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* ''Series/Fakingit'': All of the teenagers in the cast are in their 20s...though their stated ages are 15 (Karma gets a 16th birthday in season 2). This not only allows them to tackle lesbian themes...and threesomes...but it also makes the first season finale extremely Squicky in at least three ways (not the least of which is that the wedding party knowingly served alcoholic drinks to minors).
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** Some of the more egregious examples were 26-year-old Danneel Harris as Rachel in season 3, and Antwon Tanner as Skills, who was 28 ''when the show started''.
** Surprisingly, one of the only characters (and possibly the only main one) who actually look like he's in high school (Mouth) was played by 22-year-old Lee Norris, who just happened to look young for his age.
** Surprisingly, one of the only characters (and possibly the only main one) who actually look like he's in high school (Mouth) was played by 22-year-old Lee Norris, who just happened to look young for his age.
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** Some of the more egregious examples were 26-year-old Danneel Harris as Rachel in season 3, and Antwon Tanner as Skills, who was 28 ''when the show started''.
started'' and 37 by the time it ended.** Surprisingly, one of the only characters (and possibly the only main one) who actually look looked like he's he was in high school (Mouth) was played by 22-year-old Lee Norris, who just happened to look young for his age. age.
** The character of Quentin Fields was played by then ''30''-year-old Robbie Jones (though he surprisingly did look really young).
** The character of Quentin Fields was played by then ''30''-year-old Robbie Jones (though he surprisingly did look really young).
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* On the SoapOpera ''Series/AllMyChildren'', Creator/SarahMichelleGellar first appeared on the show at the real-life age of 15 in 1993 as the main character Erica Kane's previously-unknown teenaged daughter, Kendall Hart. Since Susan Lucci, the actress who portrays Erica, had been on the show since it first aired in 1970 and the show had claimed Kendall was conceived when Erica was raped as a teenager, Gellar's character was rapidly aged from 16 to 23 years old several months after the character's debut. For two years, a teenaged Gellar played a character in her early twenties and nobody really bought it but just wrote it off as WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. After Gellar left and Kendall's character was brought with a recast 6.5 years later, the character's birth year was reverted back to her original birth year, making her a 16-year old girl again in 1993.
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* On the SoapOpera ''Series/AllMyChildren'', Creator/SarahMichelleGellar first appeared on the show at the real-life age of 15 in 1993 as the main character Erica Kane's previously-unknown teenaged daughter, Kendall Hart. Since Susan Lucci, the actress who portrays Erica, had been on the show since it first aired in 1970 and the show had claimed Kendall was conceived when Erica her mother was raped as a teenager, Gellar's character was rapidly aged from 16 to 23 years old several months after the character's debut. For two years, a teenaged Gellar played a character in her early twenties and nobody really bought it but just wrote it off as WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. After Gellar left and Kendall's character was brought with a recast 6.5 years later, the character's birth year was reverted back to her original birth year, making her a 16-year old girl again in 1993.
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* ''Series/YouCantDoThatOnTelevision,'' Christine "Moose" [=McGlade=] was kept on the show until age 23 due to her ability to "pass as 16" while most of the other actors were between the ages of 10 and 15.
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* ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' (pictured) was an offender as well, as the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Creator/SarahMichelleGellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander, Creator/AlysonHannigan (22) as Willow, and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26) as Cordelia. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley (Creator/AlexisDenisov, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher.
** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (25) as Anya (18-19).
** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (25) as Anya (18-19).
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* ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' (pictured) was an offender as well, as the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Creator/SarahMichelleGellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander, Creator/AlysonHannigan (22) as Willow, and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26) as Cordelia. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley (Creator/AlexisDenisov, (Creator/AlexisDenisof, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher.
** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), and Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (25) as Anya(18-19).(18-19), though it's mentioned in season 4 that Anya started aging again at some point.
** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), and Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (25) as Anya
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* ''Series/WithoutATrace'' - 21-year-old Creator/EvanPeters plays a high school student in an episode called ''A Bend in the Road.''
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* ''Series/WithoutATrace'' - ''Series/WithoutATrace'': 21-year-old Creator/EvanPeters plays a high school student in an episode called ''A Bend in the Road.''''
* ''Series/DarkMatter'': Five says a fifteen-year old boy is around her age. The actress playing her, Jodelle Ferland, is twenty.
* ''Series/DarkMatter'': Five says a fifteen-year old boy is around her age. The actress playing her, Jodelle Ferland, is twenty.
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* ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'' plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life GracePark, who plays Sharon, is actually six years ''older'' than Creator/KateeSackhoff as Kara.
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* ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'' ''Series/BattlestarGalactica2003'' plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life GracePark, who plays Sharon, is actually six years ''older'' than Creator/KateeSackhoff as Kara.
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* In ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'', 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. Creator/KateeSackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
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* In ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'', ''Series/BattlestarGalactica2003'', 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. Creator/KateeSackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
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* ''Series/ModernFamily'': The show notably averts this for everyone except Haley. Sarah Hyland was eighteen at the time her agent tried to get her the part for sixteen year-old Haley, and the casting department tried to deny her before she even auditioned. Her agent assured them [[OlderThanTheyLook that she didn't look eighteen]]. In fact, there were some notable flame wars claiming that Sarah was too ''young'' for the role.
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** Surprisingly, one of the only characters (and possibly the only main one) who actually look like he's in high school (Mouth) was played by 22-year-old Lee Norris, who just happened to look young for his age.
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* ''Series/SwitchedAtBirth'' is about two teenage girls who were... you know. At the start of the series Bay and Daphne are both 16, but Katie Leclerc (Daphne) was 24 when it premiered (in "The Tempest," Daphne gets a fake ID so she can pass as being of drinking age. Yeah, alright). Lucas Grabeel (Toby, Bay's big brother/Daphne's biological big brother) is even more age-inappropriate, being as he was 26 come the debut.
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* Bay, Vanessa Marano's character on ''Series/SwitchedAtBirth'', was born in 1995. Vanessa herself was born in 1992. Sean Berdy (Emmett) is also about right, since he was born in 1993.
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* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'' which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools [[spoiler: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 RippedFromTheHeadlines: [[http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2010/11/fake-teens-iv-serial-teen-treva.html see it here.]] (And see below)
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* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'' which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools [[spoiler: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 RippedFromTheHeadlines: [[http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2010/11/fake-teens-iv-serial-teen-treva.html me/2010/11/15/fake-teens-iv-serial-teen-treva-throneberry/ see it here.]] (And see below)
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* At the start, the main teenaged characters on ''Series/OneTreeHill'' were all played by actors in their early twenties; 22-year-olds Chad Michael Murray and Bethany Joy Lenz, and 21-year-olds Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton. The only one still a teenager was 18-year-old James Lafferty, and even he was an example since the characters were juniors in the first season.
** Some of the more egregious examples were 26-year-old Danneel Harris as Rachel in season 3, and Antwon Tanner as Skills, who was 28 ''when the show started''.
** Some of the more egregious examples were 26-year-old Danneel Harris as Rachel in season 3, and Antwon Tanner as Skills, who was 28 ''when the show started''.
