High school students in television look nothing like high school students in real life (well, not always), for one good reason: they're played by actors who are upwards of ten-to-fifteen years older. This dates back to the earliest days of Hollywood, if not further, making it Older Than Television.
Despite this trope being a prime source for ridicule, mockery, and parody, there are actually a lot of legit reasons this is done.
Labor laws and regulations are probably the biggest reason. They apply to acting just as they do any other profession. There are a whole string of laws that child actors are subject to, including; (in the UK and the USA) education requirements and night shoot and work hours restrictions. These aren't the ideal condition when trying to meet the deadlines for finishing a film or a TV season.
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.
Real child actors have more factors that make the pressure of stardom more of a burden on them. An actor in their 20's is far less likely to leave a show after one season or film series after one entry to focus on their education than a legitimate high schooler.
Puberty tends to be extremely fickle; a cute fourteen-year-old can transform into a gawky, gangly sixteen-year-old with rather shocking celerity. Or vice versa.
Obscenity and child porn laws. This 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).
Allows for Fanservice, which is legal as long as it's non-nude.
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, less likely to go completely Off the Railson some random whim, etc.), better-suited to playing younger children than real children would be. See Teens are Short.
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 the character 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, or because the actor looks younger (for example many do not realize Sissy Spacek was not actually a teen in Carrie). But with no such luck Hollywood will get by with appropriate clothing, hairstyles, makeup and mannerisms.
Named for Dawson's 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. Simply put, a twenty-year-old does not physically look like a fourteen-year-old.
Note that many works can end up on both the examples and exceptions due to either mixing casts or the aging of cast members over a series. Be sure to specify which performers fit the examples and which fit the exceptions.
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. There's a good explanation for why this may be done for voice acting, too - having actual children to voice actual child characters is sometimes complicated because kids age, have their own lives ahead of them, enter puberty (and voices change) etc. This is also part of why we have Crossdressing Voices - see below.
Compare Age Lift, Age Inappropriate Dress, Hollywood Old and Playing Hamlet. Contrast Playing Gertrude. See also Artistic Age for an intentional drawn equivalent. Cross-Dressing Voices is more-or-less the animated version of this trope, as partially explained above.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
A note before actual examples: this is the norm rather than the exception when it comes to the voice casting of anime characters, and is easier to conceal than their live action equivalents as the appearance of the Seiyuu in question rarely (if ever) factors into the equation. Particular extreme examples are as follows.
A borderline squick example is that of Miki Ito playing the bright-and-perky seventeen year oldShigure Asa in SHUFFLE!, when she was at the time already 43 years old. Though Ms. Ito can pull off the ruse in most cases, there are certain scenes you can clearly hear that she's straining to pull off the perkiness of roles like Magami A-Ko and Android 18 that was so easy 20 years ago. Not to mention how aaaaaaaawkward it must have been for both her andTomokazu Sugita, Rin's voice actor, who at 25 years old was eighteen years her junior when they had to voice love-scenes...
Most of the actresses in the English dub of Sailor Moon fit. Susan Roman was a 43 year old who was playing 14-year-old Sailor Jupiter, with an obviously older voice. Tracey Moore was 42 in the seasons she dubbed Serena/Sailor Moon, which was especially jarring when you compare Usagi's childish Japanese voice.
For context, Kotono Mitsuishi was in her mid-20's when she first voiced Usagi, which in the voice acting is actually pretty dang close to her character's age.
Another English dub example, but one who can get away with it: Wendee Lee was 52 when she provided the voice of 16 year old Konata. She has openly mused about how much longer she'll be physically able to voice teenage girls, or do VA work at all.
She voiced Haruhi Suzumiya in her mid-fifties, opposite Kyon, who in real life is 17 years her junior.
TMS has kept the original Japanese cast of Lupin III in place for nearly 40 years with only one change since 1977 (and that one due to the sudden death of Lupin's seiyuu). Although Lupin and his gang are older than your standard anime characters, their actors were already in their late 30's or 40's when they started with the series. By the time The Last Job came out in 2010, all the original cast were at least in their 70's; Zenigata's seiyuu, Goro Naya, was past 80 and had to be given a reduced part so he wouldn't have to stand in front of the microphone for very long.
All the original Lupin cast are really showing their age, but the most noticeable would have to be Fujiko. Eiko Masuyama is in her 70's and sounds like it, yet is still playing the incredibly busty Femme Fatale. She is over 20 years older than Kanichi Kurita, Lupin's replacement VA.
Noriko Ohara voiced Doraemon's kid companion Nobita till she was 70. Recently she reprised her role as Yatterman villainess Doronjo (whose age is undetermined, but looks like she's in her early 20's) in the remake, allowing for direct comparisons to her performance 30 years ago. Her voice has definitively aged.
Fanfiction
Although there's generally no actual casting involved, many fanfics involve describing the characters (both existing and new) in terms that don't fit with eleven to seventeen years old. Sometimes there actually is casting, when the author creates banners or pictures for the cast, and generally uses models or actresses in their young 20s.
A notable example would have to be The Girl Who Lived, which references pictures of well-endowed porn actresses in their late 20s as pictures of the main cast all the way back when they were 11.
Practically all Role Players cast their characters into age illogical celebrities.
The Roommate is pretty bad. Minka Kelly, born in 1980 and Leighton Meester, born in 1986, play college freshmen. Freshmen born during the setting of this film would have been born in 1992.
Actually, any film or TV series featuring Leighton Meester is prone to this.
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.
In the original 1958 version of The Blob, high-schooler Steve Andrews is played by 28-year-old Steve McQueen in his first starring role.
Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Both were born in the early 1940s, and both starred in a series of Beach Movies in the late 1960s with vague plots about how "school is out, so let's go to the beach."
Fabiano Anthony Forte often played a restless teenager with a penchant for singing.
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.
Love, Lies and Murder - A woman is murdered and two teenage girls are involved. 24-year-old Sheryl Lee plays 17-year-old Patti Bailey, and 23-year-old Moira Kelly plays 14-year-old Cinnamon Brown.
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.
The Saturday Night Live movie Superstar 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.
Female Trouble - Mink Stole, in her late 20s, plays a 14-year-old, and it's heavily lamp shaded.
In Dirty Dancing Frances is 17 years old; Jennifer Grey, who played her, was 27 but looked suitably young. Johnny is 25 years old, and played by 35 yr old Patrick Swayze, who unfortunately looked his age, making it look a bit squicky.
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 narrator) comments that "for this movie you've got to suspend disbelief."
Ralph Macchio was in his early twenties when he first played the 15-year old Daniel La Russo in The Karate Kid. By the time the third movie came out, 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.)
An (in)famous movie example: 33-year-old Stockard Channing 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).
No wonder MAD Magazine made the joke in its parody that Rizzo promised her dad to finish high school before she's thirty.
The stage version justified this by using the framing device of a high school reunion.
This was apparently a nod to Broadway musicals, where lead actors would often play characters much younger than themselves, since they had more experience than young performers.
Some film-goers, unfamiliar with the Broadway show, confused by the casting, and misled by the odd fantasy ending, midunderstood the film to be some kind of "What I wish I'd done/could go back in time to redo" film along the lines of Peggy Sue Got Married, and thought the film was about a 30-something Danny or Sandy going back to redo the past.
In Rock 'n' Roll High School, all the "teen" actors are, at the youngest, in their mid twenties. 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.
In the 1954 film 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.
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.
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).
The movie version of The Wiz takes this Up to Eleven: Thirty-three-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.
Ellen Page is 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 18 to 22 respectively at the time of their production. Ditto for her roles in An American Crime (where she played 16-year-old Sylvia Likens) and X3 (where she played the teenage Kitty Pryde).
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.
Cry_Wolf features Lindy Booth (in her mid-20s at time) as an 18-year-old.
Some people believe that Shakespeare intended Romeo in Romeo and Juliet to be much older than his 13-year-old wife, claiming the character's age was changed to avoid charges of pedophilia or ephebephilia. Most conventional readers of the play strongly disagree, and while Shakespeare is unavailable for comment, the text repeatedly refers to Romeo as a "youth." In any event most modern interpretations of the play cast Romeo with an actor in his late teens or early 20s; however, Leslie Howard, at 43, played the role in a 1936 version (then again, in that same production, Juliet was played by 34-year-old Norma Shearer).
Even more geriatric was John Barrymore, Sr. as Mercutio, who was fifty-four at the time.
In the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were both 17 during the filming. This was considered a radical innovation at the time, and much of the film's success was due the stars' very believable youthful passion. (It's still an outstanding version!)
For added charm, Olivia Hussey wasn't allowed to go to the screening of the film since she was too young to go there. The reason? A pair of breasts make a brief appearance. They were her own.
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.
In the 1974 Werner Herzog film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (also known as 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. 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.
Harry Potter: Moaning Myrtle (a ghost who died in her teens) was played by then-37-year-oldShirley 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 core cast catches a great swath of jokes for being, at last count, three years older than the characters they are playing (they started at about the right age, give or take six months, but it wasn't possible to produce one Hogwarts movie per year, so by the release of film 6, the actors are already grown up and playing adult roles elsewhere). A quick glance at the rest of the list will show that the people who write these jokes really need to sort out their priorities.
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 despite only being in their early 20s. Actually no makeup was added, they are in fact that old. Every other time they were using makeup.
Michael J. Fox played the teen-aged Marty McFly of the Back to the Future films into his late twenties, having done the first film when he was twenty-three. The actors playing Marty's parents and Biff, appearing as teenagers in the 1955 scenes, had similar ages.
Throughout the early 1980s, just about every character Michael J. Fox played was considerably younger than him. Brantley Foster from The Secret of My Success was the first character that was relatively close in age to Michael J. Fox.
In Back to the Future 3 Michael J. Fox is 28-29 years, while Marty is still 17! Sometimes this difference looks ugly.
Michael J. Fox's (lack of) height — and the fact that he hadn't changed significantly in appearance since he was 14 — probably helped make him look younger.
Michael J. Fox still looks surprisingly young for his age, even with Parkinson's Disease. Compare him to Julianna Margulies, with whom he appeared in several episodes of The Good Wife. He is five years older than she is.
Parodied in Scary Movie. In a "If this were a movie" conversation, one character says "We'd be played by actors in their late 20s/early 30s". The characters then pause for a moment, letting the phrase sink in.
Jake Gyllenhaal was 23 when he was cast as a teenager in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow.
Most of the actors in The Breakfast Club were out of high school, with only 2 actually being under 18.
Graham Phillips (age 14) plays the titular Ben10 in the Made-for-TV MovieBen 10: Race Against Time. His also-ten-year-old cousin Gwen was played by Haley Ramm, age 15.
At least that one worked. In the sequel, 15-year-old Ben is portrayed by a 23-year-old.
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.
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.
25-year-old Paul Rudd also worked pretty well as a college student character.
Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Metakes 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, and Laura Dern had trouble passing as a teen when she was one, for instance when she was 19 in Blue Velvet.
In Dune: 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.
The eponymous character was a high school senior and portrayed by a 26-year-old Sissy Spacek, the same as P.J. Soles, who played Norma Watson. As well as the other teenagers, who were, oddly enough, only a few years younger than the actor playing Miss Collins.
Angela Bettis was 29 when she portrayed Carrie in the remake.
Four years later, Spacek played Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter — starting at the age of 14.
Parodied in Walk Hard, where the fourteen-year-old version of Dewey Cox is played by 42-year-old John C. Reilly, and his twelve-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 Rian Johnson's 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.
In Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, 23-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a teenager.
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 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.
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.
The 1996 film version of The Birdcage features Ally McBeal star 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.
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).
Parminder Nagra was 26 when she played 18-year-old Jess in Bend It Like Beckham.
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.
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: 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 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, and Little Lord Fauntleroy (in which she played a ten-year-old boy).
Famous for pulling it off, too. 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.
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.
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. Mandy Patinkin was 30; his character Avigdor's age is never given, but he's young enough to be eagerly awaiting his wedding night.
In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury plays the mother of Laurence Harvey's character, despite being only two years older than Harvey; both actors were in their mid-30s when the film was made.
The satirical 1966 film Lord Love a Duck has high-schoolers played by 23-year-old Tuesday Weld and 38-year-old Roddy McDowall.
In the first Spider-Man film, Tobey Maguire and James Franco were about 26 and 23, respectively, playing high school seniors.
Andrew Garfield, who will portray the character in the 2012 reboot film, is 27 playing what will be a high school student.
The film Willow inverts the trope by featuring then-17-year-old Warwick Davis as a father of two who must be in his 30s at least.
Richard Wilson was 21 when he played Mikey in The Proposition, who is implied to be about 14.
Matthew Broderick gets mentioned further down in Theater, but Ferris Bueller's Day Off merits notation. Matthew Broderick was 24 at the time, Jennifer Grey (Ferris' younger sister) was 26, but Alan Ruck (Cameron) topped them both by turning thirty a few weeks after the film was released.
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.
The Graduate paired 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman as a recent college graduate, and 36-year-old Anne Bancroft as the middle-aged wife of his father's business partner. Not to mention 27-yr-old Katharine Ross as her daughter Elaine.
Played With in Matchstick Men, an older actress playing a young girl...OR IS SHE!?
Alison Lohman also played a teenager girl in Flicka when she was 25.
Malcolm McDowell was 27 when he played Alex in A Clockwork Orange. In the original novel, Alex is 15 years old, while in the film his age is never given, but he still attends school.
Most of the high school freshman class in Freedom Writers were played by actors ridiculously too old to be playing fourteen-year-olds. The most prominently featured student was played by April L. Hernandez, who was fourteen in the time period the film is set. This makes her just six years younger than Hilary Swank, who played the teacher.
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.
Played with in Suspiria: 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.
The Girl in Gold Boots. Buz is supposed to be college age, but the actor is clearly in his early 40's.
Teenage Caveman. Robert Vaughn was only 26 when playing the titular character, but looked older due to the brylcreem (which somehow survived the apocalypse).
Many of the actors in Kids, including Chloe Sevigny, were 18 and older (but really did look and act like young teens).
The 1983 film version of SE Hinton's The Outsiders cast a then 31-year-old Patrick Swayze to play the protagonist's 18-year-old elder brother.
In The Aviator, 35-year-old Gwen Stefani plays Jean Harlow, who was 19 at the time the film shows her. She never even lived to be 35.
Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused sometimes plays it straight: Christine Harnos and Sasha Jenson portrayed incoming high school seniors despite being older than age-appropriate Matthew McConaughey, who played a twenty-something graduate.
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." Somewhat justifiable in that there is no way such a young actress would ever be cast in a movie with its sexual content.
The Goonies: 26-year-old Steve Antin plays the high school bully Troy.
Danielle Harris was 29 when she portrayed the 17-year-old Annie Brackett in Rob Zombie's Halloween, the same as Nancy Kyes, who portrayed Annie in the original 1978 version. Kristina Klebe, who played Linda in the remake, was also 29. PJ Soles was also in her late 20s and had a habit of playing pig-tailed teens back in the 1970s. Jamie Lee Curtis was 20 playing a teen in the first Halloween, and 23 playing the same teen on the same night in Halloween II. Bob, the guy who gets pinned to the wall with a butcher knife in the first movie was 33.
