Dawson Casting - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Old Teenagers

The Trope Namers. Seriously, would you consider them as teens at that time!?

This is just like The O.C., except without twenty-five-year-old teenagers and thirty-five-year-old parents.
— Jack, Will and Grace

High school students in television look nothing like high school students in real life, for one good reason: they're played by actors who are upwards of 10-15 years older. This dates back to the earliest days of Hollywood, if not further, making it Older Than Television.

There are many reasons for this. One is that the vast majority of professional actors are twenty and up anyway, so if you hold an audition for a teen role, nine out of ten of the actors you see will be an inappropriate age, and they'll be the ones with good CVs. A twenty-four-year-old actor is far less likely to drop out after a year to focus on their education than a legitimate high schooler. There are a whole string of laws that apply to child actors, including (in the UK and the USA) education requirements and night shoot and work hours restrictions. Another reason is that puberty tends to be extremely fickle; a cute fourteen-year-old can transform into a gawky, gangly sixteen-year-old with rather shocking celerity.

This trope also allows said "teenagers" to perform various acts on camera that would be highly illegal if they were actually underage. (It's generally illegal in the U.S. to do anything that even simulates sex on film unless everyone involved is 18 or older.) It also allows for Fanservice, which, while legal (as long as it's non-nude), causes guilt for everybody involved. Yes, go ahead and oogle those cheerleaders, dialogue says they're 16, but the actresses are really 24.

Finally, most successful teen actors — i.e the ones with the most experience and impressive resumes — tend to be physically smaller than other actors, and look younger than their actual age, because they are the child-analogues of Dawson Casting (due to more experience, more able to remember lines etc), better-suited to playing younger children than real children would be.

This ought to be horribly distracting, but by and large television audiences have learned to manage. It can sometimes result in a paradoxical effect: teens that look more like actual teens (either with real teenage actors or in animation) are described as looking "too young" (see Reality Is Unrealistic). Conversely, actors in their early-to-mid-twenties, especially those who make their name in these kinds of shows, often have difficulty being taken seriously playing characters their own age.

This happens far most often when dealing with teenage characters in the range of 14-18 years old, especially in Dramatic shows. If younger, casting usually tries for children actors, and if older it is simply far less noticeable. If a show or movie carries a greater focus on the adults rather than the kids then they will usually avert this.

Very specific actors can pull it off, usually attributing it to being Older Than They Look. In other cases, some stories work with this because a key plot point may be the character does not actually look their age. But with no such assumption Hollywood will get by with appropriate clothing, hairstyles, makeup and mannerisms.

Named for Dawsons Creek, which was notorious for it — James Van Der Beek (20), Katie Holmes (18) and Joshua Jackson (19) playing 15-year-olds (at the time of the pilot's filming). 17-year-old Michelle Williams was the only one still high school aged.

The below ages are generally at the time the movie was released or the first episode aired; the actors are of course younger during filming. Also, examples should be a truly dramatic difference; an 18-year-old actress playing a 16-year-old isn't Dawson Casting. Simply put, twenty-year-olds do not physically look like fourteen-year-olds even if they act like it.

And because voice acting has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with vocal performance, only notable aversions should be mentioned in that regard (it would be like complaining they didn't get an actual alien to voice an alien). Likewise, this is intended primarily towards adults playing teenagers and not about simple age discrepancies.

Compare Playing Hamlet, Age Inappropriate Dress. Contrast Playing Gertrude. See also Artistic Age for an intentional drawn equivalent.