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* The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Creator/SarahMichelleGellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander, Creator/AlysonHannigan (22) as Willow, and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26) as Cordelia. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley (Creator/AlexisDenisov, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher.
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* The Creek ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' (pictured) was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where an offender as well, as the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Creator/SarahMichelleGellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander, Creator/AlysonHannigan (22) as Willow, and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26) as Cordelia. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley (Creator/AlexisDenisov, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher.
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** Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow were 30 and 31 when the show premiered, despite their characters being in their mid-20s.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two [[spoiler: Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer]]. The characters are all between 15 and 20 (aged up roughly two years from the books), the actors between 23 and 29.
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) playing Tyrion Lannister (early 20s) is a rather extreme example, even though the character is out of his teens. {{Justified|Trope}}, 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 [[Creator/MaisieWilliams Arya Stark]], who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two [[spoiler: Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer]]. The characters are all between 15 and 20 (aged up roughly two years from the books), the actors between 23 and 29.
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) playing Tyrion Lannister (early 20s) is a rather extreme example, even though the character is out of his teens. {{Justified|Trope}}, 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 [[Creator/MaisieWilliams Arya Stark]], who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
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** Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow were 30 and 31 when the show premiered, despite their characters being in their mid-20s.
mid-20s. In one scene Monica is even offended by a suggestion that she couldn't pass as 22-year old (the character was 26 at the time, the actress 32), but the rest of the characters are realistic about it.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two[[spoiler: Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer]]. Dormer. The characters are all between 15 and 20 fifteen (aged up roughly two years from the books), books) and early twienties (in Margaery's case), the actors between 23 and 29.
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) is playing Tyrion Lannister(early 20s) is who was in his early 20s in the book. In the show he's in his thirties, though it's still a rather extreme visible example, even though the character is out of his teens. {{Justified|Trope}}, 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 [[Creator/MaisieWilliams Arya Stark]], who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) is playing Tyrion Lannister
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* At 26 years old Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in ''Series/GilmoreGirls''.
** Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.
** Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.
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* At 26 27 years old Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in ''Series/GilmoreGirls''.
**''Series/GilmoreGirls''. Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.Jess, and Liza Weil (Paris) and Shelly Cole (Madeline) were 23 and 25 respectively when they played 16-year-olds. Only Jared Padalecki (Dean) and Teal Redmann (Louise) were firmly in their teens at the beginning of the show, while Alexis Bledel (Rory) was growing out of them, at 19.
**
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* ''Series/OrangeIsTheNewBlack'': Dayanara is implied to be in her late teens, while the actress (Dascha Polanco) is in her early thirties -- two years younger than her on-screen ''mother'' (Elizabeth Rodriguez). Polanco is definitely [[OlderThanTheyLook Older Than She Looks]], but not to the extent of convincing anybody that she's a teenager.
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** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (??) as Anya (18-19).
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** Later additions to the cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (??) (25) as Anya (18-19).
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* ''Series/CriminalMinds'' - 23-year-old Creator/EvanPeters plays a 16-year-old abductee in an episode called ''Mosley Lane.''
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* ''Series/WithoutATrace'' - 21-year-old Creator/EvanPeters plays a high school student in an episode called ''A Bend in the Road.''
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* In ''Series/YoungBlades'', 16-year-old RobertSheehan plays the nearly 16-year-old King Louis XIV.
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* In ''Series/YoungBlades'', 16-year-old RobertSheehan Creator/RobertSheehan plays the nearly 16-year-old King Louis XIV.
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* ''OurMissBrooks'' began on the radio, where age and appearance weren't a factor. Even so, the sixteen-year-old students Walter Denton, Harriet Conklin and Stretch Snodgrass were played by actors in their late teens. Fast forward to the television adaptation and TheMovie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
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* ''OurMissBrooks'' ''Series/OurMissBrooks'' began on the radio, where age and appearance weren't a factor. Even so, the sixteen-year-old students Walter Denton, Harriet Conklin and Stretch Snodgrass were played by actors in their late teens. Fast forward to the television adaptation and TheMovie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
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** Even Matthew Waterhouse was nearly 19 years old when Adric was introduced in the latter half of 1980. Adric's age is never revealed, but he is generally assumed to have been around 15 years old. What's more, Matthew was 22 years old when he made his final appearance as Adric (in a scene where the regenerating Fifth Doctor has visions of his former companions) but, because Adric was KilledOffForReal, the character hasn't aged.
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** Even Matthew Waterhouse was nearly 19 years old when Adric was introduced in the latter half of 1980. Adric's age is never revealed, but he is generally assumed to have been around 15 years old. What's more, Matthew was 22 years old when he made his final appearance as Adric (in a scene where the regenerating Fifth Doctor has visions of his former companions) but, because Adric was KilledOffForReal, the character hasn't aged.
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** Even Matthew Waterhouse was nearly 19 years old when Adric was introduced in the latter half of 1980. Adric's age is never revealed, but he is generally assumed to have been around 15 years old. What's more, Matthew was 22 years old when he made his final appearance as Adric (in a scene where the regenerating Fifth Doctor has visions of his former companions) but, because Adric was KilledOffForReal, the character hasn't aged.
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* OurMissBrooks began on the radio, where age and appearance weren't a factor. Even so, the sixteen-year-old students Walter Denton, Harriet Conklin and Stretch Snodgrass were played by actors in their late teens. Fast forward to the television adaptation and TheMovie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
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* OurMissBrooks ''OurMissBrooks'' began on the radio, where age and appearance weren't a factor. Even so, the sixteen-year-old students Walter Denton, Harriet Conklin and Stretch Snodgrass were played by actors in their late teens. Fast forward to the television adaptation and TheMovie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
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* OurMissBrooks began on the radio, where age and appearance weren't a factor. Even so, the sixteen-year-old students Walter Denton, Harriet Conklin and Stretch Snodgrass were played by actors in their late teens. Fast forward to the television adaptation and TheMovie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
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* The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Nicholas Brendon as Xander (25), Creator/AlysonHannigan as Willow (22) and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26, making Carpenter the same age as her teacher played by Robia [=LaMorte=]. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley first meets her and mistakes her for a teacher. The RunningGag surrounding the supposed inappropriate nature of Wesley's attraction to Cordelia is also rather ruined by the fact that Alexis Denisof (Wesley) was 33 while Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) was 29.) On the show's spinoff, ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by then-22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser. Creator/SarahMichelleGellar, 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. Flash forward to Season 2, when there's an extended flashback to when Buffy is 15, played by 21-year-old S.M.G.
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* The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Creator/SarahMichelleGellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander (25), Xander, Creator/AlysonHannigan as Willow (22) as Willow, and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26, making Carpenter the same age (26) as her teacher played by Robia [=LaMorte=]. Cordelia. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley (Creator/AlexisDenisov, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets her Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher. The RunningGag surrounding teacher.
** Later additions to thesupposed inappropriate nature of Wesley's attraction to Cordelia is also rather ruined by the fact that Alexis Denisof (Wesley) was 33 while Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) was 29.) cast included Creator/SethGreen (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), Creator/AmberBenson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have Creator/JamesMarsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Creator/EmmaCaulfield (??) as Anya (18-19).
