Lacey Chabert and Lizzy Caplan playing High School Juniors. Averted with Amanda Seyfried and Lindsay Lohan, both also playing 16-year-olds, were 17-year-olds respectively. Amy Poehler, who played Regina George's mother, is only seven years older than McAdams. In the sequel, the principal cast who played Jo, Mandi, Hope, Chastity, and their boyfriends… all in their 20s. The exception would be the actress who plays Abby, Jennifer Stone, was 17. However, this is still part of the trope in that they show a flashback to Jennifer Stone playing Abby in junior high when Abby was around 13 years old.
• Melody (S.W.A.L.K.) - Jack Wild plays a character of no more than 11 almost entirely believably despite being 17 at the time of filming. Wild was notoriously short and boyishly cute with a childish voice throughout his teens, and easily played as a 13-year-old in Flight of the Doves the same year.
• The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha:
  • Ziyi Zhang plays Chiyo (later renamed Sayuri) first at age fifteen, when she was twenty-five. But the film covers several years, and Sayuri is thirty-five by the end.
  • Hatsumomo has a Vague Age but is obviously in her twenties when the story starts. Gong Li was nearly forty but certainly didn't look it. In fact, when Mrs Nitta mocks Hatsumomo for getting old, she barely seems to have aged at all - even when she's closer to her actress's actual age.
  • Pumpkin is likewise close in age to Sayuri, and Yuki Kudoh was in her mid-thirties. She was only a few years younger than Gong Li. But then again, Hatsumomo exits the story around World War II, and Pumpkin reappears later, now matching their ages somewhat.
• Men in Black 3 — Agent J travels from 2012 to 1969, 43 years into the past. He wakes up and sees a young Agent K, played by Josh Brolin. Brolin is only 21 years and 5 months younger than Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the older Agent K.
  Agent J: "You got some city miles on you."
• Mermaids (1990):
  • 15-year-old Charlotte Flax is portrayed by then 19-year-old Winona Ryder. Though this was necessary due to the fact that Charlotte ends up having sex with 26-year-old Joe.
  • Rachel Flax's age is never outright stated, but she says she was 16 when she had Charlotte, which would make her around 31 years old. Cher was 44 at the time.
  • Downplayed with Michael Schoeffling as Joe Poretti. Joe is 26, Schoeffling was 30.
• In 1981, ABC broadcast a made-for-TV account of the 1980 United States men's hockey team's surprising gold medal run in the Olympic Games in Lake Placid, which like the movie, was called the Miracle on Ice. The movie starred Karl Malden as the head coach Herb Brooks despite the fact that Malden was about 69 at the time, playing a 42-year-old Brooks.
• The Miracle Worker is a stage play which tells the story of how Helen Keller (left blind and deaf following a near fatal illness in early childhood) was taught to communicate via her sense of touch. In real life, Helen was not quite 7 years old at the time the events depicted took place, but two out of the three movie versions have her played by a (then) teenaged actress.
  • Patty Duke, who played Helen in the 1962 version, was 15 years old at the time the movie was made.
  • The 1979 TV movie has another 15-year-old, Melissa Gilbert, playing Helen
  • Averted in the Disney TV movie from 2000, where Helen is played by 8-year-old Hallie Kate Eisenberg.
• Midnight Sun (2018) features 20-year-old Bella Thorne as the 17-year old protagonist Katie Price.
• Miller's Girl: Dawson Casting: Cairo and Winnie are both high school students. At the time of the film, Jenna Ortega (Cairo) was 21. Gideon Adlon (Winnie) was 27. Cairo is stated to be only 18, Winnie's isn't said but can't be too much different.
• MirrorMask — 15-year-old Helena Campbell is played by 20-year-old Stephanie Leonidas.
• Moonlight (2016) has two actors playing "Teen Chiron" and "Adult Chiron" ... though they are both in their 20s.
• The casting of Moonstruck is all over the place in terms of age. Cher was a 41-year-old playing a 37-year-old (not a stretch). Danny Aiello was 54, playing a 42-year-old. Nicolas Cage was just 23, and although the age of his character is never mentioned outright in the film, the plot (involving his romance with Cher's character) just wouldn't make much sense unless we assume he's significantly older, at least mid-30ish.
• More Dead Than Alive: According to the dialogue, hotheaded Gunfighter Wannabe Billy Valance is 18 years old. He is played by actor Paul Hampton who was 32 at time. During one fight scene, his hat is knocked off revealing his bald spot.
• The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, is very guilty of this, casting actors in their mid-to-late-twenties as the teenage main characters. The main protagonists Clary (15) and Jace (17) are being played by Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, both of whom are 23. Isabelle (16) and Simon (also 16) are being portrayed by 24-year-old actors Jemima West and Robert Sheehan, while most notoriously Alec (18) is being played by 27-year-old Kevin Zegers. That said, the producer has revealed that although they won't be specifying anyone's exact age in the movie, the characters are supposed to be somewhat older than their book counterparts. To make matters even more mind-boggling, the character of Luke (who is pushing forty, and acts as a surrogate father to the kids) is being played by the 28-year-old Aidan Turner.
• Mr. Holland's Opus — Rowena, the high school senior who tempts Mr. Holland because she's intellectually mature and looks older than her years? She looks mature for her age because she was played by 23-year-old Jean Louisa Kelly. The baby-faced 13-year-old freshman clarinet player who later becomes governor? Played by 20-year-old Alicia Witt.
• Tim Roth played a 19-year-old serial killer in a TV movie Murder in the Heartland. He was 33 when it aired. Being short and thin probably helped but couldn't fully cover the age difference.
• In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos was 39-40 at the time she filmed the movie, where her character was only 30.
• My Boyfriend's Back - 23-year-old Andrew Lowery and 25-year-old Traci Lind as teens.
• In the film adaptation of My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn was 34 years old while playing the 21-year-old Eliza Doolittle.
• My Days of Mercy: Elliot Page, who was thirty at the time of filming, plays twenty three year old Lucy.
• In My Left Foot 32-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis is playing a 17-year-old teenager.
• My Name Is Emily - Evanna Lynch (twenty-three) as Emily, and George Webster (twenty-four) as Arden. Both are high-school students.
• My Science Project from 1985. All the teens are clearly in their 20s, starring Michael Harlan, born in 1961.
• To an extent in Mystery Team. Granted, the characters are 18, so it's far less noticeable.
• In Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, 23-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a teenager.
• In the 2007 movie The Namesake, based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri, Kal Penn is Gogol/Nikhil in high school (as well as throughout his life). Kal Penn is 32, and he is only 7 years younger than the actress playing his mother (Tabu). Also, Moushumi Mazumdar is played by Zuleikha Robinson when Moushumi is in high school and in her 30s, but Robinson seems to pull it off better.
• Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) inverts this with the title character: Albert Dieudonné is 38 and plays Bonaparte in his early to mid 20s.
• Sacha Guitry's Napoléon (1955) has this and the inverse with the titular character. 33-year-old Daniel Gélin plays Bonaparte from his mid-teens to his early 30s, at which point 29-year-old Raymond Pellegrin takes over, that is, from Napoleon's 30s to his death in his 50s.
• Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023) has 48-year-old Joaquin Phoenix playing Napoleon from his mid-twenties to his early fifties, 13 years older than Vanessa Kirby, who plays Napoleon's wife Josephine (who was six years older than Napoleon in real life).
• In Napoleon Dynamite, 26-year old Jon Heder, 30-year old Efren Ramirez, and 25-year old Trevor Snarr all played high school students. Most of the other cast members were teenagers, though.
• National Lampoon's Joy of Sex (1984) 22-year-old Michelle Meyrink and 25-year-old Cameron Dye as teens.
• Neighbors, from 1981, has 20-year-old Lauren-Marie Taylor as the 16-year-old daughter of 32-year-old John Belushi.
• In Never Been Kissed. Drew Barrymore plays a 25-year-old who is pretending to be a high school student, and no one thinks she looks too old. In real life, Barrymore was 23 for the duration of filming. David Arquette, who plays her younger brother, is actually four years older than her. Averted with at least two of her fellow students — Leelee Sobieski and Jessica Alba were 15 and 17 respectively when the film was made.