In Halloween 4, Rachel was played by 25 year old Ellie Cornell, her boyfriend Brady was played by 24-year old Sasha Jensen, and Brady's mistress Kelly was played by 23-year-old Kathleen Kinmont. In Halloween 5, Rachel's friend Tina is played by 23-year-old Wendy Kaplan, and the average age of Tina's other friends is 25.
14-year-old Jamie Lloyd is played by 20-year-old J.C Brandy in part 6.
The first sequel is worse, especially the bald teen at the beginning. There's also an O.C type situation with Vicki and her mom. They couldn't be more than 10 years apart in age with Vicki in her late 20s and the mom in her early 30s, only one's dressed like a prudish librarian school marm cliche, and one has really awesome clothes and really radical crimped hair. The other two sequels feature teens that are around the age of 25.
The Remake features teens that range from 21 (Brittany Snow) and 22 (Jessica Stroup) to 29 (Scott Porter) and 30 (Dana Davis)
The four actors who played the supposedly high-school aged Juan Rico, Dizzy Flores, Carmen Ibanez, and Carl Jenkins in the Starship Troopers film were between 25 and 30 at the time.
In the 2009 Star Trek, 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 Saldana (Uhura) is 31.
However, the Starfleet Academy isn't a proper school, and people can presumably enter it at any age.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture tried to pretend that only two years had passed since the original series rather than the ten years which actually had. Somewhat to William Shatner's chagrin, Star Trek II reversed this, portraying the characters having aged along with their actors and referring to the events of the "Space Seed" episode as having happened fifteen years ago, the same number of years which had elapsed in real life.
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).
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.
The first film in the Scream series stars an entire cast of mid-20's 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 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.
The first sequel continues this with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elise Neal as college students, playing contemporaries of Neve Campbell at the ages of 30 and 31 respectively. 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 averts this trope elsewhere on this page) and the rest of the cast.
Disco Pigs brought us Cillian Murphy, then 24, playing a sixteen-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.)
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.
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.
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 Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee has a number of friends who are also adults playing children.
In Clifford, the 43-year-old Martin Short plays the 10-year-old Clifford. Forced perspective, body doubles, and oversized props serve to make the character look child-sized.
Earlier on SCTV, Short played a TV child star whose show ran on for decades, necessitating oversized props and playing against huge football players.
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!"
In Sin City 24 year old Jessica Alba (who otherwise generally avoids this trope) played 19 year old Nancy Callahan.
In the film adaptation of My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn was 34-years-old while playing the 21-year-old Eliza Doolittle.
In For Your Eyes Only, 22-year-old Lynn-Holly Johnson played the 14-year-old Bibi Dahl, though this was likely done to reduce the squick of her infatuation with Bond.
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).
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.
Bad Day at Black Rock is one of the most egregious examples ever: 55-year-old Spencer Tracy played John J. Macreedy, a World War Two veteran in a movie set in 1945, when Macreedy would in all likelihood have been no older than his mid-twenties, and certainly no older than his mid-thirties.
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.
Basketball Diaries - 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as a teen junkie runaway.
Total Eclipse - 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as a teen poet.
Romeo + Juliet - 22-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as a teen Romeo (in all fairness, Romeo's age is never specified in the original play and DiCaprio did look younger than his actual age).
Marvin's Room - 22-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as a teen arsonist.
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 Titanic, Kate Winslet was 21 and playing a 17-year-old.
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.
The 2010 Tim Burton production 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.
Funnily enough, the animated Disney version used a child voice actress (12-year-old Kathryn Beaumont) even though animation provides the perfect excuse for using an adult. Beaumont was also the physical model for the character, so Alice ended up being drawn looking like she was about eleven or twelve rather than seven. Played straight decades later when Beaumont, in her sixties by this time, voiced Alice in Kingdom Hearts.
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.
Jackson Rathbone age 25 plays 15-year-old Sokka (at least in the series) in The Last Airbender
In the 1996 film The Craft, coven member 16-year-old Rochelle was played by 30-year-old Rachel True. 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.
Justin Long has made a career 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.
In perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this trope, the film 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 lead to widespread confusion among audience members as to which sister was supposed to be older.
The Carry On Film 'Carry On Camping' featured a school girl played by the 32 year old Barbara Windsor.
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's character is supposed to be 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.
In Goodfellas, Henry and Tommy 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 thirty years, so the choice of actors makes sense (it's considerably harder for someone in their twenties to make a believable forty-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." Similarly Jimmy, played by Robert De Niro who was well into his forties by that point, is first introduced as a 28 year old.
In Lord of the Rings, Eowyn is played by the 30-year old Miranda Otto. While Eowyn is 23 in the book, she is physically closer to 18, given the longevity of her bloodline. Also, Billy Boyd, at the time in his early thirties, played twenty-nine-year-old Pippin Took. This would not be an example of Dawson Casting, except that in bookverse, hobbits age more slowly than humans and aren't counted as adults until they're thirty-three, and a twenty-nine-year-old hobbit is therefore the equivalent of a sixteen-to-nineteen-year-old human. The hobbits all end up looking like children next to the human characters anyway, though.
Eowyn's (and Eomer's) bloodline is only slightly longer-lived than average: their grandmother was from Gondor, but the rest of their ancestors were regular Rohirrim with standard human lifespans (70-80 years if especially healthy and lucky). We aren't told about Eowyn, but her brother lived to be 93 and died in bed.
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.
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".
Scott Pilgrim 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. *
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.
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.
In Cherrybomb, 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.
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.
Most of the other teen actors are in their mid to late twenties as well. However, Sarah Jessica Parker, who was 19 at the time is more believable as a high school senior than the others.
The remake looks set to play this trope straight. The "teens" are all comfortably in their twenties, with Ren being played by a 26 year old.
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.
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.
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.
Harry Earles made a career out of playing short people or children.
Gary Coleman often played way younger after playing Arnold Jackson.
Bring It on - Some of the actors are in their 20s, most notably Gabrielle Union (age 28) during the first one, and Christina Milian (age 28) 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 Sleepaway Camp 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 part 3, 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.
The People vs. Larry Flynt - Courtney Love portrays Althea. Althea 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.
Nowhere (1996) by Gregg Araki - Mena Suvari and Joshua Gibran Mayweather were both teens, but the rest were between 20 and 40 years old.
Friday the 13th - You'll be hard-pressed to find a real teen in any installment of this teen slasher series.
The 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility had a lot of this going on, with the most glaring being then-35-year-old Emma Thompson playing 19-year-old Elinor Dashwood.
In Girl Interrupted 28-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.
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.
Can't Hardly Wait featured many old teens, especially Selma Blair at age 26.
Debutante - 26-year-old Selma Blair plays a 17-year-old.
Girl (1998) - 26-year-old Selma Blair plays bookish high school senior Darcy.
Cruel Intentions - All of the actors are well out of their teens, especially Selma Blair at age 27 who is supposedly younger than the other characters and has Never Been Kissed.
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.
In Remember The Titans, most of the actors playing the 16-18 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.
Natural Born Killers - 21-year-old Juliette Lewis plays Mallory Knox from ages 15 to 19 (according to the novelization)
The Other Sister - 26-year-old Juliette Lewis as 18-year-old Carla Tate.
16-year-old Nancy Thompson (played by 20-year-old Heather Langekamp) fights Freddy, goes without sleep, and has to deal with the death of her teen friends who are also played by people in their 20s. The stress shows on her face, and she looks in the mirror and proclaims, "God, I look 20 years old."
There are three actors under the age of 20 in any of the sequels. The actors are usually between 21 and 24. The most egregious example would be Lezlie Deane, playing Tracy in Freddy's Dead at age 27. The youngest teen in the remake was 23.
Child's Play:
Christine Elise was 25 in Child's Play 2.
Katherine Heigl's friends in Bride of Chucky, in their late 20s.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 4, Renée Zellweger is a 24-year-old high school senior. Her friends look older.
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.
Varsity Blues starring the guy from Dawson's Creek and a bunch of other people in their 20s as beloved high school jocks.
Devil in the Flesh - 25-year-old Rose McGowan plays a teenaged murderess.
Dean Koontz's Phantoms - 25-year-old Rose McGowan plays a character that was 14 in the book.
Jawbreaker - Some high school girls accidentally kill another high school girl during a high school prank. Starring 24-year-old Judy Greer, 26-year-old Rose McGowan, 27-year-old Julie Benz, 28-year-old Rebecca Gayheart.
The Charlie's Angels movie 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.
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 sweet heart.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 23-year-old Kristy Swanson as Buffy, and 27-year-old Luke Perry as her high school boyfriend.
While 17-year-old Hilary Duff playing a high school senior, this was played straight with Chad Michael Murray, who was 22 and playing a high school senior.
In Another Cinderella Story, Selena Gomez was 15 at the time of filming and was therefore younger than her high school junior character. Played straight with 25 year old Drew Seeley playing a high school senior. Drew does kinda look his age while Selena looks somewhat younger than her age, so it's got some squicky vibes when their characters become the Official Couple.
Played very straight A Cinderella Story: Once Upon A Song, with 21-year-old (at the time of filming) Lucy Hale playing the 17-year-old heroine.
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.) Bledel is now 29 and set to play a teenager in Violet & Daisy - she is thirteen years older than her actually teenage co-star Saoirse Ronan.
For The Hunger Games, based on the book series by Suzanne Collins, every young woman in Hollywood seems to have tried out for the lead heroine: a Bad AssAction Girl named Katniss Everdeen. Winter's Bone blonde beauty and new indie darling Jennifer Lawrence has got it. That makes her a 20-year old playing a 16-year old.
In Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (no, not that Mask. Dear God, don't mistake these two), the then-24 year old Eric Stoltz played the 15-16 year old Rocky Dennis. Granted, with all the makeup he had to wear to deform his face, it's less noticable. Somewhat averted with Laura Dern, who was about 18 around the time it was filmed.
Ginger Snaps centres around the lives of two teenage sisters; the older sister was played by an actress pretty much dead on the right age (17 or so), while her little sister was played by a young-looking actress, four years older than her screen sibling.
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 30's.
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.
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.
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, the "I" in the title, was almost 30...
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!
To an extent in Mystery Team. Granted, the characters are 18, so it's far less noticeable.
"The Conspirator" features 42-year-old Norman Reedus playing Lewis Payne who was 21 at the time of his death.
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.
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.
Don't forget the film for Disco Pigs, where Cillian played a 16-year-old when he was 24 at the time. 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.
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.
In Rob B Hood, Jackie Chan, who was 52 years old in 2006, nevertheless plays a professional burgler 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.
Breaking Away: The four lead characters are supposed to be 19. Jackie Earle Haley was 17 at the time, then there was Dennis Quaid (25), Dennis Christopher (24), and Daniel Stern (22).
Caroline Munro played a high school student in the 1986 slasher flick Slaughter High. Munro was born in 1949. You do the math.
In Warlock, a 30-year-old Lori Singer played a 20-year-old character.
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.
Anna Paquin was roughly 23 when she played a seventeen year old in Margaret. Due to the film going through a lengthy period of post-production Development Hell, she was 29 when it was finally released in 2011.
Live-Action TV
Arthur Fonzarelli in Happy Days was supposed, in the early episodes at least, to be seventeen years old. The Fonz was played by Henry Winkler, who was twenty-nine when the show started, and thirty-nine when it ended. His age seemed all the more obvious when he was seen romancing an actress clearly in her teens or twenties.
Back to the trope namer, Dawson's Creek: Much worse than Dawson's leads were the actors introduced later on: Kerr Smith (26) and Meredith Monroe (29) playing siblings (and high school sophomores) Jack and Andie McPhee starting in Season 2. Worse considering that Andie was likely the younger sibling.
On the behind-the-scenes parts of the Series Finale movie, James Van Der Beek was amused that it was the first time he and Dawson were the same age (because there was a five-year time skip from the last episode to the movie).
The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Nicholas Brendon as Xander (25), Alyson Hannigan as Willow (22) and Charisma Carpenter (26, making Carpenter the same age as her teacher played by Robia LaMorte. Possibly Lampshaded when Wesley first meets her and mistakes her for a teacher.). On the show's spinoff, Angel, the role of Angel's sixteen-year-old son Connor was portrayed by then-22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser.
The most jarring example from the series might have been when 27 year old Elizabeth Anne Allen played a 16 year old cheerleader (then again Allen is actually several months younger than Carpenter).
Also Oz and Jonathan, played by 23-year olds Seth Green and Danny Strong. Also appearing was 26-year old Jason Hall as 18-year old Devon. Though the show did feature 18-year-old Mercedes McNab as a teenaged Harmony later in its run.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was 19 when she began playing a 16-year-old Buffy, was the only one of the leads who was actually (just about) a teenager at the time of her casting.
James Marsters as Spike played the role in Buffy from 1997 (when he was 35), reprising the role in Angel up until 2003 (When he was 42) playing a character who was implied to be of similar physical age to characters like Buffy. Somewhat averted due to his being a vampire and hundreds of years old.
Averted however with Dawn, played by an actress of the correct age (who eventually ended up taller than Sarah Michelle Gellar).
Though she was originally intended to be a preteen, which is very clear in the first few episodes she appears in, before the scripts were written with Michelle Trachtenberg in mind.
Beverly Hills 90210 is well-known for this sort of thing, but believe it or not, quite a few of the cast members were actual teenagers. Of course, some of the core cast of high school juniors (ages 15-16) were well into their twenties: Luke Perry (25), Ian Ziering (26), and, most famously, Gabrielle Carteris, who was 29. Series star Jason Priestley was comparatively young at 21. Still, these examples alone are so egregious, coupled with the fact that 90210 predates the Trope Namer by several years, that it is also called "90210 Syndrome".
This trope is played ridiculously straight on the reboot 90210. The youngest cast members were 19 when the series started, and the rest range from their early twenties to Trevor Donovon who was 30 when he began his stint. Honorable mentions are Michael Steger (28 at the beginning) and Matt Lanter (25 at the beginning). What's even crazier is that those three "teens" are all older than actor Ryan Eggold who plays the English lit. teacher!
23-year-old Lauren Ambrose plays highschool-aged Claire from Six Feet Under.
Senta Moses is an actress who is very short and has very curly hair... which contributed to her playing a 17-year-old at age 27 on the show Bull. She wasn't alone on this part, however: Her 16-year-old brother was played by 25-year-old Fred Koehler.
Similarly, she played a 16-year-old computer genius in an episode of Vengeance Unlimited two years earlier (at 25).
And in 2009, at 35, she's playing an apparently early 20-something computer tech on General Hospital.
Roswell: not one of the members of the younger cast (supposedly 16-17 at the start) was a teenager, with the exception of 18-year-old Majandra Delfino and Emilie de Ravin. Shiri Appleby, Nick Wechsler and Katherine Heigl were 20, Brendan Fehr and Colin Hanks were 21 and Jason Behr was a whopping 25 years old when the first season premiered.