** On the show's spinoff, ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed bythen-22-year-old 22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser. Creator/SarahMichelleGellar, 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. Flash forward to Season 2, when there's an extended flashback to when Buffy is 15, played by 21-year-old S.M.G. Kartheiser.
** Later additions to the
** On the show's spinoff, ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by
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**D'Angelo Barksdale is another adult example. Prison records seen in season three indicate that he was approximately 23. He's played by Larry Gilliard Jr., who would have been 31 in the first season. What makes this more jarring is that he's supposed to be the nephew of Avon Barksdale, played by an actor who was only two years older than Gilliard.
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* ''HeadOfTheClass'' -- Most of the cast members are in their 20s, but Dan Frischman was in his late 20s and early 30s during the show's run from 1986 to 1991. The creators and producers of the show have said this... Season One: 9th grade, Season Two: 10th grade, Season Three: 11th grade, Season Four: First semester of 12th grade, Season Five: Second semester of 12th grade. So they were all playing 14 year olds in the first season.
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* ''HeadOfTheClass'' ''Series/HeadOfTheClass'' -- Most of the cast members are in their 20s, but Dan Frischman was in his late 20s and early 30s during the show's run from 1986 to 1991. The creators and producers of the show have said this... Season One: 9th grade, Season Two: 10th grade, Season Three: 11th grade, Season Four: First semester of 12th grade, Season Five: Second semester of 12th grade. So they were all playing 14 year olds in the first season.
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* ''Series/PerfectStrangers'' episode, "Happy Birthday, Baby," 32-year-old Mark Linn-Baker plays Larry, who is depressed on his 24th birthday.
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* Sadie Calvano, who plays Violet on ''Series//{{Mom}}'', was 16, the same age as her character, when the show premiered in 2013. Spencer Daniels, who plays her boyfriend Luke, is a slight case since he was 20 when the show began.
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* Sadie Calvano, who plays Violet on ''Series//{{Mom}}'', ''Series/{{Mom}}'', was 16, the same age as her character, when the show premiered in 2013. Spencer Daniels, who plays her boyfriend Luke, is a slight case since he was 20 when the show began.
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* In BBC sitcom ''Series/OpenAllHours'', 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.
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* In BBC sitcom ''Series/OpenAllHours'', 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). difference, although Arkwright was supposed to be around 58 in the pilot). 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 but it is revealed in the pilot he is 24, and a 1981 episode confirms he was born circa 1950 and is a bloke in his thirties who Arkwright still treats as if he is a child. The revival series has now 75-year-old Jason is playing play a character around half his real age.visibly elderly Granville.
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** 24-year-old Tom Welling, and (let's face it) pretty much everyone else except Lex Luthor, who is supposed to be several years older. But Tom is particularly noticeable, as the character is fourteen in the pilot. [[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y2JaOhXV0Lw/Tb2QmF3JvmI/AAAAAAAAAF4/9vs3gXIdmvo/s1600/clark-kent.jpg How many fourteen-year-olds are built like a tank?]] (Then again, this is [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Clark Kent]].)
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** 24-year-old Tom Welling, and (let's face it) pretty much everyone else except Lex Luthor, who is supposed to be several years older. But Tom is particularly noticeable, as the character is fourteen in the pilot. [[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y2JaOhXV0Lw/Tb2QmF3JvmI/AAAAAAAAAF4/9vs3gXIdmvo/s1600/clark-kent.jpg How many fourteen-year-olds are built like a tank?]] (Then again, this is [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Clark Kent]].)) He's fourteen in human years, remember. Goodness knows what is in Kryptonian.
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* ''SeriesLawAndOrderCriminalIntent'': Tony Goldwyn played Vincent D'Onofrio's older (by several years) brother. Goldwyn is actually a year younger than D'Onofrio.
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* ''SeriesLawAndOrderCriminalIntent'': ''Series/LawAndOrderCriminalIntent'': Tony Goldwyn played Vincent D'Onofrio's older (by several years) brother. Goldwyn is actually a year younger than D'Onofrio.
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Elsa from Frozen is 21 in the movies, hence 23 in the show, probably 24. Anna, however, is 20 played by a 22-year-old Elizabeth Lail.
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* Georgina Haig (29 as of late 2014) as [[Disney/{{Frozen}} Elsa]](20; she was 18 in the movie when she was coronated, and the flashback scenes with her and Anna take place 2 years later).
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[[folder:Straight Examples]]
* ''Series/TheTenthKingdom'' -- 23-year-old Lucy Punch as a girl experiencing her 18th birthday.
* ''Just the Ten of Us'' -- Teen characters Marie and Connie were played by 24-year-old Heather Langenkamp and 25-year-old [=JoAnn=] Willette.
* This trope is subverted in ''Series/TwentyOneJumpStreet'', 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, though many of the non-cops play this trope straight.
* Chiara Zanni, who plays the main character "Amy" on [[Creator/TeenNick The N]] show ''AboutAGirl'', was 29 years old during filming, yet she plays a supposedly "young college student."
* In the British comedy ''Series/AbsolutelyFabulous'', 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.
*** This was heavily Lampshaded in a ''French and Saunders'' sketch where Sawalha also appeared as Saunders's daughter and claimed that, at 42 (much older than she really was), she was getting too old for it.
* 31-year-old Gerard Christopher was cast as the title character in the live-action ''[[Series/TheAdventuresOfSuperboy 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.
* On the SoapOpera ''Series/AllMyChildren'', Creator/SarahMichelleGellar first appeared on the show at the real-life age of 15 in 1993 as the main character Erica Kane's previously-unknown teenaged daughter, Kendall Hart. Since Susan Lucci, the actress who portrays Erica, had been on the show since it first aired in 1970 and the show had claimed Kendall was conceived when Erica was raped as a teenager, Gellar's character was rapidly aged from 16 to 23 years old several months after the character's debut. For two years, a teenaged Gellar played a character in her early twenties and nobody really bought it but just wrote it off as WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. After Gellar left and Kendall's character was brought with a recast 6.5 years later, the character's birth year was reverted back to her original birth year, making her a 16-year old girl again in 1993.
* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryMurderHouse'' - 24-year-old Evan Peters as Tate, a high school student. The five classmates that are shown are played by people in their early 20s, as well. Among the girls who bullied Violet are 32-year old Bianca Lawson. The only teens on the show who aren't portrayed by someone over the age of 20 are Violet and Leah, portrayed by 17-year-old Taissa Farmiga and 19-year-old Shelby Young.
* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryAsylum'', episode ''Tricks and Treats'' -- 25-year-old Devon Graye as 16-year-old Jed Potter.
* Burt Ward, the teenaged Robin in the 60s ''Series/{{Batman}}'', was already 20 when the show started filming.
* ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'' plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life GracePark, who plays Sharon, is actually six years ''older'' than Creator/KateeSackhoff as Kara.
* ''Series/TheBeverlyHillbillies'': 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.
* ''Series/BeverlyHills90210'' is well-known for this sort of thing, but [[CommonKnowledge 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 JustForFun/{{egregious}}, coupled with the fact that ''90210'' predates the {{Trope Namer|s}} 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!
** Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode, "Marge Vs. The Monorail" in reference to "Springfield Heights 90210" star, the Luke Perry-esque Kyle Darren:
---> "Let's have a warm welcome for the stars of the popular teen soap opera, Springfield Heights 90210! He's cool, he's sexy, he's 34 years old! Say hello to Kyle Darren!" (Darren smiles, excessive wrinkles show on his face)
* On ''Series/BigTimeRush'', 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.
* 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...
* In ''Series/BoardwalkEmpire'' 37-year-old Stephen Graham plays UsefulNotes/AlCapone, who was 21 at the time the show is set.
%%* ''Series/BostonPublic''%%
* Trina [=McGee=] started playing high school senior Angela Moore on ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'' at age 28; this is really glaring because ''every'' other major cast member was more-or-less age-appropriate.
* The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Nicholas Brendon as Xander (25), Creator/AlysonHannigan as Willow (22) and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26, making Carpenter the same age as her teacher played by Robia [=LaMorte=]. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley first meets her and mistakes her for a teacher. The RunningGag surrounding the supposed inappropriate nature of Wesley's attraction to Cordelia is also rather ruined by the fact that Alexis Denisof (Wesley) was 33 while Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) was 29.) On the show's spinoff, ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by then-22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser. Creator/SarahMichelleGellar, 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. Flash forward to Season 2, when there's an extended flashback to when Buffy is 15, played by 21-year-old S.M.G.
* Creator/SentaMoses 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 ''Series/VengeanceUnlimited'' two years earlier (at 25).
** And in 2009, at 35, she's playing an apparently early 20-something computer tech on ''Series/GeneralHospital''.
* ''Series/{{Californication}}'' -- 22-year-old Madeline Zima as 16-year-old Mia Lewis. [[LampshadeHanging Few of the other characters can believe she is really 16.]]
* The plot of ''Series/{{Caprica}}'' revolves partially around two 16-year-old girls. Of the actresses who play them, one was 21. The other was 23.
* In ''Series/CodeLyokoEvolution'', Quentin Merabet, Mélanie Tran, and Diego Mestanza, who play Ulrich, Yumi, and William, all characters in their early-to-mid teens, are 21, 20, and 19, respectively. This is made all the stranger by the fact that the rest of the main characters avert Dawson Casting -- Gulliver Beverenage, who plays Ulrich's best friend Odd, is ''14''.
* ''Series/ColdCase'' -- In the episode "Love Conquers Al," then-22-year-old Summer Glau plays a teen athlete.
* ''Series/{{Community}}'':
** In the first season, Annie is explicitly stated to be 18, but Alison Brie was three months and change shy of 27 when the first episode aired. Troy, who was in the same high school classes as Annie and in the second season is also revealed to be a year older, is played by Donald Glover, who is [[PlayingGertrude nine months younger than Brie]]. The real kicker is the fact that Gillian Jacobs, who is all of 78 days older than Brie, plays a character who's close to ten years older than Troy and Annie.
** It's {{vague|Age}} how old Abed is (around the same age as Troy), but Danny Pudi was 30 while filming most of the first season.
* The ''Series/{{CSI}}'' episode "Neverland" heavily featured three fourteen-year-old characters. Two were played by actual kids of that age (one from ''Series/{{Heroes}}''). The last was played by an [[Series/ICarly actor]] who's 18.
* In ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' "Grounds for Deception", Stella Bonasera is revealed to have been born in 1975, making her character 35. Melina Kanakaredes who portrays Bonasera is currently 42.
* In ''Series/DadsArmy'', 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 [[FrozenInTime Pike had not aged]].
** Also {{inverted|Trope}}. 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 UsefulNotes/WorldWarI) was played by Clive Dunn, 48. This meant that the oldest member of the platoon was actually played by one of the youngest cast members.
* The 1998 MadeForTVMovie of ''David And Lisa'' has Lukas Haas (22 at the time) and Creator/BrittanyMurphy (21) as the title teens (which is nowhere near as extreme as the 1962 cinema version elsewhere on this page).
* Back to the {{trope namer|s}}, ''Series/DawsonsCreek'': 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) [[SuddenlySexuality Jack]] and [[GenkiGirl Andie]] [=McPhee=] starting in Season 2. Worse considering that Andie was likely the ''younger'' sibling.
** On the behind-the-scenes parts of the SeriesFinale 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).
* A five year TimeSkip between the fourth and fifth seasons of ''Series/DesperateHousewives'' 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).
* ''Series/DoctorWho'' had numerous examples:
** 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (a [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld Time Lord]] posing as a 15-year-old girl). A woman in one episode is said to be "only a few years older" than Susan. Her actress was in fact two years ''younger'' than Ms. Ford.
*** In one First Doctor story, ''The Aztecs'', we get a reverse-Dawson in Cameca. We find her in basically a retirement village; minimum age to live there is at least 51 and they are often consulted for their wisdom. We don't get a number, but as the first girl-of-the-week to fall in love with the Doctor, and the Doctor being the grandfatherly William Hartnell version, she is probably ''not'' intended to be a new arrival on her 51st birthday. Actress' age: '''29'''. (No, she's not secretly a Time Lord.)
** 21-year-old Maureen O'Brien as 15- to 16-year-old Vicki.[[note]]Her exact age isn't given, but in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E3TheMythMakers The Myth Makers]]" she says a 16-year-old character is 'hardly any older than me'.[[/note]]
** 25-year-old Jackie Lane as 18-year-old Dodo Chaplet.
** 21-year-old Wendy Padbury as 15-year-old Zoe Heriot (though Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart says Zoe looks "about 19").
*** And again at the age of 27 in the stage adaptation "Seven Keys To Doomsday", she played 17- to 18-year-old Jenny Wilson.
** 23-year-old Mark Strickson as Turlough. This one is perhaps less JustForFun/{{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.
** 26-year-old Creator/SophieAldred as 16-year-old Ace.
** The new series two-parter The Doctor Dances/The Empty Child has a subversion. [[spoiler:Nancy, played by 21-year-old Florence Hoath, appears to be about 16, having a 5-year-old [[CreepyChild "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 mother.]]
** The ultimate inversion, however, in the case of the Doctor. As pointed out in numerous interviews with the writers and actors in 2013, whether it's 55-plus William Hartnell or Peter Capaldi playing the role, or 20-something Peter Davison or Matt Smith, they're still hundreds, if not thousands of years younger than the character.
*** Of course, even within that, Doctors are sometimes played 'younger'. For one example, 40-year-old Tom Baker was supposed to appear to be in his early 30s, and started out dressed in a costume intended to resemble a university student in order to exaggerate his apparent youth (which soon got switched out for more mature AwesomeAnachronisticApparel as both he and the character aged). ExpandedUniverse books tend to describe him as appearing to be in his thirties, which is [[AdaptationalAttractiveness rather generous towards the end of his tenure]] -- Chris in the "Shada" novelisation struggles to accept the idea of the Doctor being "any older than forty", causing Romana to observe that he's [[Really700YearsOld 760]]. For another example, Matt Smith was 27 when he started playing the role, but is described by other characters to look about 18 or 19, with his first outfit based on {{Hipster}} fashion. River even describes him to Amy as resembling a twelve-year-old, but she was exaggerating for tragicomic effect.