• The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia: The Childlike Empress, immortal and described in the book as looking no more than 10 years of age, is played by 21-year-old Julie Cox in the 3rd movie, and Ms. Cox is credited as "The Empress".
• The New Guy — 22-year-old Eliza Dushku and 24-year-old DJ Qualls as teens.
• Night of the Comet - 25-year-old Catherine Mary Stewart as 18-year-old Reggie. 24-year-old Kelli Maroney as 16-year-old Sam.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street is hard pressed to find a single genuine teen or high-school-aged actor in the series:
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984):
    • 20-year-old Heather Langenkamp
    • 21-year-old Johnny Depp
    • 23-year-old Amanda Wyss
    • 21-year-old Nick Corri
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge:
    • 27-year-old Mark Patton
    • 19-year-old Lisa Webber
    • 20-year-old Robert Russler
    • 24-year-old Sydney Walsh
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors:
    • 24-year-old Jennifer Rubin
    • 20-year-old Bradley Gregg
    • 20-year-old Ira Haiden
    • 20-year-old Penelope Sundrow
    • 19-year-old Ken Sagoes
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master:
    • 23-year-old Lisa Wilcox
    • 20-year-old Danny Hassel
    • 19-year-old Tuesday Knight
    • 20-year-old Rodney Eastman
    • 21-year-old Ken Sagoes
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child:
    • 24-year-old Lisa Wilcox
    • 23-year-old Kelly Jo Minter
    • 21-year-old Danny Hassel
    • 26-year-old Erika Anderson
    • 29-year-old Joe Seely
  • Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare:
    • 27-year-old Lezlie Deane
  • Wes Craven's New Nightmare:
    • 24-year-old Tracy Middendorf
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010):
    • 22-year-old Kyle Gallner
    • 24-year-old Rooney Mara
    • 22-year-old Katie Cassidy
    • 21-year-old Thomas Dekker
    • 24-year-old Kellan Lutz
• Not Another Teen Movie has a mostly 20-something cast playing teens, and also lampshaded with an elderly woman as an undercover reporter pretending to be a student.
• Lucy Tyler was 22 when she filmed the movie '80s Superstars Reborn playing the role of Traci from 15 to 18.
• Nowhere (1996) by Gregg Araki — Mena Suvari and Joshua Gibran Mayweather were both teens, but the rest were between 20 and 40 years old.
• The Natural, which had in a couple of flashback scenes and the first act Robert Redford and Glenn Close play teenagers while they were in their 40's.
• Natural Born Killers - 21-year-old Juliette Lewis as teenaged Mallory Knox.
  • 26-year-old Ashley Judd as 18-year-old Grace Mulberry in a deleted scene.
• Oh, What a Night (1992) - 21-year-old Corey Haim plays a teen in this coming-of-age period piece.
• Once Bitten - Jim Carrey and his fellow high school chums were all in their mid 20s.
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - A character named "Pussycat" says that she's 18 years old, and it's heavily implied that she is younger than 18. The man that she's talking to cannot believe that she's that old. She is played by Margaret Qualley, who was 23 during production.
• The Other Sister - 26-year-old Juliette Lewis as 18-year-old Carla Tate.
• The Outfit: Notorious gangster Dutch Schultz, who died at age 33, is played by 53-year-old Lance Henriksen. Lucky Luciano, who would have been in his 30s at the time the movie takes place, is played by 48-year-old Billy Drago.
• The 1983 film version of SE Hinton's The Outsiders cast a then 31-year-old Patrick Swayze to play the protagonist's 20-year-old elder brother.
• Parenthood - 25-year-old Keanu Reeves as teenaged Tod Higgins. Grey-haired, 44-year-old Steve Martin as 35-year-old Gil Buckman.
• Sometimes the whole point of a character is that it is a child being played by an adult. Pee-wee Herman is an ambiguous man-child who is always referred to as a "boy" but is played by the obviously adult Paul Reubens. In the live Pee-wee Herman Show performed with the Groundlings, as well as Peewees Big Adventure, Pee-wee has a number of friends who are also adults playing children.
• In Peggy Sue Got Married 32-year-old Kathleen Turner plays 40-year-old Peggy Sue. So far, so good. Peggy Sue is then transported back to her senior year of high school, and Turner also plays the 18-year-old version of Peggy Sue.
• The People vs. Larry Flynt — Courtney Love portrays Althea, who is 17 years old at the beginning, and Larry just can't believe that she's a day over 18. Courtney Love was 31 and looks it.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Lightning Thief, the main trio is Age Lifted from preteens in the book to teenagers. While Logan Lerman was 18 playing 16-year-old Percy, Alexandra Daddario was 24 playing a 16-year-old Annabeth, and Brandon T. Jackson was 25 also playing a high schooler (although he at least has the excuse in that Grover is 24 in the books, but that's the satyr equivalent of a human 12-year-old). This is even more jarring considering that in their most prominent roles coming into the film, they were already playing adults: Daddario in White Collar and Jackson in Tropic Thunder. This continues into Sea of Monsters, filmed three years later with Lerman in his early 20's as well.
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower tells the story of a shy 15-year-old high school freshman being befriended by a bunch of 18-year-old seniors. Despite Logan Lerman portraying a freshman, he is 8 months older than Ezra Miller, who played a senior.
• Peter Pan (1924):
  • Peter Pan, the young boy who never grows old, was played by Betty Bronson (a seventeen-year-old actress). She was personally selected by JM Barrie himself.
  • Wendy Darling is also understood to be about twelve. Her actress Mary Brian was eighteen (and the studio lied to say she was sixteen so that audiences wouldn't think she was too old for the part).
  • Downplayed with Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily. The princess is accepted to be a teenager older than Wendy, and Anna May was nineteen.
  • Esther Ralston was an inversion, playing Mrs Darling when she was only twenty-two. Word of God states that a younger actress was cast because children see their mothers as young women.
• Phantasm II - 26-year-old James LeGros as 19-year-old Mike Pearson
• In The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Emmy Rossum was about the same age as her teenage character, but her costar Patrick Wilson was 30, though their characters were supposed to have been childhood friends and thus around the same age.
• In The Phantom Tollbooth 16-year-old Butch Patrick played 12-year-old Milo.
• Piggy (2022): Laura Galán was 35 when she played the teenaged Sara.
• Pirates of Silicon Valley — 27-year-old Noah Wyle and 31-year-old Anthony Michael Hall as teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
• In Pitch Perfect, about college a cappella groups, the characters are supposed to be college age, from 18 to 22. However, most of the cast was 25 and older. In fact, Anna Camp (Aubrey) was 30.
• Pleasantville has 22-year-old Reese Witherspoon, 23-year-old Tobey Maguire, 25-year-old Paul Walker, and others, as high school teens.
• In the 1920 silent film Pollyanna, 27-year-old Mary Pickford plays a 12-year-old girl. Pickford was famous during much of her career for playing child characters: cf. The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Through the Back Door, Little Lord Fauntleroy (in which she played a 10-year-old boy... and his mother), and Daddy-Long-Legs (in which the first half of the movie has no parallel in the book, but was invented purely so she could play the character as a child). In Sparrows, she is 34, but she plays a young teenager. Her co-stars for most of the film are children ranging from about age six to age 10, so if she were obviously much older, it would show up in contrast to the real children, but it doesn't. She was even planning to do an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland adaptation, playing Alice, when she was thirty-seven.
• In Poltergeist, Dominique Dunne was 23, playing 16-year-old Dana.
• Porky's, probably the prototypical teen sex farce, featured an entire cast over 20 playing high school students, so that it could actually show nudity.
• This trope is constantly invoked in porno films: Any actress that qualifies as flat chested is usually cast as a "teenager", even if they've looked like they've popped a couple of kids or have been traveling the strip club circuit for a bit too long. Infamous director Max Hardcore made a cottage industry of hiring short/flat chested actresses, dressing them in toddler clothes, and filming the scenes as if he were making some sort of underground child porn video.
• Portrait of Jennie: When introduced, the titular character is about 13 and played by a 29-year-old Jennifer Jones.