24-year-old Tom Welling, and (let's face it) pretty much everyone else from Smallville, except Lex Luthor, who is supposed to be several years older. But Tom is particularly noticeable, as the character is fourteen in the pilot. How many fourteen year olds are built like a tank?◊
In one episode of Smallville Lex was stalked by a servant girl about 10 years younger than he. She was played by Azura Skye, who in real life is indeed about 9 years younger than Rosenbaum; but in Zoe Duncan Jack And Jane she played his fraternal twin sister.
Although Kristen Kreuk, and Allison Mack were just barely 18 at the start. Michael Rosenbaum was 29 playing the supposedly 21-year-old Lex. It doesn't seem so bad once you get out of the teen years.
Sam Jones III (Pete Ross) was also 18 at the start.
Tom Welling is two years older than Brandon Routh (Clark/Superman in the movie Superman Returns), yet plays the same character at a much earlier point in his life (although admittedly in a different continuity). Welling also began playing Clark at about the same age (maybe a year younger) that Christopher Reeve made his screen tests to play Superman in the mid-1970s.
31-year-old Gerard Christopher was cast as the title character in the live-action Superboy series which ran from 1988-1992. Superboy/Clark Kent was supposed to be a 19 or 20-year-old college sophomore at the time.
25-year-old John Hensley playing 16-year-old Matt on Nip/Tuck (made glaringly obvious off-screen when Hensley began dating Joely Richardson, the actress, only 13 years his senior IRL, who played his mom on the show). Also mae glarigly obvious when he started getting a receding hairline.
The O.C. is guilty of this, as mentioned in the quote at the top, with teens in their late 20s and parents in their early 30s.
The O.C.hangs a lampshade on this trope, among many others, with their show-within-a-show, "The Valley."
The teenage characters of The Vampire Diaries are played by 20something actors, starting with Nina Dobrev (20), Steven R. McQueen (21), Katerina Graham (20), Caroline Accola (22), Kayla Ewell and Zach Roerig (both 24). All of them play high school students. Stefan and Damon Salvatore, who got vamped at the ages of 17 and 24 respectively, are played by Paul Wesley (27) and Ian Somerhalder (31).
This is rendered extra absurd by the fact that 22-year-old Sara Canning plays an aunt (albeit a young one) to Dobrev and Mc Queen's characters, when she is younger than some of the actors who play their classmates.
Popular, from 1999, about high school students played by 20-something-year-olds, most notably 28-year-old Leslie Grossman and 29-year-old Ron Lester.
Possibly intentional as it something of a parody of High School Dramas
In their junior year (season one), when you would expect them all to be about 16 or 17, some of the main characters of Veronica Mars were: the titular heroine (24-year-old Kristen Bell), Wallace Finnel (22-year-old Percy Daggs III), Logan Echolls (22-year-old Jason Dohring), and Dick Casablancas Jr. (23-year-old Ryan Hansen).
Which worked fine, except for the episode in season two, in which then 24-year-old Kristen Bell and 25-year-old Aaron Ashmore (Troy), playing high school seniors (~18), interact with 18-year-old Michael Cera and 17-year-old Alia Shawkat... who were playing college students. One of them at least in his sophomore year, as he was acting as a tour guide to profros. That was sort of disorienting.
The series actually had an even more prominent example in the first season; Amanda Seyfried was only 18 when the series started, yet Lilly was supposedly a year older than Veronica (and all of her contemporaries — again, as noted above, played by people in their 20s). Then again, Seyfried's voluptuous figure (which the writers and directors were not afraid to draw attention to) helped her look more developed than Bell, even though Bell's face was more mature. Which is interesting in light of Seyfried's role in Mean Girls (see above), made the same year.
There was also Charisma Carpenter who played the 25-year-old Kendall when she was 35 and clearly looked like she was in her thirties. The show was not above indulging in a little meta humour about all this:
Duncan: She's like our age.
Veronica: She's twenty-five.
However, it's later found out that Kendall had assumed the identity of a younger highschool student and was actually older than first thought.
Even then Kendall's 'real' is still about seven years younger than Charisma's and presumably she was supposed to at least look 25, in-universe if nothing else.
Kind of lampshaded in the mini-episode shot to promote a possible season 4. Veronica is supposed to be in her mid-twenties, having graduated both college and the FBI academy, yet as one of the younger new recruits, she gets picked to go undercover as a teenager.
iCarly: The actor who played Gibby inverts the trope, being 3 years younger than the character when introduced. The filming schedule stretch has actually brought both the character and the actor to almost the same age, and the actor is going through the same growth spurt that Freddie went through in between Season 1 and Season 2.
Griffin, Carly's love interest in iDate A Bad Boy, was played by a 23 year old and looked like it, especially in some shirtless scenes, is supposed to be a high school senior. The episode involved some heavy make out sessions with the star of the show Miranda Cosgrove, who was 15 when they filmed them. Miranda apparently got to choose which guy they casted.
On Big Time Rush, Carlos Pena (21), Logan Henderson (21), James Maslow (20) and Kendall Schmidt (20) play 16 year olds. It sort of works out, though, because of their rather boyish yet still mature good looks and their mid-pitched voices. Kendall and Carlos could pass as a bit older, though.
This trope is subverted in 21 Jump Street, where the main characters are clearly identified as adults, but they are assigned to this undercover unit because they all look young enough to pass as teens.
Julianna Rose Mauriello was 13 when she took on the role of 8-year-old Stephanie on the children's show LazyTown, and is still playing her at 17. By the second season, filmed when she was 15, it was obvious that Julianna was no longer a little girl, and in LazyTown Extra, filmed when she was 17, the character mentions she's lived in LazyTown for a year, which would make her 9.
And if rumors are to be believed, LazyTown is returning in 2011 and might even have Julianna reprise her role as Stephanie...despite the fact that she is now 20 years old and will still be playing a 9 year old.
Power Rangers is a common offender, with the original season's 15-year-old characters being played by actors as old as 24. Operation Overdrive had an 18-year-old SmartChick being played by a 28-year-old actress (who, however, looks quite young and seems to actually be able to get away with it).
The early seasons had most actors between 18-21, with subsequent seasons going off in many different directions.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers has an excuse: the characters were originally intended to be high school seniors, as evidenced by the original plot for the two-part episode 'Doomsday' involving the Rangers going to Senior Prom. When the show became a hit, they needed to keep the characters around, so they refrained from actually giving ages for the Rangers in order to keep the high school setting as long as possible.
Though in that case, the trope still would've been played straight as several of the actors were a few years older than a high school senior. The trope would've been averted, though, with Austin St. John, who was 18 at the time.
The 28-year-old actress from Operation Overdrive has stated in interviews that she was also given an audition for the Harry Potter films as 15-year-old Cho Chang...
Melanie Vallejo, who plays the 17/18-year-old Madison in Mystic Force, was 27 at the time of filming...
Played straight and inverted in the case of Olivia Tennet (Dr. K) from RPM, in which the 17-year-old actress (when production began) played her character at ages 14 (during a flashback in "Doctor K"), 18, 19 (as of "The Road to Corinth"), and then 20 (as of "If Venjix Won").
Linkara summed it up nicely in his History of the Power Rangers series: "Clearly, the casting director has never seen a teenager."
Both Disney Channel and ABC Family loves to use this every now and then. And yes, they're not ashamed to use it.
Lizzie McGuire mostly avoided this with the main characters, but Adam Lamberg (who played 14-15 year old Gordo) was a college student. Kyle Downes (who played Tudgeman, in the same grade as Lizzie et al) is even worse...in his previous series (Higher Ground) he played a troubled high schooler.
Hannah Montana has one of the strangest examples. Jackson Stewart is (currently) depicted as a high school senior, while Jason Earles (who plays Stewart) has left people guessing about his age, with speculations running from a fairly reasonable 21 to as old as 32 years old.
A look at Jason Earles' Other Wiki page will show you that the actor is indeed 32 years old as of 2009.
Likewise, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody also premiered in 2005, with then 20-year-old Ashley Tisdale playing then 15-year-old Maddie Fitzpatrick. The show is also a subversion, as Dylan and Cole Sprouse were (and continue to be) exactly the same age as their characters, which actually required some suspension of disbelief, as their voices took some time to crack.
Slightly inverted on The Secret Life of the American Teenager: Some cast members actually were teenagers when the series started (the youngest being 15 (India Eisley, at the time the show was first aired)), and were only a couple of years older than their characters. Played straight with other members of the cast who were all in their early twenties from the get-go (the oldest member being a then 24-year-old Greg Finley playing a high school sophomore).
Lampshaded in the TV version of 10 Things I Hate About You. The overprotective father refers to Patrick as "your friend with the disturbingly deep voice who looks much older than seventeen." His actor, Ethan Peck, is 21 years old. In this case, the whole casting thing doesn't really work, since he does indeed look like a college student.
Indeed, the only teenage role actually played by a teenager is 16-year-old Bianca, played by 18-year-old Meaghan Martin.
That's So Raven had very obvious examples of this: Raven-Symone was 18, Orlando Brown was 17 and Anneliese van der Pol was 19 and they were all playing high school freshmen.
The television adaptation of Pretty Little Liars. The four main characters are 16 but their actresses are between the ages of 20 and 25. The most egregious example is the character of Maya, who is 16 but is played by 31-year-old Bianca Lawson.
Bianca Lawson was in Saved by the Bell: The New Class, a show that is even older that the Trope Namer, actually. This fact rises this example Up to Eleven.
The four main teen characters on Make It Or Break It are played by actresses between the ages of 20 and 25.
Even Stevens used this heavily. Applies to the entire cast to a significant but albeit mostly believeable degree, but especially egregious with Donnie, a star athlete in high school played by an actor in his mid-twenties, and Ren, a 13-14 year old middle school student whose actress was well into high school age.
A.N.T. Farm's cast members all fall in this: China Anne McClain (age 12), Sierra McCormick (age 13) and Jake Short (age 14) play 11-year old Freshmen, and Allie DeBerry (age 16) is just one age up compared to her character Paisley, who's age 15 in the show.
23-year-old Carol Ann Ford as 15-year-old Susan Foreman (though she is a Time Lord).
21-year-old Maureen O'Brien as 15-16-year-old Vicki. *
Her exact age isn't given, but in "The Myth Makers" she says a 16-year-old character is 'hardly any older than me'.
25-year-old Jackie Lane as 18-year-old Dodo Chaplet.
21-year-old Wendy Padbury as 15-year-old Zoe Heriot (just to add to the confusion, according to The Brigadier she looks "about 19").
And again at the age of 27 in the stage adaptation "Seven Keys To Doomsday", she played 17-18-year-old Jenny Wilson.
23-year-old Mark Strickson as Turlough. This one is perhaps less egregious, as Turlough was actually an alien of indeterminate age, but he was posing as a human boy in boarding school, and did not look young enough at all. For that matter, neither did most of his classmates.
The new series two-parter The Doctor Dances/The Empty Child has a subversion. Nancy, played by 21-year-old Florence Hoath, appears to be about 16, having a 5-year-old "little brother" and helping out a band of homeless children. The Doctor realizes she is actually about twenty, old enough to be the boy's mummy.
The spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures features 20-year-old Daniel Anthony as 14-year-old Clyde Langer.
And 18-year-old Anjli Mohindra as 15-year-old Rani Chandra. But then, when they had 15-year-old Yasmin Paige playing 14-year-old Maria Jackson, she had to quit for exams.
K9 features 19-year-old Keegan Joyce as 14-year-old Starkey, 16-year-old Philippa Coulthard as 14-year-old Jorjie Turner and 20-year-old Daniel Webber as 15-year-old Darius Pike.
Melissa Joan Hart started playing 16-year-old Sabrina the Teenage Witch when she was 19-20 (depending on when it started filming, she was 20 when it first aired). By its final season she was 27, though by then they'd dropped the "Teenage" bit from the title and she'd been going to college and then on to a career in journalism.
This is actually a good example of how the line blurs as actors and characters grow older, although this effect only happens in works where the characters age roughly in realtime.
Additionally, when she was 15 she played the role of the similarly aged Clarissa Darling in Clarissa Explains It All which ran from 1991 to 1994.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 26-year-old Summer Glau played Cameron Philips, who is able to pass as a high school student. Cameron's cyborg form is patterned after a teen named Alison. And one assumes that all teens from the future live a harsh life that causes crows feet and deep smile lines, as seen on Summer Glau's face in closeups.
A reporter for Boston's Fox affiliate referred to Glau and costar Thomas Dekker as the show's "teen stars" in a promo for an interview segment. Dekker was 20. He was however, never supposed to be a teenager in the show.
In a second season episode, Cameron was seen being served alcohol in a bar. It's likely she has IDs to cover a wide variety of ages.
Similarly, but less drastically, is Summer Glau's portrayal of River Tam in Firefly. Summer was 21 (23 during the filming of Serenity) but River was only seventeen. And in the R. Tam Sessions, it went even further, with Summer playing River when she was fourteen years old. Surprisingly, she plays all these ages quite convincingly as she still looks very much like a teenager now.
She's actually a year OLDER than Jewel Staite, who played Kaylee and would have been about 19 during shooting. To be fair, no official age is ever given for Kaylee, but it's presumably at least a few years older than River.
In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor is called "29 years old" in an APB. Since her son (conceived in the first movie) is now 10 (played by 14 year old Edward Furlong). She would have been 19 at the most in the first movie. Linda Hamilton would have been 28 at the time.
According to thenovelization, this is exactly right - the first section to focus on (the right) Sarah gives her age as 19.
The reimagined Battlestar Galactica plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life Grace Park, who plays Sharon, is actually six years older than Katee Sackhoff as Kara.
Actress Rachel True played teenagers when she was in her early 30s and young twenty-somethings when she was in her late 30s to early 40s.
In Half Baked, at 32, she's girlfriend to 25 year old Dave Chappelle. Of course, her character's age isn't given, and this editor doesn't see why he couldn't date a chick seven years older than him, especially as Hollywood does the inversion of that all the fucking time.
Trina McGee started playing high school senior Angela Moore on Boy Meets World at age 28; this is really glaring because every other major cast member was more-or-less age-appropriate.
Strangers with Candy - 30-something Amy Sedaris plays 40-something Jerri Blank, who decides to go back to high school as a freshman. Jerri doesn't lie about her age, and this trope is mostly inverted by casting actual teens as the students to make the situation seem even more ridiculous. Until the last episode, when 30-year-old Winona Ryder played "Fran" the coolest girl at school.
His music had already established that trend, with story songs placing him in the role of a young teen in high school even though he was in his late teens and early twenties at the time.
Chiara Zanni, who plays the main character "Amy" on The N show About A Girl, was 29 years old during filming, yet she plays a supposedly "young college student."
Gary Burghoff of M*A*S*H fame. He was already 27 when playing the teenaged Radar, and continued the role well into his 40s. Burghoff, however, had such a childish frame and voice, that little besides his thinning hairline betrayed his true age. The producers tried hard to get him to keep his hat on in later episodes.