* ''Series/DowntonAbbey'' 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 [[DashedPlotLine progresses considerably faster than real time]], this doesn't last; by the end of season 2, Sybil has actually passed Findlay's real age.
* 22-year-old Justin Long in ''Series/{{Ed}}''.
* The Mexican comedy ''Series/ElChavoDelOcho'' has all of its child characters (around eight years old or so) played by adults over 30. The result is, of course, hilarious.
** Considering all the AmusingInjuries that the "kids" go through in the show, it'd be pretty disturbing otherwise.
* In ''Series/{{Fortysomething}}'', Creator/BenedictCumberbatch was about six or seven years older than university student Rory; 16-year-old Edwin was played by 20-year-old Joe Van Moyland.
** In the ''Series/{{Sherlock}} Case Book'', Sherlock Holmes is revealed to have been born in 1981. Creator/BenedictCumberbatch was born in ''1976''.
* ''Series/FridayNightLights'' is way guilty of this; many of the actors playing juniors and seniors in highschool are in their mid-to-late twenties.
* ''Series/{{Friends}}''
** Parodied in an episode 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, as every flashback to (and video evidence from) Ross, Monica, and Rachel's high school days featured the regular actors playing themselves at 18, with very little attempt to disguise it.
** Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow were 30 and 31 when the show premiered, despite their characters being in their mid-20s.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two [[spoiler: Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer]]. The characters are all between 15 and 20 (aged up roughly two years from the books), the actors between 23 and 29.
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) playing Tyrion Lannister (early 20s) is a rather extreme example, even though the character is out of his teens. {{Justified|Trope}}, 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 [[Creator/MaisieWilliams Arya Stark]], who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
*** Tyrion's case can become FridgeBrilliance: the character is described in the books as being horribly ugly as well as a dwarf, and while Dinklage is quite good-looking, it can be inferred that Tyrion's ugliness is actually looking much older than he is.
*** Subverted with Sansa Stark's actress Creator/SophieTurner, who ''looks'' in her late teens or early twenties due to her mature features and [[StatuesqueStunner being five foot seven]], but is [[YoungerThanTheyLook only slightly older than Sansa]].
* Lampshaded(?) on ''Gidget''. 15-year-old Gidget (played by 19-year-old Sally Field) fails to convince a job interviewer that she's 19.
* At 26 years old Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in ''Series/GilmoreGirls''.
** Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.
* ''Series/{{Glee}}'' is extremely guilty of this with most of their cast being HighSchool characters. The youngest member of the original "teen" cast is the now 23-year-old Creator/ChrisColfer (who was 18 when he was cast) playing a now college freshman with the oldest being 31-year-olds Cory Monteith and Mark Salling playing 19-year-olds.
** 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.
** HilarityEnsues with a recent [[MoralGuardians Parents' Television Council]] statement on the "near pedophilia" of a recent racy GQ shoot starring Lea Michele and Diana Agron. Both were 24. That said, their clothes and hairstyles were clearly designed to make them ''look'' as young as possible, so the legitimacy of this accusation is in the eye of the viewer. And that's putting aside the [[YouKeepUsingThatWord incorrect definition of pedophilia that they were using]].
** Of the season 4 additions to the cast, 20 year old Blake Jenner is now playing high school sophomore Ryder Lynn.
* The TV adaptation of ''Literature/GossipGirl'' is chock full of this. Spoofed on ''Series/TheDailyShow'' 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.
** Which actually ended up causing problems when Chace Crawford objected to his character's romance with Momsen's character, because while the characters were only two years apart Momsen was fifteen and he was twenty-three. They ended up scuppering the pairing because of how uncomfortable he was with it.
* ''Series/GreysAnatomy'' pulls this off 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 [[InsufferableGenius Cristina]] would never do.
** Cristina is said to have a [=PhD=], however, which might explain why she's a bit older -- she might never have taken time ''off'' from her education, but that doesn't mean she went straight to med school after getting her Bachelor's.
* Music/MileyCyrus averted this during ''Series/HannahMontana'', being in her teenage years at the time. However, her character's still-teenaged older brother was played by Jason Earles. For the record, Earles is currently 35.
* Arthur Fonzarelli in ''Series/HappyDays'' was supposed, in the early episodes at least, to be eighteen/nineteen 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. Also featuring Creator/RonHoward as Richie Cunningham, a high-schooler with a lacquered combover.
* ''Series/HardyBoysNancyDrewMysteries'' had Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy (24 and 18, when the series started filming) playing Literature/TheHardyBoys, who were supposedly 17 & 16. Inverted in Disney's adaptation for ''TheMickeyMouseClub'', in which the actors Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk were younger than the books -- 12 and 11.
** The series also had 24-year-old Pamela Sue Martin as 16-year-old Nancy Drew. [[TheOtherDarrin Her replacement]], Janet Louise Johnson, was 19.
* In ''Series/{{Heroes}}'', Nicholas D'Agosto was 27 years old when he started playing high school student West Rosen.
** Hiro Nakamura is stated to be 24, but actor Creator/MasiOka was 32 at the time.
* Some of the younger patients on ''Series/{{House}}'' have this. One example is the 15-year-old supermodel in the 2nd season episode "[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0606039/ Skin Deep]]" played by an actress aged 25.
** Several of the doctors on the team invert this to some extent, [[Series/DoogieHowserMD at least presumably]], being played by actors who would be extraordinarily young to be in their position.
** The episode "Not Cancer" had an ''incredibly'' obvious example, with an alleged 4-year-old (who was only seen briefly) being played by a kid who was clearly, like, eleven.
** A younger example, Cuddy's daughter was also played by a girl who was at least four years old. She was two at her oldest, and treated as such, which to some made it seem like the child had developmental difficulties.
* 25-year-old Steve Burns (of WesternAnimation/BluesClues fame) played a bullied high-school student in a 1998 episode of Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet.
* ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'' is a minor example in that Ted, Lily and Marshall are all supposed to be the same age yet Jason Segel is 6 years younger than Josh Radnor and Alyson Hannigan. The age gap between Cobie Smulders and Neil Patrick Harris is 9 years, as opposed to the 4 between Robin and Barney. A more obvious example is the flashbacks to scenes in college, with the characters' younger selves still played by the same actors. The same goes for the flash forward scenes, though the actors are usually heavily made up to look older. In "Time Travellers" however, 20-years-from-now Ted and Barney, who'd both be in their fifties look pretty much the same as before.
* ''Series/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 Music/MirandaCosgrove, who was 15 when they filmed them. Miranda apparently got to choose which guy they casted.
* In ''Series/IClaudius'', because the series takes place over nearly eighty years, this is both played straight and later inverted with many of the same characters. Just to name a few major examples:
** Creator/DerekJacobi, aged 38, played Claudius from the age of 19 to his death at 63.
** Siân Phillips, aged 43, played Livia from the age of 34 to her death at 86.
** George Baker, aged 45, played Tiberius from the age of 18 to his death at 77.
** Margaret Tyzack, also aged 45, played Antonia from the age of 27 to her death at 73.
** Some examples where this is purely played straight include Creator/JohnHurt (aged 36) as Caligula from the age of 17 to his death at 28, Christopher Biggins (aged 28) as 17-year-old Nero, and Graham Seed (aged 26) as ''13''-year-old Britannicus.