• The Poughkeepsie Tapes — 35-year-old Stacy Chbosky as 19-year-old Cheryl Dempsey. Cheryl is the Final Girl of the film, and her age is carefully handled in that the view of Cheryl at the beginning is shown only through the shaky, grainy, damaged footage of the killer's Jitter Cam, so she's hard to see. After a few dark, far-away shots, Cheryl/Stacy wears a mask for 8 years before we see her face again, which is probably aged from stress and malnutrition, plus that Chbosky looks sort of young for 35.
• Powder: The title character is played by Sean Patrick Flanery at age 30. However, in a sort of subversion, he's actually passable as a teenager even so. Maybe partially because he's shaved bald for the part of Powder, it makes it harder to judge age.
• None of the actors in Power Rangers (2017) were actually in high school; Becky G (Trini) was 19, RJ Cyler (Billy) and Dacre Montgomery (Jason) were 21, Naomi Scott (Kimberly) was 23, and, most egregiously, Ludi Lin (Zack) was 28, and pushing 30 by the time the movie was out. Though, it wasn't as noticeable as the show due to the way the characters were portrayed.
  • Also helped that Ludi Lin does not look like he's pushing 30. He even mentioned in an interview shortly after the film's release that when he visited his old high school to observe in an attempt to get an idea of how to portray Zack, he managed to, successfully, convince a group of kids to show him around by posing as a transfer student. It wasn't until one of his old teachers asked him why he was there that anybody noticed that he wasn't really a student.
• In Precious 16-year-old Precious Jones is played by 26-year-old Gabourey Sidibe. Not quite that obvious because of the way she was dressed and the fact that Sidibe does not look her age.
• Pride and Prejudice:
  • The BBC adaptation from 1995 included Julia Sawalha (then in her late twenties) as 15-year-old Lydia Bennet. (Fortunately, Sawalha had not only the chops but the face to pull it off.)
  • The 1940 adaptation plays this trope straight. 36-year-olds Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson played 28-year-old Mr. Darcy and 20-year-old Lizzie respectively.
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has all girls in the Brodie Set played by actresses older than their characters - the youngest being Pamela Franklin at nineteen. The book it's based on chronologically starts when they're twelve but the film makes it vaguer presumably for this reason. There is a good portion of the film that takes place when the girls are about to graduate however. According to Pamela Franklin, most of the student extras were over eighteen too.
• Priscilla: Cailee Spaeny was 24 during the filming and plays Priscilla Presley from the ages of 15 to 27; Spaeny has frequently played teenagers in the past due to her youthful appearance, with Sofia Coppola stating she felt it was important to have the same actress playing the role throughout different events in Priscilla's life.
  Coppola: The character goes from the age of 15 to 27 over the course of the film, so she had to be able to act and age across a big span of time. It was really important for me to have the same actress playing Priscilla at those different stages of her life, and I think Cailee can pull it off. She's such a strong actress, and she also looks very young.
• Howard Stern in his film Private Parts played an 18-year-old version of himself... He was 42 at the time. The incongruity is extremely obvious when we first see him walking around campus, and Stern (as a Character Narrator) comments that "for this movie you've got to suspend disbelief."
• Inverted in the 2018 film A Private War, about the late journalist Marie Colvin. She is portrayed by Rosamund Pike, who at then 39, was 5—17 years younger than Colvin was during the time period depicted in the film.
• The Prom Night franchise.
  • The original Prom Night (1980) had 20-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis (Kim), 21-year-old Anne-Marie Martin (Wendy), and 23-year-old Jeff Wincott (Drew), alongside a bunch of other 20-something actors who's exact birth dates are unknown. David Mucci as Lou was especially jarring, and Joy Thompson (who played Jude) mentioned how surreal it was to walk down a high school hallway again.
  • Hello Mary-Lou: Prom Night II had 30-year-old Lisa Schrage (Mary Lou), 21-year-old Louis Ferreira (Craig), and 29-year-old Terri Hawkes (Kelly), alongside Wendy Lyon (Vicki) and Beverly Hendry (Monica), who would've definitely had to be legal adults to film some of the content. Also, many viewers laugh at the flashbacks with the younger Billy Nordon (played by Steve Atkinson), who already had a receding hairline. Averted with 18-year-old Brock Simpson (Josh).
  • Prom Night III: The Last Kiss has 23-year-old Cynthia Preston (Sarah), 22-year-old Dylan Neal (Andrew), and 25-year-old Jeremy Ratchford (Leonard). As the writer / co-director, Ron Oliver, said, "While I love Tim [Conlon, as Alex] and David [Stratton, as Shane] and Courtney [Taylor, as Mary Lou] and all of them, and think they did very well given what I saddled them with, I think I made a huge mistake in not casting 18-year-olds versus almost-30-year-olds. It just feels off. But live and learn."
  • Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil had 22-year-old Nicole de Boer (Megan), 24-year-old J.H. Wyman (Mark), 26-year-old Joy Tanner (Laura), and 21-year-old Colin D. Simpson (Larry). Averted with 18-year-old Fab Filippo (Jonathan).
  • In Prom Night (2008), Brittany Snow (Donna), Jessica Stroup (Claire), and Collins Pennie (Ronnie) were 22, Kelly Blatz (Michael) was 20, Jana Cramer (April) was 24, Brianne Davis (Crissy) was 26, Scott Porter (Bobby) was 28, and Dana Davis (Lisa) was 29, all playing high school seniors.
• Richard Wilson was 21 when he played Mikey in The Proposition, who is implied to be about 14.
• Johnny Depp was 46 when he starred as John Dillinger in Public Enemies. The real John Dillinger was killed at the ripe old age of 31.
• Quest For The Mighty Sword: Ator is a teenager played by the 28-year-old Eric Allan Kramer.
• 20-year-old Sally Thomsett played 11-year-old Phyllis in The Railway Children, and was forbidden by contract to reveal her age during the making of the film.
• The 1956 film adaptation of the stage play The Rainmaker featured a 49-year old Katharine Hepburn playing a woman who is supposedly only in her late 20s or early 30s yet is considered undesirable because she is "plain" (often delivered with a viciousness suggesting that what the other characters really mean is ugly — even though it's Katharine Hepburn, even a middle aged Katharine Hepburn) and thus doomed to never start a family of her own (and technically Hepburn was too old to have kids safely by that point in real life). This is blatantly, almost laughably obvious in the scenes with her family, where she is clearly old enough to be the wife of the actor playing her father and clearly older than Lloyd Bridges, who played her "big brother" and just makes her performance feel bizarre rather than sympathetic as she tries to play a part she was clearly too old for.
• Rain Man: Raymond's exact age is never given, but it's stated that he was institutionalized at age 18, and since his younger brother Charlie was an infant at the time that would put him in his 40s during the events of the film. His actor, Dustin Hoffman, was in his early 50s when he starred in the film.
• Raising Cain - 31-year-old Gabrielle Carteris as Nan, a babysitter whose age is stated on the news as 18.
• All the actors playing music students in Raising the Wind seem rather old for the parts.
• The 19-year-old title character in Rambling Rose was played by 24-at-the-time Laura Dern.
• Reanimator: Both Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott were 31-year-olds playing medical school students, though it is unclear just exactly how old their characters are supposed to be.
• The original Red Dawn (1984): Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze are cast as teenage brothers. Sheen was 18 at the time, but Swayze was 31!
• Red State, filmed in 2010, is about three high school boys who travel to meet a woman and get more than they bargained for. The boys include Billy Ray (22-year-old Nicholas Braun), Travis (23-year-old Michael Angarano), and Jared (24-year-old Kyle Gallner). The woman they travel to meet, 38-year-old Sarah Cooper, is played by 50-year-old Melissa Leo.
• In Red, White & Royal Blue, 31-year-old Taylor Zakhar Perez plays Alex, who is 22 in the book but has possibly been aged up by a year or two for the movie.
• In the 1986 Girls Behind Bars parody flick Reform School Girls, Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics plays a character ostensibly a teen despite being an undisguised 36.
• La Reine Margot stars Isabelle Adjani and Daniel Auteuil, who were 39 and 44 respectively when they played a queen and king who were historically 19. Auteuil showed his age, but many had expressed surprise that Adjani was any older than her twenties.
• In Remember the Titans, most of the actors playing the 16- to 18-year-old high school football players were well into their twenties, and Wood Harris was 31, a year older than the actress who played the wife of Denzel Washington. However, Ryan Gosling as one of the players was about 19 and Kate Bosworth as the girlfriend of one of the players was 17.