There was a heavy dose of Dawson Casting for most of the cast, especially in the later seasons. The book establishes Hawkeye as 28 years old, but TV-Hawkeye was played by Alan Alda, born in 1936 — 36 when the series started (which would have made Hawkeye of draft age during WWII), 47 by the time it ended.
This, combined with the fact that the show lasted almost four times as long as the war it portrayed, gave rise to some excellent accidental Fridge Brilliance: along with other signs of aging, Hawkeye's hair went from jet black to pure grey over the course of the show — reflecting the effects of the stress and horror of war. A healthy, 28-year-old actor wouldn't visibly age much in three years, but a stressed, overworked, mentally frayed, constantly terrified 28-year-old frontlines army surgeon would take about three years to age as much as a healthy, 36-year-old actor would in eleven years.
Subverted in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools to the point of having sex with her teenaged boyfriends, and had her current lover killed when he found out. The actress in question is actually younger than the role she was cast in, she was 26 and the character was 28. As many other cases, the plot was Ripped from the Headlines: see it here.
In an episode of Law & Order with a similar plot, the female murderer is played by a 20 year old actress. The the character is a 26 year old woman pretending to be a 16 year old girl.
The Ripped from the Headlines (sort of) precursor of the above, an adult writer posed as a teenager in order to sell her scripts; naturally this was made into TV movie.
In CSI: New Yorkthis was gender-reversed, the conwoman was turned into a pair of paedophiles, the girlfriends were date-raped and the guidance counselor was killed when he found out.
All of the secondary school pupils in the seventies Britcom Please Sir!! were quite visibly in their late twenties or early thirties.
Nog, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposedly a young teenager, but played by Aron Eisenberg, who was in his twenties when the series started. This is, however, something of an odd aversion: he was cast because a kidney transplant in his youth stunted his growth and they wanted him to remain short, since Ferengi are smaller than other humanoids. However, it got incredibly jarring, because his best friend Jake (whose actor was two years older than the character, but didn't look it) had some crazy growth spurts and ended up being 6'3" by the time the series ended. I guess they didn't expect Nog to stick around as a recurring character for that long.
Wil Wheaton was 15 when playing a 15-year-old Wesley Crusher. Star Trek in general has avoided this with the child characters, with several recurring children on Star Trek: Voyager being played by the appropriate age.
One of the worst examples was the Original Series episode "Miri". The "kids" in that would have died if they'd hit puberty (so "early" blooming cannot explain this away)—but some of them looked like they were in their thirties. Or older.
The best-known Dawson Casting in the Original Series might be Chekov, who was supposed to be 21 years old when 31-year-old Walter Koenig joined the show in 1967.
The 2009 movie retcons this by giving him a birthdate that would have made him 26 when he debuted in the show.
In Heroes, Nicholas D'Agosto was 27 years old when he started playing high school student West Rosen.
In "Five Years Gone" and other episodes set in an alternate future, Claire doesn't look notably older but as her genetic ability slows her aging process to a stop, like it did with Adam Monroe, this is understandable.
Period drama Upstairs Downstairs is an interesting case of justifiedDawson Casting: at the beginning of the series, Elizabeth Bellamy is 17, played by 26 year-old Nicola Pagett. But there are frequent Time Skips forward, making the character around 29 at her final episode.
Pauline Collins is several years older than the age of her character, Sarah, in the first few episodes, but like Elizabeth, they line up better by her last episode. It seems less egregious with an adult actor, because it's perfectly legitimate to cast someone according to the age she appears, rather than her actual age, and Collins did look younger than she was.
J.D. Williams was 24 when he began playing then-16-year-old Bodie Broadus on The Wire. Julito McCullum was 17 when his character (Namond Brice) was 14, and Tristan Wilds was 18 when his (Michael Lee) was 14. Other characters were exceptions to this trope (see below).
Another surprising example from The Wire: Lt. Daniels is the apparently forty-ish squad commander, and Carver is the late-twenties junior officer. But their actors, Lance Reddick and Seth Gilliam, were both in their mid-thirties at the start of the show, and Gilliam is actually a year older than Reddick.
Another adult example is the 35 year old Michael K Williams as the approximately-28 year old (in season one) Omar Little. This seems like a fairly trivial age gap, but it seems more striking when paired with Ernest Waddell (who is almost twenty years younger than Williams, making him 17 during the filming of season 2), who played Omar's lover Dante in seasons 2 and 3.
The TV adaptation of Gossip Girl is chock full of this. Spoofed on The Daily Show after the 2008 Olympics scandal of the Chinese gymnasts possibly being underage; Stewart questioned how qualified Americans are to judge such a thing with a shot of the GG cast.
On the other hand, many people are surprised to learn that Taylor Momsen is the same age as her character.
At 26 years old Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in the television series Gilmore Girls.
Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.
Party of Five had the (then) 26-year-old Scott Wolf and 20-year-old Neve Campbell playing the respectively 16- and 15-year-old Bailey and Julia. On the other hand 11-year-old Lacey Chabert (Claudia) and 16-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt (Sarah) were the same ages as their characters.
Lampshaded in season 3 where Bailey's friend, seeing his fake ID, was very surprised that anyone would believe he's 27.
Due to the fact that time on the show passes much slower than in real life, 10-year-old Walt Lloyd on Lost was played by roughly 14-old Malcolm David Kelly in season 3, who was 12 when the series began.
They try to disguise his aging... but in the season 4 finale, they don't disguise it, since it's in flashforwards set three years after he left the island, which still doesn't work because he's too old for 13. Prior to his appearance in the flashforwards he had appeared a few times and the show began to lampshade the changes to Walt, for instance Locke described how Walt suddenly showed up, but was taller, more so than the the few months that had passed on the show to explain.
Inverted to the point of absurdum on Rome where Vorena the Younger and little Lucius are played by children under the age of ten throughout the series, in spite of nearly 20 years passing from the pilot to the finale. Especially odd when Octavian ages properly, and when Caesarion, who is born when Lucius is at least four or five years old, appears to be played by someone older than the actor playing Lucius when he appears in the second season.
The cast in The Middle are a lot older than they actually are. However to be fair, Brick's actor (Atticus Shafer) has Type IV Osteogenesis Imperfecta and is a lot shorter than someone his age would be otherwise.
The star of Nickelodeon's The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo was extraordinarily unconvincing as a "kid detective," even to the target audience.
A five year Time Skip between the 4th and 5th seasons of Desperate Housewives has led to this trope being inverted for several of the characters: 23-year-old Danielle Van de Kamp and 24-year-old Julie Mayer are now several years older than the actresses playing them (19-year-old Joy Lauren and 18-year-old Andrea Bowen).
The television version made in Italy in the '70s of the book Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca(Johnny Whirlwind's Diary) have 30-year-old people as 6-year-old children.
Parodied in an episode of Friends, where Joey tries to play a 19-year-old, but he is absolutely unconvincing.
Joey: Come on, am I 19 or what?
Chandler: Yes, on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the dumbest a person can look, you are definitely 19.
Also played straight on Friends, as every flashback to (and video evidence from) Ross, Monica, and Rachel's high school days featured the regular actors playing themselves at 18.
The cast itself is a mixed bag. The shows starts out with the characters aged 24-25. Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston are the same age as their characters, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc are just a year or two over, but both Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox were over 30 in the first season.
Jeeves and Wooster has it both ways. Both Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry were in their early 30s when the series started in 1990. The ages of the characters are never given in the books, but it would seem that Bertie Wooster (Laurie) was in his early-to-mid 20s and Jeeves (Fry) in his 40s. Of course, their ages are never given in the series, either, so The Powers That Be could get away with it. By way of contrast, the Jeeves movies of the mid-1930s starred forty-year-old Arthur Treacher as Jeeves and 25-year-old David Niven as Bertie.
The WB's Jack & Bobby featured 24-year-old Matt Long as 15-year-old Jack McCallister. Made glaringly obvious by the fact that Logan Lerman, who played Jack's 13-year-old brother Bobby, was actually 12 at the time of filming.
I want to live in Dawson's Creek, where the kids are in their 20s and their parents are in their 30s.
For the record it should be said that Jack was wrong about the parents though — they were in their mid-40s. Still quite young for typical American parents of today.
It should also be said that though the dads were in their 40s, the moms were in their 30s. The show started in 2003. Kelly Rowan (who played Kirsten Cohen) was born in 1965 and Melinda Clarke (who played Julie Cooper) was born in 1970, making them around 38 and 33 respectively.
In BBC sitcom Open All Hours, David Jason plays Granville, nephew and errand boy of Ronnie Barker's Arkwright. Jason would have been around 35 when the series proper started and 44 or 45 when it finished. In itself, it's not technically implausible that he could be Barker's nephew (even without stretching their ten year age difference). However, although never(?) explicitly mentioned, none of Granville's character (obviously meant as young and inexperienced), the generational dynamic between the two leads and their obvious statuses- and the fact that no-one thinks it strange that he's still doing an errand boy job(!)- makes any sense until you realise that Jason is playing a character around half his real age.
Kal Penn was 29 when he played a high school student in Season 6 of 24.
Elisha Cuthbert was 19 when she started playing Kim Bauer, who was sixteen at the time of Season 1. As of Season 7, she's 27 and her character's 34!
One episode of Psych quite possibly took advantage of this trope. The killer was a young-looking adult posing as a high school student. Because of Dawson Casting, it's easy for the viewer to dismiss his possibly looking older than he should, when in-universe, he IS older than he should.
The plot of the recent Spin-Off of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, revolves partially around two sixteen-year-old girls. Of the actresses who play them, one is currently 21. The other is 23.
The Canadian sitcom Life With Derek premiered in 2005 with lead characters Casey (15) and Derek (16) played by then 19-year-old Ashley Leggat, and then 18-year-old Michael Seater, respectively.
On the UK "dramedy" Shameless 21-year-old Fiona Gallagher was portrayed by then 33-year-old Anne-Marie Duff. In an interview, the actress herself admitted that she was surprised to have been offered the role, as she thought she was "too old to be seen for it."
Duff was 30 years old when she appeared in The Magdalene Sisters as Margaret, who ages from 16 or 17 to 20-ish. The film also starred the then 25-year-old Eileen Walsh as teenage Crispina.
Burt Ward, the teenaged Robin: The Boy Wonder in the 60's Batman TV show, was already 20 when the show started filming.
The 16/17 year old Baker twins in Privileged skirt this trope - while at the time of first airing (in 2008) Lucy Hale (Rose) was only nineteen, Ashley Newbrough (Sage) was almost 21. Also, main character Megan Smith is supposed to be 23, while Joanna Garcia was 29 when the show first aired.
Some of the younger patients on House have this. One example is the 15-year-old supermodel in the 2nd season episode "Skin Deep" played by an actress aged 25.
Several of the doctors on the team invert this to some extent, at least presumably, being played by actors who would be extraordinarily young to be in their position.
Friday Night Lights is way guilty of this; many of the actors playing juniors and seniors in highschool are in their mid-to-late twenties.
The episode "Not Cancer" had an incredibly obvious example, with an alleged four-year-old (who was only seen briefly) being played by a kid who was clearly, like, eleven.
The six main characters of the short-lived show Life As We Know It were all supposed to be high school sophomores (15/16), but all of their actors were 21 or 22 during filming, except for Jessica Lucas, who was 19.
Glee is extremely guilty of this with half of their cast being High School characters. The youngest member of the "teen" cast is 21-year-old Chris Colfer with the oldest being 29-year-olds Cory Monteith and Mark Salling.
Justified/Lampshaded with at least one member of the rival glee club, Vocal Adrenaline, who is a 24-year-old "6th year senior" who has been repeatedly flunked because he's the only one who can do a particular dance move.
Hilarity Ensues with a recent Parents' Television Council statement on the "near pedophilia" of a recent racy GQ shoot starring Lea Michele and Diana Agron. Both are 24.
It's arguably justified in that every episode is a Musical Episode; it would probably be difficult too find high-school aged actors that could sing and act convincingly enough to compete with whom they've actually cast.
Totally averted by BBC children's dramas Byker Grove and Grange Hill, where all the actors playing children were about the same age as their characters. Some were even a year or so younger.
Grey's Anatomy pulls off Dawson Casting with tweens: In season 1, the characters start their internship at the Seattle Grace, so they should be around 25 (give or take). Ellen Pompeo playing Meredith was 35 at the time of filming and the actors of Cristina, George and Alex were also in their thirties. Only averted with 26-year-old Katherine Heigl as Izzie.
It's justifiable, at least in some cases- Meredith, for example, is said to have taken time off before med school, and most of the characters don't have stated ages. But it's kind of confusing when considering a character like Cristina- Sandra Oh is clearly in her 30s, so the only logical explanation is that Cristina also took time off at some point during her education, something that Cristina would never do.
The Channel 4 docudrama series The Queen had a mild case with the 26-year-old Katie McGrath playing the 21- year-old Princess Margaret (though she is 25 by the end of the episode). More extreme is the 35-year-old Emilia Fox playing the 25-year-old Queen Elizabeth II.
The same two actresses played sisters again in the BBC's Merlin, although this is arguably more justified as the Arthurian legends tend to suggest a fairly wide age gap between Morgause and Morgan le Fay/Morgana
That '70s Show — Danny Masterson (Hyde), Topher Grace (Eric) and Ashton Kutcher (Kelso) were respectively 22, 20 and 20 in 1998 when the show debuted. It ran for 8 years, but sets between 1976 and 1979.
Then-18-year old Olivia Burnette was cast as a preteen Justine O'Neil in the the miniseries The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years. While someone of her petite height could plausibly have passed for someone younger, her... development made it painfully obvious she was well past puberty.
All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones, such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Sam Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer, and Brienne of Tarth, as played by Gwendoline Christie. The characters are all between 16 and 20 (aged up roughly two years from the books), the actors between 20 and 29.
Peter Dinklage (mid 40s) playing Tyrion Lannister (early 20s) is a rather extreme example, even though the character is out of his teens. Justified, as casting a dwarf in a serious drama is rather difficult. This should also become an issue as the actors who play the younger children, such as Arya Stark, who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
In series three of Robin Hood, twenty-nine-year-old Clive Standen played twenty-year-old Archer and thirty-year-old Joanne Froggatt played Kate, whose age was never stated but it was heavily implied that she is supposed to be a young teenager.
In the new series Victorious, Daniella Monet, who is 21 years old, is playing a 17 year old character.
German actress Josefine Preuss (b. 1986) has not visibly aged since she was about 15. Guess which roles she usually gets.
Twin Peaks. Keep in mind that the actors age two years, and the characters age about half a month. But at the beginning, their ages were...
19-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle as 17-year-old Donna Hayward
20-year-old Mädchen Amick as 18-year-old Shelly Johnson
21-year-old Phoebe Augustine as 17-year-old Ronette Pulaski
23-year-old Sheryl Lee as 17-year-old Laura Palmer
23-year-old Dana Ashbrook as 17-year-old Bobby Briggs
23-year-old James Marshall as 17-year-old James Hurley
25-year-old Sherilyn Fenn as 18-year-old Audrey Horne
Mexican comedy "El Chavo del ocho" has all of its children (8 years old) characters played by adults of more than 30 years old! The result is, of course, hilarious.