* 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.
* ''Series/TheInbetweeners''. The four main characters, 17-year-olds, are played by actors ranging from 22 to 26.
* The WB's ''Jack & Bobby'' featured 24-year-old Matt Long as 15-year-old Jack [=McCallister=]. Made glaringly obvious by the fact that Creator/LoganLerman, who played Jack's 13-year-old brother Bobby, was actually 12 at the time of filming.
* ''Series/JeevesAndWooster'' has it both ways. Both Creator/HughLaurie and Creator/StephenFry 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 PowersThatBe could get away with it. By way of contrast, the Jeeves movies of the mid-1930s starred 40-year-old Arthur Treacher as Jeeves and 25-year-old David Niven as Bertie.
* German actress Josefine Preuss (b. 1986) has not visibly aged since she was about 15. Guess which roles she usually gets.
* ''Series/{{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.
* ''Franchise/KamenRider'' shows usually avert this, since they have a habit of casting late-teens actors for their late-teens characters. However, Renn Kiriyama as Shotaro in ''Series/KamenRiderDouble'' was 25 when the show was airing, and while Shotaro's never given an explicit age, he is shown wearing a high-school uniform. This would indicate he's in his late teens as well.
* ''Series/KathAndKim's'' Kim is supposed to be in her mid-to-late 20s. Gina Riley, the actress who plays her, is pushing 50.
** Jane Turner, who plays her mother, is only five months older than her... but when the sketches the show originated from began, they were both in their early thirties, making Turner's Kath an inversion of this trope. She's only recently caught up with her character's age. In the second season, there were flashbacks to Kim's birth (when Kath would be in her early twenties) and to Kim as a teenager. Both actresses were 42 at the time.
* ''SeriesLawAndOrderCriminalIntent'': Tony Goldwyn played Vincent D'Onofrio's older (by several years) brother. Goldwyn is actually a year younger than D'Onofrio.
* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'' which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools [[spoiler: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 RippedFromTheHeadlines: [[http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2010/11/fake-teens-iv-serial-teen-treva.html see it here.]] (And see below)
** In an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrder'' with a similar plot, the female murderer is played by a 20-year-old actress. The character is a 26-year-old woman pretending to be a 16-year-old girl.
** The RippedFromTheHeadlines (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 ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' [[spoiler:this 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]].
* 27-year-old Peta Wilson as 18-year-old Nikita in ''Series/LaFemmeNikita''. 31-year-old Marnie [=McPhail=] as her childhood friend of the same age in the second episode of the first season. [[spoiler:Though it turns out she's an imposter, but this trope is still pretty glaring until the HeelFaceTurn]].
* Julianna Rose Mauriello was 13 when she took on the role of 8-year-old Stephanie on the children's show ''Series/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 ''Lazy Town Extra'', filmed when she was 17, the character mentions she's lived in Lazy Town for a year, which would make her 9.
* The six main characters of the short-lived show ''Series/LifeAsWeKnowIt'' 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.
* The Canadian sitcom ''Series/LifeWithDerek'' 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.
* ''Series/LincolnHeights'' has quite an extreme example with the 27- to 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.
* Due to the fact that time on the show passes much slower than in real life, 10-year-old Walt Lloyd on ''Series/{{Lost}}'' was played by roughly 14-year-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 [[spoiler:it's in flashforwards set three years after he left the island]], which still doesn't work because he's too old for [[spoiler:13]]. Prior to his appearance in [[spoiler: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 few months that had passed on the show to explain.
** Inverted in the case of Locke's father, played by Kevin Tighe, who is only eight years older than Terry O'Quinn.
* In the miniseries ''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.
* ''Series/MaddigansQuest'' 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.
* ''Series/MADtv'' parodies and lampshades this repeatedly in "Pretty White Kids With Problems". The actors are obviously way too old to be playing teenagers, which they constantly make sure to point out.
-->'''Actor in his mid-30s:''' 15 can be a difficult age. And that's how old I am. 15.
* Gary Burghoff of ''Series/{{MASH}}'' 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 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. Mike Farrell was 36 when he was cast as 28-year-old BJ Hunnicutt, Harry Morgan was 60 when he played a character who was young enough to be underage at the time of World War I.
** These issues were exacerbated by the fact that the show ran almost four times as long as the actual Korean War, making the disparities in long-running characters even more striking near the end of the series. Not relevant in the cases of characters whose ages are not given.
* Matt [=LeBlanc=] played underaged boys from his first appearance at age 18 on ''TV 101'', until he landed his role on ''Series/{{Friends}}''. He specialized in playing the boyfriend to underaged female characters on sitcoms such as ''Series/MarriedWithChildren'' and ''Just the Ten of Us''. as the good-looking, Italian "hunk" (from some unspecified East Coast city).
* ''[=McHale=]'s Navy'' ran from 1962 to 1966. In peacetime, to find a Third or Second Class Petty Officer (E-4, E-5) in their thirties or forties, you would have to look extremely hard. Most are in their twenties. This is especially true in wartime when advancement is obscenely easy. Ernest Borgnine served in the real Navy during WWII, getting out as a First Class Petty Officer at age 28, but also played a Commander at age 45, which is not unreasonable. Another actor, Victor Mature, was in the Coast Guard in WWII, and he made Chief Petty Officer (E-7) in 14 months. Given this, some of the casting for "[=McHale=]'s Navy" was extremely egregious. Carl Ballantine (PO2 Gruber) was 47, in real world he would have been an E-7/E-8, not an E-5. Billy Sands was 51, too old for the military, peacetime or wartime. Surprisingly, most of the others were at least close to their appropriate age. I believe it was a case of the producers not caring.
* In the 1998 series ''{{Series/Merlin|1998}}'', Sam Neill (who was 51 when the film was released) played Merlin for about two-thirds of the first half of the film and all of the second half. However, it wasn't until the second half that Merlin would have been around that age in-story (because of the time skip necessary for Arthur to grow up). During the entire first half, he was less than half that age. [[JustifiedTrope The reason for this is probably because having Merlin portrayed by an actor of the appropriate age at all times would have left Sam Neil playing Merlin for only one half of the entire film]].
* The cast in ''Series/TheMiddle'' 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.
** Siblings Axl Heck (15 in Season 1) and Sue Heck (13 in season 1) are portrayed by actors born in 1990 and late 1991 respectively, even though both do a good job of acting and looking (almost) the right age. Brick Heck (8 in Season 1), is portrayed by Atticus Shaffer, who was 11 at the time. Shaffer is now 14 playing an 11 year old, but due to his small stature (a result of osteogenesis imperfecta), he pulls it off most convincingly.
* ''Literature/TheMistsOfAvalon'' miniseries had an extreme example, where 13-year-old Morgause at the beginning was played by Joan Allen, who was 44 and looked it.
* In the MiniSeries adaptation of Arthur Hailey's ''The Moneychangers'', callgirl Avril Devereaux -- a blonde in her twenties in the novel -- is played by Joan Collins. While the hair colour can be overlooked, her being 43 years old at the time is another matter. (Then again, producer Ross Hunter was known for skewing older in his casting choices.)