• RENT has this as a side effect of using the original Broadway cast, nine years after the play first ran. Characters meant to be twentysomethings out of college are played by people in their thirties. In fact, this trope is exactly why Daphne Reuben-Vega (Mimi) and Freddie Walker (Joanne) did not return, as they felt they were too old to respectively play a 19-year-old stripper and a recent law school graduate. Their only request was to cast women of color for their roles.
• Resistance: Marcel Mangel/Marceau was 16 when World War II broke out and 22 when it ended. Jesse Eisenberg was 35-36 when playing him.
• Revenge of the Nerds has 30-year-old Robert Carradine, 31-year-old Curtis Armstrong and 27-year-old Timothy Busfield as kids just starting college.
• Rhymes for Young Ghouls: Devery Jacobs, who played 15-year old Aila, was actually 20 at least during filming.
• Riding in Cars with Boys features 26-year-old Drew Barrymore as 15-year-old Beverly. Beverly's best friend is played by 24-year-old Brittany Murphy, Beverly's boyfriend is played by 34-year-old Steve Zahn. The movie spans from when teen Beverly gives birth to a baby boy named Jason, until Jason grows up to be a teenager himself, played by 28-year-old Adam Garcia.
• George Mather was 42 when he portrayed 22-year-old college student Lewis B. Moffet in Ring of Terror. Most of the cast catches grief from Joel and the bots for looking too old for their roles.
• Riot Girls: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their early to mid twenties.
• A super egregious case in Rise Of The Footsoldier Origins; where actors no younger than 50 play real-life hoodlums who in the timeframe should be in their 20's.
• Any movie that River Phoenix made after 1989.
• In Rob B. Hood, Jackie Chan, who was 52 years old in 2006, nevertheless plays a professional burglar with family problems who ends up having to care for a baby for several days. He engages in his usual acrobatic and martial arts stunts alongside his co-star Louis Koo, who plays Chan's character's partner-in-crime, who is 16 years younger than Chan.
  • In Drunken Master II, he played the same character at the same age as the original Drunken Master despite being the same age as the man who played his father.
• In Rock 'n' Roll High School, almost all the "teen" actors are, at the youngest, in their mid twenties. (An exception was Loren Lester, who was actually of high-school age during the time of filming.) The main character, Riff, was played by 29-year-old P.J. Soles. The sequel Rock 'n' Roll High School Forever also features a teen cast of twenty somethings.
• Romeo and Juliet: The 1936 film version. Leslie Howard, at 43, played Romeo and Juliet was played by 34-year-old Norma Shearer. In the play, Romeo is described simply as "young" while Juliet is specified to be 13. Even more geriatric was John Barrymore, Sr. as Mercutio, who was fifty-four at the time, and due to his advanced alcoholism looked older than that. This was a knock on the movie at the time and has been ever since.
• Interestingly, both Romeo and Juliet (1968) and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) avert this. Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were 16 and 17 respectively; this was considered a radical innovation at the time, and much of the 1968 film's success was due to the stars' very believable youthful passion. In the 1996 film, Leonardo DiCaprio was in his 20s, and Claire Danes (playing the 13-year-old Juliet) was actually sixteen.
• Romy and Michele's High School Reunion: Mira Sorvino (29) and Lisa Kudrow (33) play their teen selves in flashback scenes, as well as their peers, such as Janeane Garofalo, who was also 33.
• The Room (2003):
  • Denny, the youngest character in the movie (who is said to be starting college, but it's never made clear), was played by Philip Haldiman, one of the oldest members of the cast.
  • Neither Johnny's age nor Tommy Wiseau's has ever been verified, but Johnny is presumably a lot younger than Wiseau, as he is believed to have been in his mid to late 40s during filming and allegedly claimed to be younger, and Juliette Danielle was 22.
• The Roommate: Minka Kelly was born in 1980 and Leighton Meester in 1986. Kelly was about 30 during filming, Meester 24, though both play college freshmen (usually starting at 19). Although if Rebecca was held back from college due to mental issues, she could be older than the age of the average freshman. That still doesn't explain Sara, though both of them can easily pass as younger.
• Rudy (1993) - The film starts off with 22-year-old Sean Astin and 26-year-old Lili Taylor as teens in a high school class.
• Used distractingly in Running With Scissors, in which the audience is expected to believe that 20-year-old Joseph Cross is Augusten Burroughs at as young an age as about 13. Evan Rachel Wood, then 19, plays a character of a similar age, and she's no more convincing. Considering that neither of them look nor act at all like middle schoolers, what age they're supposed to be is straight-up confusing — and then surprising, once Augusten is stated late in the film to be fourteen.
• Save the Last Dance: the leading male was in his 30s playing a high-school senior (somewhat convincingly.)
• Say Anything... - 23-year-old John Cusack and 22-year-old Lili Taylor as high school students going into the summer immediately after graduation.
• A minor example from School of Rock: while most of the kids were around the right age (Miranda Cosgrove was only 9), Kevin Clark, who plays Freddie Jones, was pushing 14 — as his husky, cracking voice leads the viewer to suspect.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World plays this trope straight with Knives Chau (17) and Stacie Pilgrim (19), both are played by actresses who are (or almost) 25. Making both older than Michael Cera, who is 22. ^note Scott's given age is reduced from the Graphic Novel's 23, probably to match Cera's age. Or to make his relationship with Knives less sketchy. "Young" Neil (20) is a borderline case; his actor is nearly 24. The rest of the cast largely averts this, if their ages are known.
  Knives: "He only likes her because she's really old. She's probably like 25!"
• The first film in the Scream series stars an entire cast of mid-20s actors playing 17-year-old students. Neve Campbell and Rose McGowan at 23, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy and Matthew Lillard at 26 (older than David Arquette, who plays the 25-year-old deputy Dewey), Drew Barrymore being closest to her characters age at 21 years old. Although considering the satiric nature of the film this was probably intentional. Molly Ringwald was even approached to play Sidney, and turned it down because she was twenty-seven and didn't want to play a high schooler.
  • The first sequel continues this with Elise Neal as a college student, playing a contemporary of Neve Campbell at the age of 31. Also played straight with 29-year-old Timothy Olyphant as Mickey, also a college student with Campbell's character Sidney.
  • The third sequel has a rare aversion with Emma Roberts (who though 20 by the time of its release was 19 during filming), although played straight with Hayden Panettiere (who celebrated her 21st birthday during filming — though she averts this trope elsewhere on this page) and the rest of the cast with 21-year-olds Rory Culkin, Marielle Jaffe, and Lucy Hale, as well as 20-year-olds Aimee Teegarden and Shenae Grimes.
    • That film also has an in-universe example, as Jenny McCarthy's character, an actress in the film-within-a-film 'Stab 3', complains about being '35 playing a 21-year-old'.
• Both inverted and played straight in Scrooge, where both the elder Scrooge and his young self were played by Albert Finney, then in his early 30s.
• Searching For Sonny is about a ten-year reunion, but all the actors play both their present-day selves and the flashbacks to their high school days. Masi Oka, who plays title character Sonny, was 37 at the time of filming and managed to pass for both 28 and a teenager.
• The Secret (2007): Olivia Thirlby, playing the 16 year old Sam, at the time was at least 20.
• Selma Blair was subject to this a lot.
  • Can't Hardly Wait featured many old teens, especially Blair at age 26.
  • Debutante — 26-year-old Blair plays a 17-year-old.
  • Girl (1998) — 26-year-old Blair plays bookish high school senior Darcy.
  • Cruel Intentions — All of the actors are well out of their teens, especially Blair at age 27 who is supposedly younger than the other characters and has Never Been Kissed.
  • Legally Blonde — 28-year-old Selma Blair played a first-year law student (who would probably be 22 or 23).
  • For more, see the Television section.
• Serial Killing4dummys: Lisa Loeb, aged 34 in 2002, plays a student half her age - 17.
• Serial Mom — 26-year-old Ricki Lake and 24-year-old Matthew Lillard as the teen children of a serial mom.
• Marilyn Monroe was 28 years old when she played The Girl in The Seven Year Itch, who is 22 years old. In the original play, however, The Girl is 16 years old.