Considering all the Amusing Injuries that the "kids" go through in the show, it'd be pretty disturbing otherwise.
In CSI: New York "Grounds For Deception", Stella Bonasera is reveled to have been born in 1975, making her character 35. Melina Kanakaredes who portrays Bonasera is currently 42.
Patrick McKenna was 31 when he started playing teen-aged Harold on The Red Green Show. Interestingly, Harold did slowly age as the series progressed, eventually going to college and getting various full-time jobs.
Somehow simultaneously played straight and subverted at the same time with The Inbetweeners. While the four main characters, 17-year-olds, are played by actors ranging from 22 to 26, all of them look and sound the correct age. Seriously, it's creepy.
In Dad's Army, 17-year-old Frank Pike was played by Ian Lavender, who was 22 years old when the series started and 31 when it ended, while Pike had not aged.
Also InvertedTrope inverted. The oldest members of the cast were Arnold Ridley (Charles Godfrey) and John Laurie (James Frazer), both into their seventies as the programme started, while 70-year-old L/Cpl. Jack Jones (having served in the Mahdist War, the Boer Wars and World War One) was played by Clive Dunn, 48.
In the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous, 16-year-old Saffron is played by 24-year-old Julia Sawalha. Also somewhat inverted with her mother Edina; in an episode dealing with Edina's 40th birthday, actress (and writer) Jennifer Saunders was only 34.
Julia Sawalha does genuinely look 16, though. Does it fit the trope if the actor genuinely does look like a teenager?
When the series picked up after a break, Sawalha's age was beginning to catch up with her, and she looked closer to her real age than to Saffy's age. There is a joke, when another character looks at her passport and says she can't believe Saffy is that young, she looks older. Saffy makes a sarcastic comment with a look at her mother, that stress ages a person.
In Underbelly: The Golden Mile the initially 17 year-old John Ibrahim is played by 25 year-old Firass Dirani, although the character was 28 by the end of the series. Ironically, the show still attracted controversy by depicting Ibrahim having sex onscreen.
In Boardwalk Empire 37 year old Stephen Graham plays Al Capone, who was 21 at the time the show is set.
Webster - Teenaged Emmanuel Lewis plays a seven year old.
Charlotte Coleman was in her early 20s when playing teenage Jess in the TV adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.
On the Soap OperaAll My Children, Sarah Michelle Gellar first appeared on the show at the real-life age of 18, but she appeared as the main character Erica Kane's previously-unknown daughter. Susan Lucci, the actress who portrays Erica, has been on the show since it first aired, and there had never been a mention of an unknown daughter being born. The show tried to cover this up by claiming that the daughter was the product of a rape of Erica when she was 13, which would have made Gellar's character in her 20s. Nobody really bought it, but just wrote it off as Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
The CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode "Neverland" heavily featured three fourteen year old characters. Two were played by actual kids of that age (one from Heroes). The last was played by an actor who's 18.
Amazon High with 25-year-old Selma Blair as a high school student.
Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane starring 27 year old Selma Blair as high school student Zoe.
The American version of Kath And Kim with 36-year-old Selma Blair as twenty-something Kim (though this wasn't nearly as bad as the Australian version; see below.)
Maddigan's Quest is full of this: Jordan Metcalfe and Rose McIver were 18 and played Timon, aged 15, Garland, 14, respectively. Olivia Tennet was 14 and Zac Fox was 15 when they played 11-year-olds Lilith and Eden.
The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries had Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy (24 and 18, when the series started filming) playing The Hardy Boys, who were supposedly 17 & 16.
Inverted in Disney's adaptation for The Mickey Mouse Club, in which the actors Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk were younger than the books — 12 and 11.
Boston Public
In 7th Heaven Barry Watson was 22 when he started playing high school junior Matt Camden, though the rest of the actors playing the Camden kids were of the right age.
Square Pegs is a show from the 1982/1983 season about the two groups of 14 year old freshman who vie for popularity. It is often overlooked for this trope because half of the cast is under 18 (though all older than their characters). However, the other half was over 18, including Tracy Nelson (Jennifer) who was born in 1963, Jon Caliri (Vinnie) who was born in 1960, Merritt Butrick (Slash) who was born in 1959, and Claudette Wells (LaDonna) who was born in 1954, making her 28, making her twice the age of her character.
Gabe Kaplan stated in interviews that he believed part of the reason the ratings for Welcome Back, Kotter began to decline in series three was that the Sweathogs, whose actors were now 24-29 years old, were simply too old to still be believable as high school students.
Both averted and played straight in What I Like About You. Extremely averted with Holly (who's in-universe birthdays were near her actress, Amanda Bynes'); played straight with Henry, Vince and Gary, all of whom were played by actors who were 24/25 at the time of their introductions, and Tina, whose actress was 28 at the time of her introduction.
Lincoln Heights has quite an extreme example with the 27-28 year old (during season 1) Erica Hubbard playing 16 year old Cassie Sutton. What makes this particularly interesting is that the actors portraying her parents where born in 1970 and 1974, making them only 9 and 5 years older than her. Even more interesting is the actors playing her younger sibling were born in 1992 and 1993, making her 13 and 14 years older than them!
Erica Hubbard's original birth date was thought to be January 3, 1984 which would have made her about 22-23 during season 1.
Kath And Kim's Kim is supposed to be in her mid-to-late 20's. Gina Riley, the actress who plays her, is pushing 50.
An inversion seems to have been the original four series of Upstairs Downstairs, which covered thirty years of historical period but only four years of real time. The characters remained the same age throughout the series, frozen in time between 1903 and 1930. The only attention paid to the passage of time seemed to be James, who grew grey about the temples. In the modern remake, Jean Marsh, now forty years older, reprises her role as Rose Buck, meaning Rose ages forty years in only six between the end of the Bellamy era in 1930 and the beginning of the Holland residence at Eaton Place in 1936. It does help, however, that the cast changed periodically, with Hazel and then Virginia replacing Lady Marjorie as "her Ladyship" and the introduction of another young lady, Georgina, to take on Elizabeth Bellamy-Kirbridge's role in the story. In the servants' hall, the cast similarly gains and loses members (adding Frederick and Daisy in the 1920s), but as the series progresses we still never see Rose, Edward, Hudson, Mrs Bridges or Ruby age.
In the Canadian series Student Bodies, all the actors playing teenagers were in their early 20s.
Annie Edison on Community is in her late teens, in real life Alison Brie is in her mid-twenties.
The Beverly Hillbillies: One early episode states that Elly May is "almost eighteen". Donna Douglas was 29 at the time. Even more egregiously, her love interest in the episode, college-age Sonny Drysdale, was played by 49-year-old (and looked it) Louis Nye.
A truly bizarre example from The West Wing. In a season four episode, Joe Quincy is being assisted by a White House Aide whom He thinks looks about fourteen and who claims to be twenty-two. She is played by Kiersten Warren who was in Her late thirties and looked it. The character is never seen again aside from that scene, almost pushing it into BigLippedAlligatorMoment territory. Like one of the page quotes, Warren actually did have a child who was the same age as the character She played.
Gerard Campion, the star of the long-running BBC series about Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School (Bunter was in the fourth form), was 29 when he began playing the role. It lasted for close to a decade...
Downton Abbey starts out by doing this; for example, Lady Sybil is 16 at the time the show begins, but played by the 21-year-old Jessica Brown Findlay. Since the show's time progresses considerably faster than real time, this doesn't last; by the end of season 2, Sybil has actually passed Findlay's real age.
When My Family began, only one of the Harper children was played by an actor close to the character's age: 13-year-old Gabriel Thomson played 12-year-old Michael, 21-year-old Daniela Denby-Ashe played 15-year-old Janey, and 27-year-old Kris Marshall played 18-year-old Nick. Averted towards the end of the series where Michael was seemingly the same age as Thomson, while Janey was "almost 30" and only two years younger than Denby-Ashe (thanks to Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, since the show ran for eleven years.) Marshall left after three series of the show, and has stated in interviews that the fact that he was much older than Nick made it more difficult for him to play the character.
Music
Alice Cooper, born in 1948, has been singing "I'm Eighteen" for over 30 years.
Pat Benatar, born in 1953, built an entire discography around singing about how "we are young" back in the 1980s.
Marilyn Manson, born in 1969, has been singing, in a first person narrative, of being a disgruntled youth, since 1994 when he was 25, though he has trouble passing for a teen no matter how much grease paint he pancakes on, or how smooth he shaves his body, and seems even more ridiculous now that he's in his 40s.
Madonna's early musical career centered around insinuating that she's a troubled youth, being a material "girl" who was "like a virgin" and juggling youthful crushes and youthful rebellion and wants to know "where's the party", contrasted with tougher issues such as whether or not her "daddy" would be angry that she's pregnant, and running away from home because "daddy" is abusive. She was 25 years old when she released her self-titled debut. 3 years after that, she still considering herself young enough to kiss a 13-year-old in the music video for "Open Your Heart", but her critics disagreed.
Belinda Carlisle had a youthful-sounding voice and used it to make references about being a "kid" in "school" finding love for the first time with her band The Go-Gos. In the late 1980s, she became a solo artist to make album after album where every song was about finding love for the first time yet again, replete with air-brushed album covers to make her look like someone born after 1958.
Cyndi Lauper, another 30-something in the 1980s who got famous about singing about being a "girl" instead of a woman.
Pete Burns was 26 when he released his album "Youthquake" and the other members of British New Wave band called "Dead or Alive" were in their late 20s and early 30s.
The Beach Boys continued to sing love songs to teenage girls even after they became middle-aged, bearded, creepy men. Not counting the unreleased track "Lazy Lizzy", in which Brian sings about stalking an underage girl, the most pedo-worthy track to appear on a Beach Boys disc was undoubtedly "Hey Little Tomboy" - made even worse by a bootlegged outtake in which the Boys seem bent on gang-raping the title character.
At the age of 26, Katy Perry played a 13-year-old high school student in the music video of her song "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)".
Several of Taylor Swift's videos, such as "Fifteen" and "The Story of Us", in which she plays high schoolers. Minor examples earlier, as she wasn't that much older than her characters, but it's started getting played more and more straight as she gets older (though to her credit, she doesn't look it).
Other
The Virgin Mary is usually played by an actress over the age of 20, but historians say she was about 14 when she became pregnant with Jesus.
Theater
In most productions of RENT, the nineteen-year-old Mimi Marquez will be played by women in their 20s, most notably in The Movie, where she was played by the then 26-year-old Rosario Dawson.
The movie in general is a good example of this trope, with most of the original cast reprising their roles eight years after they'd created them onstage. Your Mileage May Vary as to the result—some are able to suspend disbelief and run with it, while others complain that the actors are now far too old to be jumping up on tables and singing about "La Vie Boheme."
Forget Rosario Dawson - there was a New Zealand production of RENT this year. The person who played Mimi was Annie Crummer. Granted, Annie Crummer is awesome, but she's in her forties. She's more than twice the age Mimi is in the production. Good grief.
Likewise, sixteen-year-old Johanna in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street gets this frequently. In the 1982 stage recording she's played by 28-year-old Betsy Joslyn. Lisa Vroman, who played her in a 2001 concert production, refuses to give her age but it's definitely well past the teen years. 20-year-old Jayne Wisener, who plays the role in the movie, is pretty close by comparison.
This happens with almost any teenage character in musical theatre, most notably:
Marius, Enjolras, Cosette, Eponine, and the students in Les Misérables. Enjolras in particular is commonly played by a man thirty years old or older, even though the character is explicitly stated in the book to be twenty-two and looks like seventeen.
Anne and Henrik Egerman, and Petra in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Anne is seventeen or eighteen, Henrik is nineteen, and Petra is twenty-one. For Anne, the age-up is also to soften the squickiness of her marriage to forty-something Fredrik Egerman (though that's probably intentional).
And of course, Spring Awakening (both the play and musical), which features a cast of almost entirely fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds usually played by actors who are all out of high school. This is due in part mainly to the explicitly sexual nature of the material, but also to the rampant ageism... well, everywhere... which states that actual teenagers would not be competent enough to play these roles.
Christine and Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera, who are somewhere around twenty but often played by older actors. Inexplicably, the film Christine is played by a sixteen-year-old Emmy Rossum (with the character aged down to match) and Raoul is played by 30-year-old Patrick Wilson, even though the two are supposed to be former childhood sweethearts.
Matthew Broderick was twenty-one when he originated the role of fifteen-year-old Eugene Morris Jerome in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs. Jonathan Silverman was twenty when he assumed the role for the film version.
This is probably pretty common with Chekhov in general, there was particularly grievous casting for The Seagull. Take for instance the 2001 production at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, which featured 34-year-old Phillip Seymour Hoffman as 25-year-old Konstantin Trepliev, 52-year-old Meryl Streep as 43-year-old Irina Arkadina, 54-year-old Kevin Kline as thirty something Aleksei (or Boris depending on the translation) Trigorin, and 42-year-old Marcia Gay Harden as 22-year-old Masha Shamraev.
In the 2008 Metropolitan Opera version of Salome, the titular character, who is supposedly in her teens, is played by 48-year-old Karita Mattila, complete with momentary nudity.
This happens a lot in opera, mostly because the vocal maturity and training required for the music are very hard to achieve at a young age.
Especially jarring with "pants roles", like Cherubino from The Marriage of Figaro, where you often have a 14-year-old boy being played by a 50-year-old woman.
Such roles were usually written either during the hey-day of Castrato singers, or while their popularity was starting to fade. Seeing a 50-year-old woman playing a 14-year-old boy might be jarring, but seeing a 50-year-old man playing the same part and singing in a woman's register would be downright squicky.
Presumably all productions of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
No presumably about it; ageist or not, children of that age haven't the ability, nor the endurance, to pull off such a long and complex show (he said, having rehearsed four children for hours on one number for a brief version that was still messed up in performance)
All the main characters of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are around twelve years old—any theater productions of this will obviously have a cast that is much, much older.
In the British sitcomOn The Buses, Reg Varney played the role of Stan Butler, a bus driver in his late 20s, he was 53 years old when the series started.
In Wicked, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Glinda and Fiyero were played by 35-year-old Kristin Chenoweth and 36-year-old Norbert Leo Butz. Then again, Kristin looks very young for her age, but not really Norbert.
The characters do go through a timeskip, though not nearly as large a one as in the books, so they eventually become closer to their actors ages.
Need we even mention Peter Pan, in which a prepubescent boy is traditionally played by a very obviously post-pubescent woman?
The main characters in Grease are high school students. Unless it's high school production, this trope is going to be invoked.
The role of eleven-year-old Iris in Morris Panych's Girl in the Goldfish Bowl was written for an actress in her mid-thirties, and is always played by an adult.
In Blood Brothers, you get a single actor play a character from childhood to adult, i.e. Edward at 25 is played by the same guy who plays him at 8. You get used to it.