* When ''Series/MyFamily'' began, only one of the Harper children was played by an actor close to the character's age; 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 Janey was "almost 30" and only two years younger than Denby-Ashe (thanks to SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome, 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.
* The star of Creator/{{Nickelodeon}}'s ''Series/TheMysteryFilesOfShelbyWoo'' was extraordinarily unconvincing as a "KidDetective," even to the target audience.
* 23-year-old Don Cheadle played the role of 16-year-old Jack in the April 1, 1988 "Jung and the Restless" episode of ''Series/NightCourt.''
* 25-year-old John Hensley playing 16-year-old Matt on ''Series/NipTuck'' (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 made glaringly obvious when he started getting a receding hairline.
* ''Series/TheOC'' is guilty of this, as mentioned in the quote at the top, with teens in their late 20s and parents in their early 30s. It [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] on this trope, among many others, with their show-within-a-show, "The Valley."
* ''Series/OnceUponATime''
** In the first season, the show was criticized for having what looked like a 40-year-old actress playing 28-year-old Emma Swan, though the actress was actually more around the age of 32. In the second season, the same actress, now 33, is spending half an episode in a flashback to when Emma was 18.
** Though the age may not be explicitly stated like the Emma example, many of the actors play the younger version of their characters, at least a decade younger, for instance Ginnifer Goodwin playing Snow White as a young adult/late teens, though Goodwin was in her early 30s. Other people in their 30s playing much, much younger versions include Lana Parrilla and Josh Dallas.
** And then there's 40-year-old Rose [=McGowen=] as "young Cora." She does look like "old Cora" (65-year-old Barbara Hershey) due to their matching plastic surgery.
** 26-year-old Parker Croft as Felix, one of the Lost Boys. The casting call describes him: "A few teen boy roles are being cast that might be recurring. One of the boys is named Felix, and he's their leader."
* Georgina Haig (29 as of late 2014) as [[Disney/{{Frozen}} Elsa]](20; she was 18 in the movie when she was coronated, and the flashback scenes with her and Anna take place 2 years later).
* In the BritCom ''Series/OnTheBuses'', ''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 BBC sitcom ''Series/OpenAllHours'', 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.
* Charlotte Coleman was in her early 20s when playing teenage Jess in the TV adaptation of ''Literature/OrangesAreNotTheOnlyFruit''.
* ''Series/ParkerLewisCantLose'' -- Older actors playing teens include Corin Nemic, Billy Jayne, Abraham Benrubi, Jennifer Guthrie, Harold Pruett, all in their early 20s.
* ''Series/PartyOfFive'' 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. {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d in season 3 where Bailey's friend, seeing his fake ID, was very surprised that anyone would believe he's 27. On the other hand 11-year-old Creator/LaceyChabert (Claudia) and 16-year-old Creator/JenniferLoveHewitt (Sarah) were the same ages as their characters.
* All of the secondary school pupils in the seventies Britcom ''Series/PleaseSir'' were quite visibly in their late twenties or early thirties.
* ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' is a common offender, with the [[Series/MightyMorphinPowerRangers original season's]] 15-year-old characters being played by actors as old as 24. ''[[Series/PowerRangersOperationOverdrive Operation Overdrive]]'' had an 18-year-old [[TheSmartGuy Smart]] [[TheChick Chick]] being played by a 28-year-old actress (who, however, looks quite young and seems to actually be able to get away with it) and a guy of 19-20 being played by a 29-year-old.
** The early seasons had most actors between 18-21, with subsequent seasons going off in many different directions.
** ''Series/MightyMorphinPowerRangers'' 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.
*** As far as high school seniors go, some of the cast members weren't all that bad for the role. The male actors were the only problem. Walter Jones actually somewhat looked the part, even at 22, but David Yost, Jason Narvy (Skull), and Paul Schrier (Bulk) were 19 (Narvy), 23 (Schrier), and 24 (Yost) respectively and looked like it.
*** David Yost was 27 when Billy graduated high school [[UpToEleven a year early]].
** The 28-year-old actress from ''Operation Overdrive'' has stated in interviews that she was also given an audition for the ''Film/HarryPotter'' films as 15-year-old Cho Chang...
** Melanie Vallejo, who plays the 17/18-year-old Madison in ''[[Series/PowerRangersMysticForce Mystic Force]]'', was 27 at the time of filming...
** Played straight and inverted in the case of Olivia Tennet (Dr. K) from ''[[Series/PowerRangersRPM 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").
** [[WebVideo/AtopTheFourthWall Linkara]] summed it up nicely in his ''WebVideo/HistoryOfPowerRangers'' series: "Clearly, the casting director has never seen a teenager."
** ''Series/PowerRangersDinoThunder'' actually wasn't bad compared to just about all the other seasons, though it was still sort of played straight. The characters were 18-year-old high school seniors, and Emma Lahana (Kira) and Kevin Duhaney (Ethan) were both 19 at the time of filming. James Napier (Conner), however, was 21 and (to an extent) looked it, and Jeffrey Parazzo (Trent) was ''25''. Except Jeffrey looked very young for his age, was arguably the youngest-looking of the cast members, and [[http://images.yodibujo.es/_uploads/membres/articles/20081146/trent48_syo.jpg actually pulled it off the best.]] Also, Jason David Frank was 30 playing Tommy at 25. [[http://de.prwiki.info/images/0/07/DT_Tommy_Oliver.jpg He pulled it off, too.]]
** ''Series/PowerRangersJungleFury'' has Casey and Lily, both 18, played by Jason Smith (24) and Anna Hutchison (22). Theo, 17, was played by Aljin Abella (23).
** ''Series/PowerRangersSPD'' has Bridge, canonically 21 (despite the Jetix website inexplicably listing him as 17), played by 27 year old Matt Austin.
** In ''Series/PowerRangersWildForce'', Max (Blue Ranger) is supposed to be younger than the other rangers, but is played by then-24-year-old Philip Jeanmarie. This is justified, however, as Philip looked reasonably young for his age.
** ''Series/PowerRangersNinjaStorm'' both averts and plays this straight. Dustin was played by 18-year-old Glenn McMillan, and Tori was played by 17-year-old Sally Martin. Shane, however was played by Pua Magasiva, who was 22 at the time and looked it, which made him appear noticeably older than the other two main characters. Adam Tuominen (Hunter) was also 22 and Jorgito Vargas Jr. (Blake) was 25.
* One episode of ''Series/{{Psych}}'' quite possibly took advantage of this trope. [[spoiler: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 be.]]
* 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|Trope}} as the Arthurian legends tend to suggest a fairly wide age gap between Morgause and Morgan le Fay/Morgana
* 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 ''Film/HalfBaked'', 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''.
* Patrick [=McKenna=] was '''''31''''' when he started playing teen-aged Harold on ''Series/TheRedGreenShow''. Interestingly, Harold ''did'' slowly age as the series progressed, eventually going to college and getting various full-time jobs.
* In series three of ''Series/RobinHood'', 29-year-old Clive Standen played 20-year-old Archer and 30-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.
* Inverted to the point of absurdity on ''Series/{{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.
* ''Series/{{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 (joining in mid-season) 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.
* Melissa Joan Hart started playing 16-year-old ''Series/SabrinaTheTeenageWitch'' 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 she'd been going to college and then on to a career in journalism.