• Sextette: It's painfully obvious that 85-year-old Mae West is trying to pass herself off as someone about half a century younger.
• She Fought Alone, stars 22-year-old Brian Austin Green and 21-year-old Tiffani Thiessen as high school kids.
• She's All That: 22-year-old Freddie Prinze Jr. and 25-year-old Paul Walker as high school seniors.
• She's the Man: Amanda Bynes and Robert James Hoffman III were 19 when filming; all the other high school characters are played by actors 20 and up. Channing Tatum (26) and Emily Perkins (28) are the most extreme.
• The Shining — 5-year-old Danny Torrence is played by a 6-year-old in the 1980 version, and a 10-year-old in the 1997 version.
• Also done in the similar spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, although never addressed.
• Sid & Nancy: 28-year-old Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious, who died at age 21. 30-year-old Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungen, who died at age 20.
• In Sin City Jessica Alba (who otherwise generally avoids this trope), then 23, played 19-year-old Nancy Callahan.
• In Sing, 23-year-old Jessica Steen (Earth 2) played 18-year-old high school beauty Hannah Gottschalk, whilst 25-year-old Peter Dobson played 18-year-old Dominic Zametti.
• Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit: Nuns help some wayward youths, and while most of the youths avert this trope, there's still a couple of 20-something-year-old teens played by Devin Kamin and Ron Johnson.
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants:
  • The central characters are all about to turn 16. Blake Lively was actually 16 during filming, but her friends are played by Amber Tamblyn (21), Alexis Bledel (23), and America Ferrera (20).
  • And 26-year-old Mike Vogel played the college-aged love interest of Lively's character.
  • Averted, however, with 12-year-old Jenna Boyd playing 12-year-old Bailey.
• Sixteen Candles: Three high schoolers were played by considerably older performers—Michael Schoeffling was 22 when the film was shot, Haviland Morris 23, and Gedde Watanabe 28. This film also has aversions; see the "Exceptions" folder.
• Slaughter High, a slasher movie from 1986, is about a group of high schoolers (probably seniors, supposedly 17 or 18) whose prank on a nerd goes bad. Cut to a supposed high school reunion where they get picked off one by one. The usual high school reunion is 10 years later (supposedly when they're 27 or 28). One would think that they'd find actors at the halfway point, maybe 22 years of age. Instead, they have Frank, played by 29-year-old Billy Hartman; Marty, played by 30-year-old Simon Scuddamore; and Carol, played by 37-year-old Caroline Munro... more like second high school reunion, Am I Right?
• Mostly averted in the original Sleepaway Camp, but for the rest of the series, some of the teens are pre-teens, some of the teens are teens, some are teens are 20-something, and one is undercover: Angela is pretending to be a teen camper in Teenage Wasteland, and making up various excuses for why she looks old. Some of the excuses are funny, such as mentioning the fluoride in her drinking water, and some are sad, such as when a guy says that she doesn't look like a teen, she must have had a hard life, to which she agrees.
  • A classic example would be Jill Terashita, who played biker chick Arab in the third film — she was about 25 at the time of the film, just a couple years younger than Pamela Springsteen, who played Angela in Sleepaway Camp II and III.
• The trope comes into play in Sleepers when the narrative jumps from 1967 to 1983. Nobody besides the four boys is played by a different actor and no effort was made to make the other actors appear older.
• All of the so-called 'students' in Sleepy Hollow High appear to be in their early 20s or older.
• The Slumber Party Massacre franchise features nothing but 20-somethings as high school students.
• Slums of Beverly Hills stars 18 year old Natasha Lyonne as 14 year old Vivian.
• Harold Perrineau was 32 when he played 17 year old Thomas in Smoke (1995). Oddly, he was only two years younger than Forest Whitaker who plays his father.
• Snow Day has 24-year old Emanuelle Chriqui and 27-year old David Paetkau play high school students Claire Bonner and Chuck Wheeler. However, Mark Webber, Schuyler Fisk, and J. Adam Brown were all in their teens when they made this movie.
• Snowden (2016) - As the title card states, "The following is a dramatization of actual events that occurred between 2004 and 2013." He starts off as a freshman in college. At the end, Edward Snowden is stated to be 29, making him 20 at the beginning. Filmed in 2015 when Joseph Gordon-Levitt was around 34.
• The Social Network: The film was made about seven years after the events it depicts, but rather than cast actors about seven years younger than the real people they portray to account for this, they cast actors of a similar age. For example, Jesse Eisenberg is actually a few months older than the real Mark Zuckerberg.
• Some Kind of Beautiful casts Malcolm McDowell (born in 1943) and Pierce Brosnan (born in 1953) as father and son.
• Some Kind of Wonderful features a cast of 20-somethings as high school students, most around the age of 26.
• In The Sound of Music, most of the kids were played by actors close to the right age, but 16-going-on-17 Liesl was played by Charmian Carr, then 21. She was only 13 years younger than her on-screen father Christopher Plummer (himself a case of Hollywood Old in this instance).
• In SpaceCamp, the teenage members of the Blue Team were all played by actors in their low- to mid-20s. During filming, Lea Thompson and Larry B. Scott were both 24, Tate Donovan was 23, and Kelly Preston was 22. Averted with Joaquin (Leaf) Phoenix; he was only 10, and likely younger than the character he was playing.
  • For comparison, their counselor was played by Kate Capshaw, who was only 32 at filming.^note Her character, Andie Bergstrom, was likely around that age if not slightly older, as she was a child in February 1962 when the Friendship 7 flight, her inspiration to become an astronaut, took place.
• The Specialist had 36-year-old Sharon Stone playing a character who's explicitly stated to be a "young woman" in her early-to-mid 20s.
• Spider-Man: Tobey Maguire and James Franco were about 26 and 23, respectively, playing high school seniors. Many of the other actors playing teens were of a similar age. Joe Manganiello, who plays Flash, noted that the actor playing the man in charge of the laboratory housing the radioactive spider was younger than at least one actor playing a teen. The production staff shaved the male cast members three times a day to avoid five-o'clock shadow during filming.
• The Amazing Spider-Man:
  • Andrew Garfield, who portrays the character in the 2012 reboot film, is 27 playing a high school student.
  • The movie also has 22-year-old Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, Peter's classmate and love interest.
  • 27-year-old Chris Zylka played high school student Flash Thompson.
  • The sequel has 27-year-old Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborn, who is around the same age as Peter and Gwen.
• The third Spider-Man, Tom Holland, is a lesser case, introduced in Captain America: Civil War as a 19-year-old playing a 15-year-old high school freshman. He revealed behind the scenes that he went undercover at an actual high school and was able to pass himself off as one. He has also mentioned, after completing the third film in his trilogy, Spider-Man: No Way Home, that he is ready to be done with the character: "If I'm playing Spider-Man after I'm 30, I've done something wrong."
• Stand and Deliver features a 25-year-old Lou Diamond Phillips playing a high school senior.
• The 1974 Soviet movie "Скворец и лира" ("The Starling and the Lyre"), featured Lyubov Orlova as a supposedly young character. Of course, no amount of tricks managed to get the 70+ actress to look the part, so the movie was nicknamed "Склероз и климакс" ("The Sclerosis and the Climacteric"), and mothballed at Orlova's own request.
• Star Wars:
  • Luke Skywalker was 19 in A New Hope, 22 in The Empire Strikes Back, 23 in Return of the Jedi and 53 in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Mark Hamill would have been 26, 29, 32, 64 and 66 during each film's release date. It’s especially apparent in the sequel trilogy, where the over ten year age gap leads to Luke not only having a chronic case of Younger Than They Look, but being treated and perceived more as an old man than a middle-aged man. However, Star Wars is a bit notable in that it often averts this casting choice among main characters unless they are reprising previous roles, making Mark Hamill in the original trilogy the exception more than the rule.
  • Carrie Fisher was actually 19 when playing Leia in A New Hope, making her an aversion... But in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, she was 58 and 60 respectively playing the 53-year-old Leia, which much like Luke has the effect of making Leia Younger Than They Look and being treated as much older than her canonical age would indicate.