In the 1996 production of A Thousand Clowns at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, Murray, a character who is supposed to be in his twenties or perhaps thirties, was played by then 61-year-old Judd Hirsch, while his older brother Arnold was played by then 59-year-old David Margulies.
Most high school productions of The Crucible will invoke this trope, as actors are aged 14-18, and Betty Parris is nine years old.
An in-universe example from Thoroughly Modern Millie. In the song "They Don't Know", the obviously past her prime Ms. Meers remarks that she could still play Juliet if the theater is big enough.
Theater IN GENERAL is an example of this trope: played straight or sometimes reversed
The three girls in Vanities are usually played by late 20 or 30-somethings. They start out as high school students at age 17, progressing through college and beyond, and by the end of The Musical they are about 40, which borders on Hollywood Old. At the time of the 2009 off-Broadway run, Anneliese Van der Pol (Kathy) was 25, Lauren Kennedy (Mary) was 36, and Sarah Stiles (Joanne) was 30.
In the world premiere of Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World, Sheri, early 20's, was played by Carol Roscoe, age 39.
Almost all productions of Romeo and Juliet; Juliet's supposed to be turning fourteen, but she's usually played sixteen or upwards.
The 2004 Off-Broadway version of bare: a pop opera had then-26-year-old John Hill, 22-year-old Michael Arden, 29-year-old Jenna Leigh Green, 26-year-old Natalie Joy Johnson and 27-year-old Aaron Lohr playing seventeen-year-old seniors.
Next to Normal had 26-year-old Aaron Tveit in the role of 18-year-old Gabe Goodman. Natalie, however, was played by 17-year-old Jennifer Damiano.
Web Comics
Tedd from El Goonish Shive invokes this in an EGS:NP strip by claiming to be twenty-one outside of continuity due to Comic Book Time. Grace counters the gap might be up to a year, making Tedd eighteen. She then goes on to say that it doesn't matter anyways since none of them are likely to look any different before they turn 30.*
Though the revelation that he may be under the drinking age causes Tedd to excuse himself so that he can dispose of a keg in the fridge before his dad finds it.
Web Original
This was the initial reason that some viewers suspected lonelygirl15 to be a hoax. The Real Life implications of this are apparent in an episode of MaxterBexter, in which former lonelygirl15 actors Becki Gregoski and Maxwell Glick complain about needing to show ID before they would be served alcohol, even though Maxwell Glick was 29 at the time.
On the website hosting the Whateley Universe, the stories centering on Chau Lee (Bladedancer) are often illustrated with pictures of Zhang Ziyi. The character is fifteen, the actress at least twelve years older...
Mocked in "A Very Potter Musical" with CLEARLY College aged Darren Criss stating "I'm just a 12 year old kid".
Lucas Cruikshank was 14 when he started playing six-year-old Fred Figglehorn. Justified in that he created the character to be performed by himself.
That doesn't count because he is in show supposed to not be the real Ma-Ti and very obviously. And in any case is pretending to be a post-series Ma-Ti, hence why he's embittered over his time spent with them.
Behind The Veil is an interesting case of this, with the "actors" being limited to celebrity representations of what the character's appearance would be. However several characters ages are either older or younger than the celebrities portraying them, for example the 32-year-old Jack Raven being represented by the 45-year-old Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Western Animation
One episode of Recess had an adult posing as a 4th grader in a contrived plot to help Mr. Prickly eliminate recess.
Parodied in the Simpsons episode "Marge vs. the Monorail", where Brockman introduces the star of a popular teen series (Spingfield Heights 90210), who is actually 34 years old. The actor then smiles, deeply wrinkling his face. The star here, "Kyle Darren"/"Derryn" is particularly a caricature of Luke Perry, then famous for Beverly Hills 90210, and his distinctive ...facial creases. Perry would later guest star as "himself" playing Krusty's half brother. He was fired out of a cannon through a number of walls, a sandpaper factory, and then blown up. Ouch.
Parodied on The Cleveland Show with Roberta in the episode "Cleveland Live!".
Cleveland: Roberta! You shouldn't be drinking as you are only fifteen years old!
Roberta:(clearly drunk) Bitch, I only play fifteen!
However, in Italian, Trent was voiced by an actual teenager. (Alessandro Ward, who was 17 when the series premiered in Italy).
Jason Marsden utilized his small stature and youthful-looking face to make a career out of playing younger characters up to the age of 30, but now that he's careening helplessly toward the big Four Oh, he's resigned himself to doing mostly voice-over work to hide his withered, ugly visage◊.
Scott Menville who is nearing his 40's primarily voices teenagers or younger children.
The character Eugene Meltsner from AdventuresinOdyssey has gone from his mid teens-early twenties, his voice actor Will Ryan was in his 50's when he started he's now in his 70's.
Parodied by Family Guy regarding 90210. Andrea Zuckerman, whose actor was the oldest of the "teenagers", was depicted as a senile old woman.
Averted, rather humorously, in Sealab 2021 "How many times am I going to have my thirtieth birthday? Well according to your drivers license, I'd say five!."
In a very interesting case, in the Chilean Spanish dub of Avatar The Last Air Bender, Aang's VA, Rene Pinochet (NOT related to the infamous Chilean dictator) was more than 30 years old when he started voicing Aang. Justified in his case, because despite his age, he still sounds like a 10 year old kid; he was born premature and his voice has not changed since childhood.
As pointed out on its official entry none of the cast of Phineas and Ferb are remotely the same ages as their characters. The most notable is Baljeet, who is supposed to be "less than 15" but is played by 30-something Maulik Pancholy.
Although Stacy may well tie with him; she's around the same age as Candace (15) and is voiced by Kelly Hu (who was 39 when she started playing her!).
Shannon Chan-Kent, who provides the singing voice for Pinkie Pie in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, also voices the filly Silver Spoon in "Call of the Cutie".
Zigzagged by the show as a whole; Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo are played by actual children, while the only two recurring male children are played by adult actors (plus Spike, who technically qualifies as a child but isn't a pony, who is played by an adult woman).
A woman, Treva Throneberry, pretended to be a teenager throughout her 20s and early 30s and moved from foster home to foster home. She got a tuition to go to college and was finally arrested for fraud. Interestingly, she didn't look especially youthful.
31-year-old Patricia Dye posed as a teenage boy so that she could have sex with a teen girl.
A member of the Hong Kong police force successfully posed as a 15-year old high school student to uncover Triad recruitment of high school students. He got the idea from a movie.
Cosplayers regularly portray characters that are considerably younger than themselves. Characters in their younger to mid-teens are prevalent in many popular series; meanwhile, the skills you need to make your own costumes require time and practice to develop. Even if you opt to buy your costumes, cosplaying eats up a LOT of money either way, so you're generally much better off if you have an income level more typical of an adult.
Kevin Bacon enrolled as a high school student prior to filming Foot Loose just to see if he was still believable as a teen at age 25, according to the Footloose DVD commentary.
Riley Weston was born Kimberlee Kramer in 1966. In May 1997, she changed her name and began claiming her date of birth as 1979 in order to be considered for acting roles. The deception was assisted by her small size, with a height of 4' 11" and weight of 93 pounds. In 1998, she began drafting screenplays and marketing herself to television studios as a recent high school graduate. She was soon hired by the WB Network as a writer for the show Felicity after they saw one of her scripts about teenage sisters. Hailed as a child prodigy and "wunderkind," she was featured on Entertainment Weekly's October 1998 list of the "100 Most Creative People in Entertainment," which described her as an up-and-coming 19-year-old, though she was really 31. Shortly thereafter, she was offered a half-million dollar screenwriting deal with Disney. After Entertainment Tonight began working on a segment about Weston, her real identity and age soon emerged. Soon after, her contract with WB expired and was not renewed, and her deal with Disney fell through.
Barbora Škrlová was a 33-year-old Czech woman suspected with child abuse and cannibalism who fled to Norway and pretended to be a 13-year-old boy named "Adam". It worked for a while, though she was eventually arrested and sent back to the Czech Republic.
When Shirley Temple was signed with Fox Studios (later part of 20th Century Fox), the studio shaved a year off her age to make her seem more precocious, even altering her birth certificate. She was initially presented to the public as a four-year-old when she was actually almost six. Shirley didn't learn how old she really was until she was thirteen.
Exceptions:
Anime and Manga
A commentary on the ADV Films release of Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer includes a few comments on the rarity of the exception, in this case being Kevin Corn, "an actual teenager playing an actual teenager". Of course, his character's five-year-old sister was played by the much older Sasha Paysinger...
Happened again when ADV Films dubbed Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. The protagonists (a 14-year-old Puppy Love couple and a five-year-old girl) were voiced by three adult seiyuu, all female, in the original Japanese; in the ADV dub, they're all played by kids closer to the characters' ages — and Jean's voice is provided by an actual boy who manages a passable if sometimes shaky French accent.
Played straight and lampshaded in the dub for the Fullmetal Alchemist Chibi Wrap Party OAV, where the now noticeably older sounding Aaron playing Al:
Edward: Al, what happened to your voice?
Alphonse:It's called puberty, Ed. Maybe it'll happen to you some day.
Similarly, in the Vision of Escaflowne English dub 13-year-old Andrew Francis plays 16-year-old Dilandau Albatou... in his debut role.
The Sailor Moon musicals usually played this trope straight, but towards the end of their run started casting girls that actually would have been the right age as the main characters. However, even before this, they always cast Chibi Usa as a girl of the right age (to the point where the first actress who played her appeared in the 10th anniversary show to play Black Lady, the grown-up version of the same character). The even younger Chibi Chibi was also played by a particularly young actress. Particularly notable is that the final actress for Sailor Moon, Marina Kuroki, was 12 years old playing a 14-year-old at the time of her first show.
Voice acting example: Dotty from Clue Club, the youngest member of the group, who's famous for complaining about not being allowed to come along "because I'm only thirteen," was voiced by a girl who was actually ten.
Also, 12-year-old child actor Kazuto Tomizawa played V.V, who looks around 12. And in a twist, V.V is actually around 60, as he stopped aging when he was a pre-teen boy and got his Code.
Ironically enough, in the Japanese version, Mayumi Tanaka and Keiko Yokoyama, both who were in their thirties (so were the Streamline V As for these two!), portray Pazu and Sheeta as high-pitched-sounding kids.) It remains debatable over who's performance of these two characters are preferable.
In the Ranma ½ dub, almost all of the lead characters are voiced by teens, although it's the polar opposite for Happosai. He is hundreds of years old and is voiced by Paul Dobson, who was 30 at the time.
Rachel Hirschfeld, who did the English dub for 12 year-old Anita King in ROD the TV (and other roles in various anime), was about the same age at the time. Chiwa Saitou who did the original Japanese track, on the other hand, was about 22 years-old.
In the English dub of Spirited Away, 10-year-old Chihiro is played by 11-year-old Daveigh Chase.
Film
Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were all the same age as their characters in the Harry Potter films when they began the film series at age 11. Of course, as time has gone on, the actors have gained a bit of a lead on the characters they play, to the point that, as of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, they're all 20-21 years old but playing 17-18 year-olds.
Emma Watson actually started off younger than Hermione. In the first film, she was 10-years-old playing 11.
This was the subject of a misaimed parody in Epic Movie, where the "kids" were all in their forties, and "Hermione" was nine months pregnant. It gets even more inappropriate: "Hermione" was shown smoking.
The title role in Babe was played by 48 different piglets, because they grow so quickly. A makeup artist was employed to make the pigs look similar.
All the lead actors of 10 Things I Hate About You were actual teenagers: 19-year-old Heath Ledger and 17-year-old Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik (though the latter two play fifteen-year-olds).
Sue Lyon was 14, and playing 14, when she filmed Lolita. (In the original novel, Lolita was 12; the character's age was raised to comply with the censors. Nabokov himself had said "to make a real 12-year-old girl play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral.") Many are under the mistaken impression that she was 16, because the film was released in 1962, and Lyon was born in 1946. The film was, however, filmed between November 1960-May 1961, and she was born July 10th, 1946, making her 14 for the duration of filming.
Similarly, Dominique Swain was 15 when she played the 14-year-old Lolita in The Remake (again, the character's age was raised to comply with the censors).
The 10-year-old (at time of filming) Fairuza Balk played the older but still preteen Dorothy Gale in Return to Oz.
Michelle Trachtenberg played the 11-year-old sixth-grader Harriet in Harriet the Spy, while the actress was 10 years old to the day when shooting began on October 11th, 1995 (this may have been done for labor law reasons, or it may have been a coincidence).
Michael Cera (Evan) was 18 and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Fogel/"McLovin") 17 when playing their graduating high-school characters in Superbad. Jonah Hill (Seth), by contrast, was 23 (due to legal regulations, Mintz-Plasse's mother actually had to be on the set of Superbad the day his character's sex scene was shot).
The 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet featured one of the only examples of an actress playing Juliet being anywhere near her age. Juliet, who is supposed to be nearing 14, was played by 15-year-old Olivia Hussey. Hussey was famously barred from the premiere due to her age. In effect, she was deemed too young to witness a scene featuring her own nude body. Seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting was impressively young for Romeo, as well.
Gogo Yubari, the psychotic 17-year-old killer from Kill Bill was played by the 18-year-old Chiaki Kuriyama (the film was released on her 19th birthday).
Inverted in Mysterious Skin with Brady Corbet and Michelle Trachtenberg. Corbet was 15 and playing a 17-18 year-old, while Trachtenberg was 18, the same age as her character.
The Star Wars films. Carrie Fisher was 18 when playing 19-year-old Princess Leia (and then 21 when playing 22-year-old Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, and 24 when playing 23-year-old Leia in Return of the Jedi). 19-year-old Anakin Skywalker was played by 19-year-old Hayden Christensen at the time of filming Attack of the Clones; when Anakin was 22, in Revenge of the Sith, Christensen was 22. Natalie Portman was 16 when playing Amidala at 14; she also played her at 24 when she was 19, and at 27 when she was 22.
Pan's Labyrinth. Guillermo Del Toro changed the screenplay when he was impressed by an actress a few years older than the part asked for initially.
Kirsten Dunst was eleven years old in Interview With a Vampire, where she played a vampire who was infected at eleven years old and was never able to grow up. Her kiss with the adult Brad Pitt led to a fair amount of controversy.
Interestingly (according to an interview with Dunst shortly after filming), the director called cut before they actually kissed on almost all takes (you'll notice she has her hand between the camera and their mouths when she leans in for the kiss, presumably to cover this) but there was one time when cut wasn't called early enough. Dunst was not pleased about this.
The book version of Claudia (Dunst's character) is assumed to be between three and six years old at the time of her turning. The character was likely aged up for the movie because the filmmakers would have had difficulty casting such a young child into the role.
The Virgin Suicides: The actresses playing the younger Lisbon sisters were close in age to their characters, from Kirsten Dunst (16) as 14-15 year-old Lux, to Hanna R. Hall (14) who played 13-year-old Cecilia, to Chelse Swain (15) as 15-16-year-old Bonnie.