  • Alec Guinness as Ben "Obi-Wan" Kenobi is also an example, but not as much as many believe. Obi-Wan was 57 in A New Hope, but looked to be at least in his seventies. Alec Guinness was 63. Ewan McGregor's age and aspect more closely matched that of the character when he played him in the prequel trilogy, meaning that by A New Hope he appears to have aged more than he should have in the 20 years that have passed since the previous episode, which is usually explained as being due to exposure to Tatooine's twin suns.
  • The unmasked Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Vader was 45, but was portrayed by 78-year-old Sebastian Shaw.
  • In Attack of the Clones, the ten-year-old Boba Fett is portrayed by the thirteen-year-old Daniel Logan. Logan reprised the role as teenage Boba Fett in Star Wars: The Clone Wars while he was in his twenties, though due to being animated this isn’t too noticeable there.
  • Several characters in the sequel trilogy, with the age gap gradually widening since more time elapsed during filming than passes in-universe. Rey is aged 19 to 20. Daisy Ridley was 23 when the trilogy began and 27 when it ended.
  • Supplementary material reveals that Cassian Andor is 26 at the time of his appearance in Rogue One. His actor Diego Luna was 37 at the time, but it has the effect of making Cassian look realistically hardened and weary from his lifetime of service to the Rebellion. The age difference is going to be even more pronounced in the spinoff series Andor, which takes place five years prior to Rogue One, when Cassian is 21, and began shooting when Luna was 41, twice his character's age.
• The four actors who played the supposedly high-school aged Juan Rico, Dizzy Flores, Carmen Ibanez, and Carl Jenkins in Starship Troopers were between 25 and 30 at the time.
• In the Starter for 10, James McAvoy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve and Rebecca Hall all play 19 to 21 year olds despite being in their late 20's, early 30's in real life
  • Catherine Tate plays Brian's Mom, despite being just 11 years older than Brian actor James Mcavoy.
• In Star Trek (2009), most of the cast is semi-plausibly close to the ages of recent Starfleet Academy graduates. However, John Cho is 37 years old, playing the 21-year-old Sulu. Karl Urban is also 37, though he's closer to his character's official age of 30. And Zoe Saldaña (Uhura) is 31.
• Stigmata starred 31-year-old Patricia Arquette as a 22-year-old.
• Strangeland: 23-year-old Linda Cardellini as 15-year-old Genevieve Gage.
• Stuck in Love: All of the actors playing teenagers were at least a couple years older than their characters.
• Inverted in The Suburbans, about a One-Hit Wonder group from the early 1980s aiming for a comeback in the late 1990s with the help of a young record company executive — who turns out to have been a huge (and their only remaining real) fan of the band since she was seven. The executive is played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, who was 19 at the time — and who would have been two years old at the time of their hit. Produced by J. J. Abrams, which explains a lot.
• In Summer Magic had 22 year old Deborah Walley playing 16 year old Julia; the rest of the teenage characters were played by actors closer in age.
• Discussed in Sunset Boulevard. White-Dwarf Starlet Norma Desmond, for her comeba—excuse me, return—role, plans to play the 16-year-old Salome.
• The casting of the title role in 1984's Supergirl isn't too bad by the usual standards of this trope; Helen Slater was 19 at the time, playing a high school age girl. But her roommate Lucy Lane? Actress Maureen Teefy was 29 at the time the movie was made.
• The Saturday Night Live movie Superstar (1999) had high school students who were mostly in their 20s. Leading roles go to Elaine Hendrix, 29, Will Ferrell, 32, and Molly Shannon, 35. Apparently, that was supposed to add to the humor.
• The Summer of Sangaile: Sangaile and Auste are teenagers, played by actresses in their early twenties.
• 1987's Summer School is about a gym teacher who must teach "summer school" to a motley crew of teens, including easily distracted Pam (20-year-old Courtney Thorne-Smith); "nocturnal" Larry, a male stripper (29-year-old Ken Olandt); football jock Kevin (22-year-old Patrick Labyorteaux); geeky Alan (21-year-old Richard Steven Horvitz); dyslexic Denise (21-year-old Kelly Jo Minter); beautiful Italian transfer student, Anna-Maria (23-year-old Fabiana Udenio); and two horror-film-obsessed underachievers, Dave (25-year-old Gary Riley) and Francis, a.k.a. 'Chainsaw' (25-year-old Dean Cameron).
• Susan Slept Here features both a straight example and a subversion: Debbie Reynolds, at 22, playing 17-year-old Susan, and Dick Powell as Mark Christopher, who — in response to Susan thinking 34 is "so old" — jokingly claims he's 35, but has managed to pass for 29. (Powell was notoriously baby-faced and youthful-seeming for decades, but he was 49 at the time of filming Susan and looks it, especially as it's his only color film role.)
• Played with in Suspiria (1977): For his horror classic, Dario Argento wanted to have the students of the girls' boarding school to be prepubescent to increase the emotional impact and play into the dark fairy tale theme. His producers nixed the idea because of the difficulties of hiring and working with so many child actors on such a project. Argento compensated by having all the students (played by actresses in their 20s) behave immaturely and building sets that made them look small.
• Take Me Home Tonight is about a group of characters in their early twenties but much of the cast is ten years (or more) older. Anna Faris and Dan Fogler in particular were both 34 playing fresh university graduates. The difference in appearance between them and those characters who are played by actors in their early/mid twenties is quite jarring.
• In Taken, the 25-year-old Maggie Grace's character is repeatedly stated to be 17, not old enough to leave the country without both parents' permission. Oddly enough, the character's friend is pointedly stated to be two years older than her, though the actress Katie Cassidy is three years her junior. But amazingly enough Liam Neeson, who plays the father of Maggie's character, actually IS old enough to be her father in real life (born in 1952 Neeson would have been 29 when Maggie was born).
• In the 2006 film Take the Lead, nearly all of the main high school-age characters were played by actors in their twenties. The most notable was Dante Basco, who was 30 at the time of filming.
• The 1984 comedy Teachers subverted this trope. In the film, actor Anthony Heald (who would later go on to play Dr. Frederick Chilton in Silence of the Lambs) plays a narcotics cop whose undercover at a High School. Heald was 40 at the time, but could have easily passed for 30. The subversion came from the fact that every student at the school knew he was an undercover cop, and was far older than the other students, but no one ever let on that they knew.
• Teen Wolf — 24-year-old Michael J. Fox as Scott, 27-year-old Mark Holton as Chubby, 28-year-old Mark Arnold as Mick, 28-year-old Susan Ursitti as Boof, 28-year-old Jerry Levine as Stiles.
• Teenage Caveman. Robert Vaughn was only 26 when playing the titular character, but looked older due to the brylcreem (which somehow survived the apocalypse).
• Teenage Hitchhikers from 1974 fails to have any teens at all.
• Teenagers from Outer Space had no actual teenagers in the cast. Or, as Mystery Science Theater 3000 said, "Really Old Teenagers from Outer Space."
• In Teeth, then-26-year-old Jess Weixler plays the teenaged Dawn O'Keefe.
• In The Terminator, Linda Hamilton was 28 playing 19-year-old Sarah Connor. In T2, she was 35 and the character was 29. John was a strange case. At the beginning of T2, the police computer shows John's DOB as 1985, and his age as 10 (making the setting of the movie 1995). Edward Furlong was 13 at the time. In the third film, they establish John's age as about 13 when he stopped attending school, subverting the trope but setting the second film two years later. Interestingly, perhaps noticing that Linda Hamilton was clearly not a teenager in the original film, the opening narration of T3 retcons Sarah's age saying she was 23 years old when the Terminator attacked her in the first film. (plus, Sarah's tombstone has her only 3 years younger than Hamilton)
  • Terminator Genisys follows suit by again featuring Sarah in 1984 while played by a 28 year old, Emilia Clarke.
  • Also, T2 did have to deal with the problems of casting a kid, Edward Furlong. Furlong noticeably grew and matured over the course of filming. He is shorter and much younger looking in the desert scenes, which were filmed early in the shoot.
  • In Terminator: Dark Fate, Dani Ramos is approximately 21 and played by Natalia Reyes, who was about 10 years older.
• In "Terror in the Wax Museum", Margaret is a minor, but is played by an actress in her late 20s.
• The Three Musketeers: d'Artagnan is eighteen years old at the beginning of the novel, and as such noticeably younger than his three comrades, but although d'Artagnan actually looks quite youthful, Michael York was 31.
• In Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Renée Zellweger is a 24-year-old high school senior. Her friends look older.
• Theresa & Allison: Allison was turned at seventeen and is meant to not have aged since then. Sarah Schoofs, the actress player her, was about thirty seven at the time. Although she can pass for younger, "seventeen" would be implausible (even if it's just her appearance).
• They/Them (2022): All of the teen characters were played by actors already in their twenties.
• Threads zig-zags this with the character Jane who is born during the first winter following a nuclear war. After a few scenes with Jane as a baby, there's a Time Skip to ten years after the war, at which point Jane would be 10 years old or nearly 10 years old. However, the actress who played her, Victoria O'Keefe, was 14 years old when the film was made (15 when it was first broadcast) and the age difference between the actress and the character is obvious. The same actress also played Jane as a 13-year-old, which isn't such a stretch.
• The Three Musketeers: In the novel, D'Artagnan is 18. More often than not, he's played by someone typically 10 years older or more. Logan Lerman was 19 in the 2011 version, making him the closest/most accurate in age yet.
  • The Three Musketeers (1921): Douglas Fairbanks was 38.
  • The Three Musketeers (1948): Gene Kelly was 36.
  • The Three Musketeers (1953): Georges Marchal was 33.
  • The Three Musketeers (1961): Gérard Barray was 30.
  • The Three Musketeers (1973): Michael York was 31.
  • d'Artagnan And Three Musketeers: Mikhail Boyarksy was over 30. The trope could have been exaggerated, since forty-year-old Vladimir Vysotsky also wanted that part.
  • The Three Musketeers (1993): Chris O'Donnell was 23.
  • The Musketeer: Justin Chambers was 31.
  • The Three Musketeers (2023): François Civil was 30-31.
• The actors in Three O'Clock High: Richard Tyson and Casey Siemaszko were both 26 and playing high school students.
• Michael E. Rodgers was 30 years old when he filmed his role as Junior in Thomas and the Magic Railroad, whom was written to be around 20 in the script. Although, this was unnoticable, as Michael did look younger when he played Junior.
• Audie Murphy played himself from his late teens to early twenties in To Hell And Back, made ten years later. It wasn't too bad, as he remained quite young-looking as well as short.
• To All the Boys I've Loved Before — The entire high school cast was played by actors in their 20s, with the worst being 29-year-old Janel Parrish as Margot, a high school graduate. The same also applies to Lara Jean's tween sister, Kitty, who was played by 14-year-old Anna Cathcart, which actually makes her closer to the book's Lara Jean instead of Kitty.
• The 2013 teen sex comedy The To Do List prudently uses this. Sexually curious high school valedictorian is played by 29 year old Aubrey Plaza. In fact the youngest actor playing a major role is 24 year old Alia Shawkat.
• In 1983, 21-year-old Tom Cruise played a teen in four different movies, The Outsiders, Losin' It, Risky Business, and All the Right Moves.
• Tombstone had 32-year-old Thomas Haden Church as the 19-year-old Billy Clanton.
• 19-year-old Summer Bishil played a 13-year-old in Towelhead. This is somewhat lampshaded by a line even featured in the trailer in when hearing her age a character responds "You look older." There is no way such a young actress would ever be cast in a movie with its sexual content.
• True Grit 1969 has 21-year-old Kim Darby playing 14-year-old Mattie Ross.
• Alexis Bledel was 21 years old when she played 15-year-old Winnie in Tuck Everlasting (the character had already been aged from a child to a teen in order to accommodate her.) At 29 she played a teenager in Violet & Daisy and was thirteen years older than her actually teenage co-star Saoirse Ronan.
• Turkey Hollow: Annie is meant to be a girl in her late teens, still living at home with her dad and younger brother. Genevieve Buechner, who played her, was twenty four at the time of the film being released.
• Turning Red: While Mei, Miriam, and Priya are voiced by up-and-coming teen actors, Abby's voice actress Hyein Park makes her acting debut after working as a storyboard artist at Pixar for several years.
• In the live-action adaptation of Twelve Months Liana Zhvaniya is twenty-three and playing the fourteen-year-old Queen. Natalya Popova as the Stepdaughter is also twenty-three, yet the Stepdaughter is obviously implied to be a couple of years older than the Queen.
• Parodied and played straight in 21 Jump Street. Many of the characters who are actually in high school were played by actors in their twenties, while Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum played police officers in their twenties who were going undercover as high schoolers. Tatum in particular was really pushing it—this is of course lampshaded.
• Parodied and lampshaded even harder in the sequel, 22 Jump Street, when they try to pass off as college students. Nobody believes them, and the other students assume they're just creepy older guys trying to act cool and young.
• The 1983 movie Uncommon Valor, 31-year-old Patrick Swayze plays Kevin Scott, a Force Recon Marine with no combat experience. When asked how long he was in Vietnam, he replies that he wasn't in Vietnam because he was too young, meaning below the draft age of 18 until U.S. involvement ended in 1973, when Patrick Swayze was 21.
• Underworld:
  • Selene was sired by Viktor when she was 19, and as an unaging vampire she should presumably look the same age. She's played by then 30-year old Kate Beckinsale in the first movie.
  • In the fourth movie Selene's hybrid daughter Eve was raised in a laboratory for the first 12 years of her life until they meet face to face. She's played by 18-year old actress India Eisley.
• In the film Unfaithful, while a specific age is not given, we are led to believe that Oliver Martinez' character is much younger than Diane Lane (37 at the time of filming). Her husband is shocked at how young he is when he encounters him, and later blasts his cheating wife—"you threw our life away for some f—king KID!". However, Martinez is only a year younger than Lane.
• All the named students in Vampire Academy are supposed to be 17-year-old, except the 16-year-old Mia Rinaldi. They are almost all played by actors in their twenties:
  • Rose Hathaway is played by 20-year-old Zoey Deutch.
  • Lissa Dragomir is played by 22-year-old Lucy Fry.
  • Christian Ozera is played by 24-year-old Dominic Sherwood.
  • Natalie Dashkov is played by 24-year-old Sarah Hyland.
  • Mason Ashford is played by 21-year-old Cameron Monaghan.
• Varsity Blues starring the guy from Dawson's Creek and a bunch of other people in their 20s as beloved high school jocks.
• Veronica Mars: People in their 30s play people in their 20s.
• The Short Film Victories - the British soldier Benjamin angrily saying he's eighteen. His actor Bobby Calloway was twenty-six, and in fact two years older than Andrew McNeill playing Otto.
• The Video Dead - 20-year-old Victoria Bastel and 26-year-old Roxanna Augesen as teenagers.
• Viral: Lio Tipton and Sofia Black-D'Elia among other actors were in their twenties while playing high schoolers.
• In Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, actress Yohana Cobo convincingly portrays Penélope Cruz's 14-year-old daughter, despite having been 20 years old when the movie was shot.
• Voyage of the Rock Aliens stars 30-year-old Pia Zadora as high schooler Dee Dee.
• Parodied in Walk Hard, where the 14-year-old version of Dewey Cox is played by 42-year-old John C. Reilly, and his 12-year-old child bride Edith is played by 34-year-old Kristen Wiig. The other students in the scene are a grab bag of realistic and hilariously inappropriate age. This scene was intentionally made even sillier by the fact that it is immediately preceded by 8-year-old Dewey being played by actual 8-year-old Conner Rayburn.
• In Warlock (1989), a 30-year-old Lori Singer played a 20-year-old character.
• Warlock III: The End of Innocence: Ashley Laurence was 33 playing an art major. While the character's ages aren't explicitly defined, they're all still living in dorm rooms, so probably early 20s.
• Both the 1961 and 2021 film adaptations of West Side Story had this. The characters are meant to be teenagers, while almost none of the cast members for either film were. Amusingly, Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn of the original film were actually younger than Ansel Elgort and Mike Faist, respectively, in the remake. Rachel Zegler, however, was 18 when the remake was made, and thus was the same age as María.
• Wet Hot American Summer has hilariously age inappropriate actors including Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd playing high school aged camp counselors.