Lost in Translation: Scarlett Johansson was not yet 18 when she played Charlotte, who is in her early-to-mid twenties (going by her reference to having graduated from college a little while previously). Johansson had just graduated from high school when she got the part.
In Somewhere, 11-year-old Cleo is played by 11-year-old Elle Fanning (she was 12 by the time of its release).
Yet another Sofia Coppola film, Marie Antoinette, features a partial subversion - it starts off playing the trope straight by having 23-year-old Kirsten Dunst portray the future queen of France at age 14, but Dunst continues to play her all the way into her thirties.
The Film of the BookTwilight: Kristen Stewart (Bella) was actually seventeen and Taylor Lautner (Jacob) was fifteen during filming. Robert Pattinson is twenty-two, in contrast to the eternally 17-year-old Edward. The rest of the actors playing the Cullens are mostly in their early twenties, but it's jusified as their characters aren't even really of high school attending age to begin with.
Chloë Moretz, at 11, plays 10-year-old Hit Girl in Kick-Ass. 17-year-old Kick-Ass himself is played by 19-year-old Aaron Johnson.
Matchstick Men is an unusual case in that an actress in her twenties plays a 14 year old girl with surprising believability, yet in the end it's revealed that her character really is in her twenties.
In Apocalypse Now, Laurence Fishburne played a 17-year-old soldier, but he was only 14 years old when filming started (due to the film's long period of production and post-production, Fishburne was 17 when the movie was released).
In Sixteen Candles the 16-year-old protagonist is portrayed by a 16-year-old Molly Ringwald. In the same movie, the trope is delightfully lampshaded by Ringwald's comments on a classmate (played by then-25-year-old Haviland Morris). "I swear to God, Caroline Mulford had to flunk about nine grades."
In Pretty In Pink, Molly Ringwald was 18 while playing a high school senior.
In the movie Real Genius, Gabe Jarret played a 15-year-old, and was actually 15 at the time of the film's release.
Averted in Danny Boyle's 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire: eighteen-year-old Dev Patel plays eighteen-year-old Jamal Malik.
Partial subversion: In the film version of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, eighteen-year-old David Kross plays main character Michael Berg from the age of fifteen into his early twenties. Considering the fairly explicit sex scenes with co-star Kate Winslet, there was very little chance of Michael being cast any younger. It is also worth noting that, although this is not mentioned in the film, the book features a brief scene in which Kate Winslet's character Hanna Schmitz expresses the false understanding that Michael is at university already when she starts having sex with him, implying that he looks several years older than he actually is.
In the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life there is a scene in which an instructor (played by John Cleese) at what appears to be a religious institution of learning is teaching a class how to have intercourse with his good lady-wife. While in the church service, all the children are... well, children. When we get to the classroom and intercourse discussion, however, they are all played by the various Pythons.
When the instructor catches one of them playing with an ocarina, he punishes him by making him play on the rugby team later, which is made up of actual children again!
Mia Sara was perhaps the only actual teenager in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Her character Sloane was a junior in high school; she was 18 at the time.
The Professional features a thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman playing twelve-year-old Mathilda. Which makes her love towards Leon as poignant as it's odd.
Evan Rachel Wood was fourteen when she was cast in Thirteen, the title referring to her character's age (Wood turned fifteen during filming). Considering the sex-and-drugs subject matter of the movie, probably no one would have blamed them if they had cast a baby-faced adult, so it's a notable near-Aversion.
Tara Steele was about ten when she played teenaged Katie in Mockingbird Don't Sing, though the charachter was 'supposed' to look much younger than she really was.
Rebel Without a Cause is a partial exception; Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo were 16, portraying teens. James Dean, however, was 24.
Victoire Thivisol was four years old when she played the main role in Ponette, that of a four-year-old who loses her mother. She even won a Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her heartbreaking performance.
All of the teenagers in Casper were played by people between the ages of 13 and 15 (including the voice actor for the titular character), and the temporarily revived Casper is played by a 17 year old. For somebody used to Dawson Casting in movies, the sight of an entire classroom of teenagers who actually look like teenagers is actually rather jarring.
The live action adaptation of The Last Airbender both plays this straight and subverts it. Jackson Rathbone (Sokka) was 25 playing 15 and Dev Patel (Zuko) was 19 playing 16, but both Noah Ringer (Aang) and Nicola Peltz (Katara)were the same age as their characters during filming (12 and 14 respectively).
Disturbingly avoided in Taxi Driver. Jodie Foster was 13 when she played the role of a 12-year-old prostitute (except for the nude scenes, which were performed by her older sister, who was of legal age).
The Sound of Music largely kept the actors relatively close to their ages - Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich) was fifteen playing fourteen, Heather Menzies (Louisa) fourteen playing thirteen, Duane Chase (Kurt) thirteen playing eleven, Angela Cartwright (Brigitta) twelve playing ten, Debbie Turner (Marta) eight playing seven, and Kym Karath (Gretl) six playing five. Played utterly straight, however, with Charmian Carr (Liesl), who was twenty-one playing sixteen-going-on-seventeen.
In Another Cinderella Story, Selena Gomez was 15 and playing a 15-year-old high schooler. Critics were squicked that Drew Seeley, who played her love interest, was 24, but the movie makes it clear that his character really is that age.
The Diary of a Wimpy Kid film adaptation. The supplemental film diary mentioned that a lot of the child actors used were actual middle-schoolers and that the two boys playing Greg and Rowley actually missed their first days of sixth grade to film the movie.
Borderline case: Most of the actors playing students in Sky High were between 17 and 19 at the time of the film's release, although many of them played high school freshmen.
Brooke Shields, in her 1980s movie appearances from Age 14-17 (most famously The Blue Lagoon), appeared in a variety of R-rated films that involved frontal nudity. In each case, an over-20 body double covered those moments for her.
Mandy Moore was 18 when she played high school student Jamie in A Walk to Remember, though her also high school aged love interest was played by Shane West, who was 21 at the time.
Walking the line in Mystery Team; the actors are in their early twenties, and their characters are high school seniors.
Ann Miller played a character several years older in You Can't Take It With You when she was fifteen.
In Welcome to the Dollhouse, released in 1995, Heather Matarazzo, born in 1982, is the right age to play a seventh grader.
Live-Action TV
Claire Danes (Angela) and Devon Gummersall (Brian) from My So-Called Life really were teenagers at the time of filming — although the rest of the teenage characters were played by twentysomethings (including the aforementioned Senta Moses).
This is a rare, possibly unique inversion, especially for an actress, as the producers knew that Danes was only 13 years old (at the start of filming) yet they still cast her to play a character two full years older than the actress, without any retcons or fudging the numbers.
Justified with Jared Leto in the character of Jordan, who is repeating the grade the rest of the kids are in...at least for the second time.
The show has been slipping into example of this, but only due to a change in season coverage. Early seasons went at an equal time (1 school year per season), since season six ended they now run the series at half the speed (half a school year per season). This means that members of the cast are now older than their characters. However, most new characters are still about the same as their actors when introduced, leaving it well short of being as bad as The Trope Namer or any other example.
Beverly Hills 90210 did manage to avoid Dawson Casting in a few cases: Shannen Doherty (19) and Jennie Garth (18) were borderline, but at least they were still teenagers. Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling, both 17, were clear aversions. Douglas Emerson, who played Scott Scanlon, was actually 16, making him the only actor the same age as his character, but he was written off in the second season.
Most of the original cast on Saved by the Bell were close to age-correct, though there was a little leakage into the 20s by graduation from the portion of the cast not from the original Good Morning Miss Bliss:
Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who played Zack, was 14 when he started on Good Morning Miss Bliss, playing an eighth-grader and was 19 at "graduation". Lark Voorhies, who played Lisa, was only a few weeks younger than Gosselaar. Dustin Diamond was three years younger than them, and the youngest in the cast, playing an eighth-grader at age 11 (and a high schooler at 12). If you were wondering why it took so long for Screech's voice to drop, that's why.
Mario Lopez (Slater) started out at age 16, graduating at 20; Tiffani(-Amber) Thiessen started at 15, making her the same age as Gosselaar and Voorhees. The eldest was Elizabeth Berkley, 17 when she started and 21 when it ended.
The other kids on Hannah Montana, including star Miley Cyrus, were actually in their early-to-mid-teens when the show started, making the casting of Jackson all the more glaring - and baffling.
In general, Disney Channel is pretty good at averting this trope.
Averted in Shake It Up, where the characters are supposed to be in high school. In fact, leads Bella Thorne (Cece) and Adam Irigoyen (Deuce) were only 13 years old playing high school freshmen at the start of the series.
Super Sentai seems to be averting this trope in recent years, since the casting directors reportedly will not see anyone over the age of 21 for the leads. Several recent series have had 15 to 17-year-old characters played by actors of the same age and even teenagers playing characters older than themselves - Shinkenger has 14-year-old Runa Natsui as 17-year-old Kaoru. There are however a few examples of the trope played straight, such as Goseiger where 20-year-old Mikiho Niwa plays 17-year-old Moune.
Christina Applegate was 15 years old and playing a 15-year-old in the first season of Married... with Children (her character's age was said to be 16 a few months before Christina herself, making it a rare case of a teen actor younger than her role).
David Faustino was much the same, playing a 12-year-old boy when he was in fact 12 years old. In both cases, the characters aged at the same rate as the actors. Of course, while Kelly was repeatedly stated to have an active sex life, Applegate wasn't actively portrayed making out on camera until after she turned 18.
The Bill features a 19-year-old character, played by an actress who was 17 when she started filming.
Sarah Michelle Gellar was 16 when she started playing Erica Kane's long lost daughter Kendall Hart on All My Children, who was in her twenties. It should be said though that her character's age was a retcon from 16 because of the continuity errors it created.
Freaks and Geeks had a good percentage of its cast close to or of the high school age (24-year-old Linda Cardellini and 21-year-old James Franco being exceptions). John Francis Daley, playing a very small and scrawny 14-year-old, was the same age as his character.
Also, in Bones, in which a now 24-year-old John Francis Daley plays 24-year-old wunderkind psychologist Lance Sweets.
In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is about 28-29 years old by the end of the third season, going by a reference to her having graduated from the military academy six years previously. Katee Sackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
for that matter, the fact that she was cast could be considered an inversion of this trope: the original script for the miniseries described Starbuck as being in her thirties. Katee was 22 when she tried out for the part and eventually got it, despite initial objections from the casting directors that she was too young.
Firefly has twenty-year-old Jewel Staite playing Kaylee, who is implied to be older than 17-year-old River (played by Summer Glau, who IRL was a year older than Jewel).
There's also a 27-year-old Sean Maher playing Simon, who's around 25, going by the age of the child actor who portrayed a young Simon.
And a brief look at Mal's ID shows us that he's 49, despite the fact that Nathan Fillion was only 31 when the show went on air. Fans are still divided over whether this means people in the future age really slowly, or someone just got the last two digits of Mal's year of birth mixed up.
F Troop's "Wrangler Jane", presumably a character in her twenties, was played by Melody Patterson. Melody got the part after lying about her age initially, and was only 15 years old at the start of the show.
On That '70s Show, the 15-year-old character of Jackie Burkhart was played by the actually 15-year-old Mila Kunis. Mila lied about her age to be allowed to play the character. Thus, she was 14 when they started filming the series, but the producers thought she was 16.
The story goes that when asked how old she was, Mila said, "I'll be 18 on my birthday." She just didn't say which birthday. The producers liked her so much that they decided to keep her even when they found out the truth.
When the show started, Laura Prepon and Wilmer Valderrama were also teens; however, they aged normally, while their characters did not.
In Supernatural, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles are actually almost exactly the same ages as their characters, Sam and Dean Winchester. They are each one year older than their characters*
Although that may have just been an accident. There's a pretty large gap of time between when an episode films and when it airs, and their birthdays might have just happened in the meantime.
, but the four-year age gap between them is the same.
However, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays their father, is only 12 years older than Ackles (something Padalecki and Ackles used to tease him about). This begins to border on squick for those who also watch Grey's Anatomy, considering Jensen Ackles (his son) and Katherine Heigl (his girlfriend) are the same age.
Played straight with Teen!Dean in "After School Special," but inverted with Teen!Sam: the actor playing 14-year-old Sam played 8-year-old in "A Very Supernatural Christmas" a year before. The kid was about 12 years old or maybe 13, but very small for his age.
The cast of Skins are generally the same age as the characters they play; given the show's apparent policy of "sex, drugs, and nudity whenever possible," one does wonder how many over-18 viewers have wound up feeling really conflicted or really dirty at some points.
Not many, since the age of consent in the United Kingdom is 16.
The American version landed in hot water with the Moral Guardians for casting teenaged actors. Most notably, a nude scene was shot involving a 17-year-old actor... and then the producers realized that it was child porn.
Gilmore Girls featured 33-year-old Lauren Graham as 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore, and 18-year-old (at the time of casting) Alexis Bledel as 16-year-old Rory Gilmore.
Lucy Griffiths, who played Marian in the BBC's 2006 version of Robin Hood was 18 and playing a 21-year-old character in the first series.
On The Wire, Jermaine Crawford (Duquan "Dukie" Weems), Maestro Harrell (Randy Wagstaff) and Michael B. Jordan (Wallace) were the same ages as their characters (15, 14, and 16 respectively).
Many Nickelodeon shows using a live-action cast actually used actors around the same age as their characters.
Notably, The Adventures of Pete and Pete actually paid attention to how old the characters were and raised their ages accordingly and the producers later commented that the kids essentially grew up on the set because they'd been doing the shorts and television series for so long.
Drake & Josh had the title actors be the appropriate age, with Miranda Cosgrove playing a 10-year-old. But the show's timeline was different then real time, and the actors were hitting their 20s when the characters were still in High School. Cosgrove especially was about 14, still supposedly about 11 or 12.
Melissa Joan Hart was fifteen when she started playing Clarissa Darling, and her character aged up accordingly.
Claire in Heroes was 17 years old - and played by 16-year-old (when the series started) Hayden Panettiere - until the writers noticed fans enjoying the chemistry displayed between Claire and 26-year-old Peter and writers docked her age down one or two years to make them less comfortable with the pairing until The Reveal of Peter and Claire being related.
The kids who play Molly Walker and Micah Sanders are about the same age as their characters, or at least they were until the show took some time off. Micah is supposed to be eleven, and the actor is now fourteen, which is very noticeable as puberty has begun to kick in and his voice changed. Deepest voice on an eleven year old ever.
In Home Improvement the actors playing the kids were all of appropriate age: Zachary Ty Bryan (Brad) was the same age as his character, Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Randy) was a year older than his character and Taran Noah Smith (Mark) was a year older than his character.
Of course, now The Movie is in the works, so one wonders if this will slip into the non-exception category (Cera is 21 and Shawkat is 20 right now).
Tyler James Williams, the young Chris Rock on Everybody Hates Chris, was 12 when he began playing his middle-school-aged role. Unfortunately, he's since hit puberty ... and now his voice is noticably more baritone than that of the adult Chris Rock, who narrates the show.