  • The prequel, which was made 15 years after the movie, features the entire cast (many of whom are in their 40's) returning to play "younger" versions of themselves.
• Lampshaded in What's New Pussycat? as flashbacks depict Peter O'Toole's pivotal experiences with women in grade school, high school, and college, all with O'Toole in character (his twelve-year-old self in school uniform looking very Angus Young).
• When the Bough Breaks (1994) has 20-year-old Tara Subkoff as fourteen-year-old Jordan and Jenny.
• In 2009's Whip It, 22-year-old Elliot Page plays 17-year-old Bliss "Babe Ruthless" Cavendar. Hilariously, Page's character claimed to be 22 in order to slide into their Roller Derby league's age restrictions, which were actually accurate-to-the-time (many modern roller derby leagues have reduced the age requirement to 18, to allow Junior skaters to graduate directly into league play when they turn 18; copious alcohol consumption was much more a part of roller derby's culture before The New '10s).
• In the 1954 White Christmas, 32-year-old Vera Ellen plays Judy Haynes; Judy's age is never expressly given, but based on comments made by other characters (she is repeatedly called "kid" and "little Judy"), that she orders a malted when the others order alcohol, and that 25-year-old Rosemary Clooney plays her older sister Betty, it appears that she's supposed to be about 19.
• Wild in the Streets has 22-year-old Kevin Coughlin as 15-year-old Teen Genius Billy Cage.
• Wild Things from 1998, 25-year-old Neve Campbell and 27-year-old Denise Richards as 18-year-old high school seniors.
• The VVitch doesn't state Thomasin's age but she's presented as around fifteen or sixteen. Given that the story deals with a teenage girl's growing sexuality and requires the character to strip naked at the end, she is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who was already twenty.
• The Wiz has 33-year-old Diana Ross managed to get herself cast as Dorothy, pushing out 20-year-old Stephanie Mills (who was the stage Dorothy) in the process. Mills herself was actually 36 the last time she played Dorothy on stage, in 1993.
• 16-year-old Judy Garland was cast as the 11-year-old Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (indeed, most people who haven't read the books don't realize Dorothy isn't supposed to be a teenager). Legend has it the studio forced her to wear a tight band around her breasts to make them less noticeable during the filming, among the many other nasty things they did to her and other actors of the day. Meanwhile, Billie Burke played the beautiful Glinda at the age of almost 60. She was old enough to be the mother of Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch of the West), several years older than Frank Morgan (the Wizard) and just four years younger than Clara Blandick, who played the elderly Auntie Em.
• Women Is Losers: Lorenza Izzo, 31-32 at the time of filming, plays her character Celina as a teenager starting out, then into her early 20s while it follows her life.
• In The Film of the Book of The World According to Garp, Garp is played from age 15 and up by then-30-year-old Robin Williams, while Glenn Close (herself only 4 years older than him) played his mother.
• Wreck-It Ralph: 42-year-old Sarah Silverman as 9-year-old Vanellope.
• From the X-Men Film Series:
  • Anna Paquin was only a couple years older than Rogue when she was cast in the first movie, but in X-Men: The Last Stand, six years later, she's still playing Rogue at about the same age.
  • For the original trilogy, there's also Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Ben Foster, Daniel Cudmore, and the aforementioned Elliot Page, all in their 20s, portraying adolescent characters.
  • 23-year-old Tim Pocock as the high school student Scott Summers in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
  • Evan Peters, who was 26 years old during filming, portrays the teenaged Peter Maximoff in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
  • Eventually inverted. The first film of the prequel series, X-Men: First Class, takes place in 1962; the final one, Dark Phoenix, takes place 30 years later, but was made only 8 years afterwards. None of the characters who have been in all four prequel films (Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, Beast) look anywhere as old as they ought to by the end, with only Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) having a plausible Watsonian Hand Wave to explain it.
• In the live-action movie version of Yatterman, 13-year-old Gan Takada is portrayed by 27-year-old Shou Sakurai. The actress playing Doronjo is actually younger than Sakurai. In the anime, Doronjo is clearly much older than Gan.
• Yentl, with a 40-year-old Barbra Streisand in the title role. In the original short story by I.B. Singer, Yentl seems to be younger than 20, although Streisand made the character 28 years old in the movie. Interesting in that the plot revolves around the main character disguising herself as a young man to study in a yeshiva, which when done by a 40-year-old woman stretches the imagination a bit. Then again, so does Streisand's Brooklyn accent in a movie set in Poland around the turn of the century. (The MAD satire "Mentl" summed it up perfectly by having her disguise be seen through by a blind man!) Mandy Patinkin was 30; his character Avigdor's age is never given, but he's young enough to be eagerly awaiting his wedding night.
• The 1936 Yiddish musical Yidl Mitn Fidl (Yidl With His Fiddle) stars the Yiddish stage icon Molly Picon, who was about 37, as a teenage girl (who poses as a boy, then falls in love).
• You Again - All the actors are in their 20s or beyond, the actors only in high school flashbacks as well as the actors who play the past and present versions of their characters.
• Young & Beautiful: 22 year old Marine Vacth plays Isabelle, who's 17. This is not surprising, given the film's subject matter.
• Young & Wild: Actress Alicia Rodríguez, 20 at the time, portrayed 17 year old Daniela.
• Young Bess casts the 24-year-old Jean Simmons as the 14-year-old Elizabeth Tudor (future Queen Elizabeth I). This is most likely to portray the inappropriate flirtation between her and the 40-year-old Thomas Seymour in a more romantic light.
• Your Highness — 40-year-old Justin Theroux plays 19-year-old Leezar. 31-year-old Zooey Deschanel as Belladonna, around the same age.
• Yours, Mine, and Ours has Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda playing expectant parents, at the ages of 57 and 63 respectively.
• The World's Most Famous Extra Jesse Heiman has made a career out of this, playing teenaged and college aged characters well into his 30's and being believable at it because he doesn't look a day older than he did when he first started out! It's gotten to the point where he plays the classmates of people whose parents would've probably played HIS classmate a decade prior (for example, he played a fellow camper of Alyson Hannigan's in American Pie 2 and a fellow student of Leonardo DiCaprio's in Catch Me If You Can then played the classmate of Jeremy Sisto's Daughter in Suburgatory almost 10 years later even though Sisto is the same age as Hannigan and DiCaprio).

In-universe examples/Parodies

• In All About Eve, Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is a 40-year-old actress playing a 24-year-old character in a stage play, and she is insecure about it.
• In 21 Jump Street, two adult screwup cops go undercover pretending to be high schoolers to investigate a drug ring on campus. However, blending in proves to be extremely difficult for Greg Jenko, as everyone noticed he looked too old to be a high schooler (his actor, Channing Tatum, was in his early 30s during the film), and his sensibilities on what is "cool" is out of date. He pretends he was held back a lot to explain his apparent age.
• Gone - the twentysomething Amanda Seyfried blends in with a group of teenagers to escape the police, referencing how she continued to play teens well into her twenties.
• Jawbreaker — Darren Stein deliberately cast actors in their twenties to play teenagers as an homage to films like Grease and Carrie, where the 'teens' looked visibly too old for their roles.
• Walk Hard, which is a parody of biopics even parodies older actors playing the characters as teens with 42-year-old John C. Reilly and 34-year-old Kristen Wiig playing their characters starting at 14 and 12 respectively.
• Parodied in the first Scary Movie. The teenage characters talk about how if their story was made into a movie, they'd all be played by actors in their 20's and 30's and laugh at how glaringly obvious it is...even though every "teenager" in this movie is played by an adult. The camera particularly lingers on Shawn Wayans, who was 29 during filming (old even by this trope's standards).
• Trainspotting: Renton meets a girl called Diane in a nightclub, has a one night stand with her, and then discovers the next morning that she's actually a fifteen-year-old school girl. Danny Boyle cast the nineteen-year-old Kelly Macdonald to prop up the twist, which is also justified in-universe, since Diane is meant to be Younger Than They Look, and out of it, since the role required nudity and a sex scene.
• Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit appears to be a cute infant who causes plenty of trouble for Roger when they're filming a cartoon together. Once the cameras stop rolling, Herman is immediately revealed to be a tiny loudmouthed grown man who looks just like a baby and even smokes a cigar.

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