Not to mention one of the early jokes of the show was that Chris' younger brother was taller than him (mirroring Chris Rock's real life younger brother who grew taller than him at an early age). After puberty, Williams was much taller than the other actor, not to mention his constant bully (though the bully remained much bulkier than the skinny Williams).
Holly Tyler of What I Like About You was exactly the same age as her portrayer Amanda Bynes (starting at 16 in the pilot), AND aged in real time to boot (both were nearly 20 in the finale).
In What a Girl Wants, Bynes was a sixteen-year-old playing a seventeen-year-old.
Neil Patrick Harris was more or less the same age as his character when he was in Doogie Howser, M.D., although the show does illustrate why Dawson Casting exists — he really grew from season one to season two.
Harris was in fact, the same age as Doogie. He was only about 3 months older than his character.
However, Max Casella was 22 years-old when he began playing 16-year-old Vinnie.
Most of the Boy Meets World cast (with the already-mentioned exception of Trina McGee) were fairly close to the ages of the characters they portrayed. In the first season, Will Friedle was 17 and playing a 15-year-old and 11-year-olds Cory, Shawn, and Topanga were portrayed by Ben Savage (13), Rider Strong (13), and Danielle Fishel (12). But the timeline actually moves faster in the BMW universe than in real life: The gang takes five years to graduate high school instead of seven, making Savage and Strong the same ages as their characters (and Fishel a year younger). Matthew Lawrence joined the cast in the fifth season at age 17, playing Shawn's older brother, despite being two months younger than Strong.
In fact, even though only two years of college are shown, it is strongly implied that at least three years have passed; Eric, Jack, and Rachel are all graduating despite (apparently) being Juniors. This makes Maitland Ward, who joined in the sixth season at age 21, yet another aversion.
The reason Dawson Casting exists was perfectly demonstrated in the episode "Better than the Average Cory", where we meet 13-year-old artist Alexandra Nechita (playing herself), who strikes up a friendship with Cory's little sister Morgan, who is the same age (and played by also 13-year-old Lindsay Ridgeway). Nechita looks several years older than Ridgeway, to the point that one reviewercould not believe they were the same age, even though they were.
Willa Holland really was fourteen when she played fourteen-year-old Kaitlin Cooper on The O.C.. Actually, she didn't turn fourteen until just after her first episode aired, but that's fine because Kaitlin was eleven two seasons earlier, anyway.
Mischa Barton was 17 when Marissa was 16 in the first season.
Malcolm in the Middle cuts this fairly close; 15-year-old Frankie Muniz played 14-year-old (at the start) Malcolm; 9-year-old Erik Per Sullivan played his younger brother Dewey; 20-year-old Christopher Masterson played his graduated and world-hopping brother Francis; but his older brother Reese was played by 14-year-old Justin Berfield (who was taller than Frankie, and remained so throughout the entire series, to the producers' probable relief).
At least later on. At first, Francis was 15 and at military school, and the younger three brothers were in elementary school. But then the producers had to tweak things when the teen actors couldn't maintain the appearance of being pre-teen.
Invoked in one episode, an adult woman in her early 20s poses as a student in order to bust drug dealers. Nobody is fooled.
Matthew in One Life to Live is canonically about a year older than actor Eddie Alderson.
Richard Castle's daughter Alexis is fifteen, as is her actress Molly Quinn.
The whole Castle family falls under this trope. The actors portraying Richard Castle and his mother (Nathan Fillion and Susan Sullivan) were 37 and 66 when filming began. That makes Castle a young father, but it does work out.
Lie to Me: Cal Lightman's daughter is 15/16; the actress playing her 18.
Although the flagship character of Caprica (Zoe Graystone) is played by someone about six years older than the character, Tamara is herself a semi-exception. Genevieve Buechneris older than Tamara Adama but she's much closer than her colleagues to her character's age, being only 18 while her character is about 15.
A deleted scene from the Pilot Episode of The X-Files shows Scully as a teacher at Quantico, and it has been noted by many fans that she looks much younger than her students.
Gillian Anderson was actually four full years younger than her character on "The X-Files". She lied to the producers of the show to say she was 27, to make her seem more credible as an FBI agent with a medical degree.
David Duchovny was only a year older than his character, Mulder.
New Zealand series The Tribe averted this with every one of the actors playing characters the same age, give or take a year.
The Canadian TV series Ramona, based on the Ramona Quimby books, subverted this surprisingly well. Ramona is 8 years old and in third grade. So is her actress. (The film, on the other hand, is a ludicrous example of this trope played very straight!)
Breaking Bad's high school-age Walter White, Jr. is played by high school-age RJ Mitte. As of Season 3, both character and actor are 17.
The George Lopez Show averts this with Max, who is played by Luis Armand Garcia. They are both the same age. Played somewhat straight with Carmen(Masiela Lusha), in that Masiela Lusha was 17 at the start of the show and Carmen was supposed to be 13-14.
All characters on The Wonder Years had ages to match their roles, with star Fred Savage being 11 years old when the show first began. Following this trope, Fred Savage has had trouble finding work as an adult after his lauded childhood acting career.
Unlike almost all of her costars, Michelle Trachtenberg in Buffy was the same age as her character, Dawn (14 years old when she first appeared on the show).
Another aversion from Buffy: at the time of Faith's first appearance in Faith, Hope and Trick, Eliza Dushku was actually seventeen, Faith's age at the time(she had to apply for legal emancipation so she could work on the show unencumbered by child labour laws).
Taylor Momsen was fourteen when Gossip Girl premiered, same age as her character Jenny. This ended up pulling the plug on the planned Jenny/Nate romance in season two since Chace Crawford (in his twenties) wasn't comfortable with a storyline that would have him regularly making out with a then fifteen year-old.
Most of the actors and actresses playing kids on The Secret World of Alex Mack were within a few years of their characters' ages.
In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Luke Smith and Maria Jackson were played by actual teenagers. This demonstrates one of the advantages of Dawson Casting because both actors had to leave the show for academic reasons.
Inverted on The West Wing. Elizabeth Moss is at least a year younger than Zoey Bartlet.
On 3rd Rock from the Sun, Tommy was Really 700 Years Old, but his fake Earth age was always the same as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's real age (both were fourteen in the first season). Both his girlfriends were played by actresses (Shay Astar and Larisa Oleynik) born in the same year as him. However, there was the interesting situation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt looking younger than he actually was, especially in the early seasons. August looked like she was a good year or two older than Tommy, but actually Shay Astar is seven months younger than Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Theater
John Owen Jones was 26 when he first assumed the role of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, who ages from late thirties-early forties at the beginning of the show and into his sixties by the end. Alexander Gemignani was 27 when he starred as Valjean in the Broadway revival. This kind of thing also happens to a lesser degree with Javert and the Thenardiers, who age similarly to Valjean throughout the show, and are usually cast near the younger end of that range (i.e. 40s). Valjean, however, is most susceptible to inverted Dawson Casting due to the role being written for a high tenor, and there are few men Valjean's age who can hit those high notes with the kind of power necessary for the role.
Similarly, this has been a respected convention for the casting of the very aged King Lear, due to the exhausting nature of the role (in one scene, Lear has to carry around Cordelia's body). However, this has not stopped many of the Shakespearean actors in their sixties and seventies from taking on the role, particularly more recently, and often multiple times throughout their lives. As a result, Lears come in all different ages.
Sir John Gielgud at 26, 46, 51, and finally at 90(!), as part of an all-star radio production.
Both 13 and the recent revival of Bye Bye Birdie averted this, casting real teens to play the teen characters.
Amy Nuttall was 16 when playing Christine in The Phantom of the Opera on the West End, and to date is the youngest leading actress ever featured in the London production.
Other
Incredibly, Maria Callas began her opera career at the age of 15, as the leading lady in Cavallera rusticana, which is about a young, knocked-up village girl, probably about 15-16. Since it requires performers who can sing over an orchestra, this trope doesn't have many opera exceptions, folks.
Although there is one other noticeable aversion in the field of opera — Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky felt that older singers playing young, passionate lovers would cause people to be unable to take his opera seriously. He had students at the Moscow Conservatory put on the first performance of Eugene Onegin.
Lampshaded by the Firesign Theatre on their album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers; High school student Porgie Tirebiter's best friend Mudhead is in court, and the prosecutor(Porgie's dad) says "So you don't go to school?" to which Mudhead replies, "Hell, no! I'm thirty years old!"
I'm putting this one in "Other" because it derives from Theatre, Live-Action Film, and Television: Patty Duke in three separate productions of The Miracle Worker. Duke was able to play Helen Keller on Broadway well into her teens, and played her again in the 1962 film adaptation, partly because she was very small: even in adulthood she has never grown taller than five feet. Her height presented a particular challenge to the producers of the 1979 TV remake, in which she played Annie Sullivan, because she was cast opposite fifteen-year-old Melissa Gilbert — confronting audiences with a seven-year-old Helen Keller who was taller than her teacher.
The Full Cast Audio book recordings, which was founded by Bruce Coville, always uses age-appropriate voice actors for every book they record.
In the notorious "Friday" video, 13-year-old Rebecca Black and her real-life friends (who are presumably in the 12-14 range) play characters who are at least 16, as one of them is driving a car. This has been observed and lampshaded in many parodies.
In the music video for Aerosmith's song "Crazy", 17-year-old Alicia Silverstone and 16-year-old Liv Tyler play two students who skip class and go on a road trip together. The fact that this is an exception is surprising because the video is fanservice-heavy and even features Liv doing a striptease at one point. Not to mention the fact that Liv is lead singer Steven Tyler's daughter.
Western Animation
ReBoot actually replaced the voice actor for Enzo three times because the child actors were growing older and lost their kid-like voices.
Similarly, Avatar The Last Airbender cast Aang and Toph with voice actors about the same age as the characters when they started. One delightful effect of this was that Aang's voice started breaking realistically over the course of the series.
In the final season, the show's sound people began artificially pitching Aang's voice up to mask the fact that the actor was aging faster than the character, succeeding so well not even the creators noticed until they were informed.
There was an example of this in the show too. In The Ember Island Players, Aang is played by an older woman. Toph is played by an older man. Aang was upset, Toph was overjoyed.
Which is actually a Shout Out to Peter Pan, where the title character is traditionally played on stage by a petite-figured woman in her early twenties. Muscleman as Toph was a reference to her original character concept.
Chowder, Panini and Gorgonzola who are children are voiced by actual children in Chowder.
10-year-old Jazmine Dubois on The Boondocks is voiced by Gabby Soleil, who was 10 when the first season aired. Jazmine is immature for her age, whereas Huey (10) and Riley (8), who act like they're in college and high school, respectively, are both voiced by 30-something Regina King.
Subverted with all Peanuts shows, in which Charles M. Schultz and Lee Melendez all insisted that young children play the roles of the gang, ranging from 4 to 8 years old. Many of the actors were non-actors and could not remember their lines well, which is why the characters have a slightly halting patois, as the kid would record a phrase or a single sentence one at a time, such as when Sally detailed what she wanted for Christmas in her letter to Santa in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Charlie Brown was the only character that would always have a professional child actor doing his voice, though especially in the early shows Linus and Lucy were usually played by professionals too.
For Monsters, Inc., Pixar used the vocal performance of an actual 4 year old to play Boo. This includes bouncing her on a knee during the door rails sequence. This is the most notable as every other Pixar film does the same thing with their child characters (except Violet in The Incredibles, who was voiced by then 34-year-old Sarah Vowell).
John Morris was 10 when he was cast to voice 6 year old Andy in Toy Story. When Toy Story 3 was given a go-ahead, Pixar immediately knew they had to at least consider Morris to reprise Andy as a college aged kid and were pleased to find his voice didn't drop three octaves. The timeline of the series wasn't exactly like real world time, but it was certainly close enough (15 years real time from the first film to the third, but at least 12 years had passed).
Meg Griffin from Family Guy was originally an exception, voiced by teenagers Lacey Chabert and Mila Kunis. However, she didn't age normally, while Mila Kunis did.
A 10-year-old did the voice of 13-year-old Dotty in Clue Club.
Children of both genders on The Simpsons are voiced by adult women, but in the episode "O Brother, Where Bart Thou?", the young orphan that Bart adopts as his brother was played by 9-year-old Jordan Nagai.
The children characters on Hey Arnold! were all voiced by kids in their early teens, at least at the start in 1996. The voice actors for Gerald and Helga stayed the same throughout the show's run until 2004, but Arnold himself was recast four or five times with kids who got progressively younger.
Fievel of the An American Tail movies was always voiced by a child. By the time they were ready to make the 3rd and 4th movies the original voice actor was too old, so they got another kid to play the part. Fievel's sister Tanya, however, was no exception to Dawson Casting.
In Arthur most of the children were voiced by actual children. The exception is Binky, whose voice actor was in his thirties at the beginning of the series. Most of the cast members were replaced as they reached puberty (Arthur himself has had seven different voice actors), however, some have had the same voice actors for the entire run. Buster, Francine, Muffy, Molly, and Fern are in their 20s and 30s by now.
In KaBlam!!, most of the child characters (save for Sniz & Fondue) were done by kids in their elementary-school ages or early teens in 1996. By the time the show ended in 2000, most of them were in their early to mid teens.
The only non-Sniz & Fondue characters "farthest" from their voice actors were 13-year-old Noah Segan playing 10-year-old Henry, and 11-year-old Danielle Judovits playing 7-year-old Loopy.
This is made fun of multiple times in Family Guy, usually whenever Jillian is concerned.
South Park Ike is voiced by real life toddlers, usually the children of the show's staff, and has had a different voice actor for every season of the show.
Averted on The Amazing World of Gumball for lead characters Gumball and Darwin, who are both middle-school age. Darwin is voiced by an 11-year old, and Gumball by a 9-year-old.
Cartoon Network shows are fond of subverting this trope lately. Finn from Adventure Time is 12 at the start of the series and currently 13, his actor is currently 15 and was 13 when the series first aired. The titular character in Chowder was 9 and his voice actor was 10 when the first episode for it aired.
On Recess, 90% of the kids in the show were played by real kids, with the exception of Spinelli, Butch, and the kindergarteners. While almost all of them weren't replaced after their voice actors went through puberty (leading to some odd moments in All Growed Down in the flashback sequence whenever Vince or Mikey started talking), the creators always wanted T.J. to have a cute little boy-voice, which led to him being replaced three times (Ross Malinger for the pilot and season one, Andrew Lawrence for the rest of the series and movie, and Myles Jeffrey for the DTV movies and the crossover with Lilo & Stitch: The Series. Gus was one of the the only male boys to have his voice never broken, as his voice actor was the youngest kid in the cast at the time.
On My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, little filly Apple Bloom is voiced by child actress Michelle Creber. Michelle also provides the singing voice for one of Apple Bloom's friends Sweetie Belle, and it isawesome.
Real Life
School plays and musicals usually invert or avert this.
Traci Lords did adult entertainment when she was a minor. She did (and does) look older than most people who were born in 1968. When the feds tried to bust the smut peddlers for molesting innocent Traci, the case fell apart when the government admitted that it, too, had been fooled when Lords traveled to Europe on a fake passport.