** A rather glaring example of this trope is the casting of a [[http://ruinedchildhood.com/post/56002643924/worb-sabrina-the-teenage-witch-hired-this BALDING MAN]] to play a highschool student.
** 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 ''Series/ClarissaExplainsItAll'' which ran from 1991 to 1994.
* ''Doctor Who'' spinoff ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'' features 20-year-old Daniel Anthony as 14-year-old Clyde Langer and 18-year-old Anjli Mohindra as 15-year-old Rani Chandra. Considering they had to write out two of the lead characters because their actors were taking exams, this is a rare justified example.
* Played straight, naturally in ''Series/TheSecretCircle''. The youngest cast member of the main cast, Britt Robertson, is 21 and the oldest, Jessica Parker Kennedy is 27. The rest of the cast members include Thomas Dekker who's 24, Phoebe Tonkin who's 23, Louis Hunter who's 22, Chris Zylka who's 27, and Shelly Hennig who's 25.
** Not to mention Adam Harrington plays the younger version of Ethan from the 90s (Adam Harrington is 42).
* Exaggerated in a few October 1968 episodes of the soap opera ''The Secret Storm''. Christina Crawford (of ''Literature/MommieDearest'' fame), the 29-year-old actress who played the 28-year-old Joan Borman Kane, called in sick for about a week. Her replacement was her adoptive mother, legendary actress Joan Crawford, who was ''63 years old'' at the time. (Thankfully, few clips of these episodes survive.)
* More SelmaBlair examples:
** ''Series/TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'' almost avoided this until 23-year-old Selma Blair arrived in the episode "Das Bus."
** ''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 ''Series/KathAndKim'' with 36-year-old SelmaBlair as twenty-something Kim (though this wasn't nearly as bad as the Australian version; see below.)
* In ''Series/SeventhHeaven'' 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.
* On the UK "dramedy" ''Series/{{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."
** ''{{Shameless}}'' also gives us 15-year old Ian (played by 20-year old Gerard Kearns) and 16-year olds Lip, Mandy and Karen, played by actors who were 22, 22 and 21 respectively.
** 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.
* In ''Series/SixFeetUnder'', the initially high-school-aged Claire Fisher was played by the initially twenty-three-year-old Lauren Ambrose.
* ''Series/{{Smallville}}''
** 24-year-old Tom Welling, and (let's face it) pretty much everyone else except Lex Luthor, who is supposed to be several years older. But Tom is particularly noticeable, as the character is fourteen in the pilot. [[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y2JaOhXV0Lw/Tb2QmF3JvmI/AAAAAAAAAF4/9vs3gXIdmvo/s1600/clark-kent.jpg How many fourteen-year-olds are built like a tank?]] (Then again, this is [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Clark Kent]].)
** 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.
** Erica Durance was 26 when she first appeared. Lois is [[ContinuitySnarl supposed to be]] 19 at the time.
** Tom Welling is two years older than Brandon Routh (Clark/Superman in ''Film/SupermanReturns''), 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.
* In-universe example: in ''Series/{{Smash}}'' when Rebecca Duvall joins the cast of ''Bombshell'' it's pointed out that she's older than Creator/MarilynMonroe was when she passed away. Duvall is played by Creator/UmaThurman, who is indeed several years older than Marilyn -- in fact, she turned 42 (Marilyn left us aged 36) the day before one of her episodes premiered!
* ''Series/SquarePegs'' is a show from the 1982/1983 season about the two groups of 14-year-old freshmen 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.
* Nog, in ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' was supposedly a young teenager as of the first season, 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.
** Justified since he wore so much makeup that you couldn't really tell what age he actually was.
** When first introduced, 19-year old Ziyal was played by (then) 23-year old Cyia Batten and (then) 25-year old Tracy Middendorf. During her major appearances in seasons five and six, she was around 21-22 years old and was played by (then) 34-year old Melanie Smith.
** Creator/WilWheaton was 15 when playing a 15-year-old [[CreatorsPet Wesley Crusher]]. ''Franchise/StarTrek'' in general has avoided this with the child characters, with several recurring children on ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' being played by the appropriate age.
** The best-known example 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 [[Film/StarTrek 2009 movie]] retcons this by giving him a birthdate that would have made him 26 when he debuted in the show.
* ''Series/StrangersWithCandy'' -- 30-something Creator/AmySedaris 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 Creator/WinonaRyder played "Fran" [[AlphaBitch the coolest girl at school]].
* In the Canadian series ''Series/StudentBodies'', all the actors playing teenagers were in their early 20s.
* Franchise/SuperSentai examples:
** A 28-year-old Tarumi Touta played the 22/23-year-old Jin in ''Series/ChoushinseiFlashman''.
** Inverted in ''Series/SamuraiSentaiShinkenger'' with 14-year-old Runa Natsui playing 17-year-old Kaoru Shiba
** Inverted with ''Series/HikoninSentaiAkibaranger'' with 16-year-old Karin Ogino playing 23/24-year-old Yuko Yamada aka Yumeria Moegi. Justified and lampshaded in that she's supposed to look much younger then she is.
* Although not as egregious as the main cast of some other shows set in high school, the youngest of the main cast of ''Series/TeenWolf'', Tyler Posey (Scott) and Dylan O'Brien (Stiles), were both 19 when the show started. Gage Golightly (Erica) is the new youngest at 19 during the second season.
** This has gradually changed due to the show progressing only a few ''months'' over the length of four seasons. Holland Roden (Lydia), Keahu Kahuanui (Danny), and Charlie and Max Carver (Ethan and Aiden) were all 24 during their first seasons, Daniel Sharman (Isaac) was 25, Crystal Reed (Allison), Sinqua Walls (Boyd), and Shelley Hennig (Malia) were 26, and Arden Cho (Kira) was 28. Well over half of the cast have been on the show for two or four years, so the majority of ''Teen Wolf's'' actors are late-20-somethings playing high school students over 10 or 12 years younger than them.
** Although he was 23-years-old when filming started, no one's quite sure of the supposed age of Tyler Hoechlin's character, Derek Hale. He was stated to be 19-years-old in the first season, but it's bounced up and down the age brackets since then, randomly altering the age of both Derek and his older sister Laura depending on when the creators wanted the Hale family fire to take place.
** Several actors and actresses, including Crystal Reed, have cited this as being one of the main reasons why they decided to leave the show. Playing a 16/17-year-old high school student while in your late 20s to early 30s, especially one who doesn't appear to be ageing or graduating any time soon, can be quite frustrating for an ageing performer. And depending on their appearance, it has become increasingly difficult for some of the show's actors to be passed off to audiences as still being in high school.
* In ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}: Series/TheSarahConnorChronicles'', 26-year-old Creator/SummerGlau 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 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, playing 15.
** 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 Creator/SummerGlau's portrayal of River Tam in ''Series/{{Firefly}}''. Summer was 21 (23 during the filming of ''Film/{{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.
** 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 in the first movie. Linda Hamilton would have been 28 at the time of the first movie.
* ''Series/That70sShow'' -- Danny Masterson (Hyde), Topher Grace (Eric) and Ashton Kutcher (Kelso) were respectively 22, 20 and 20 in 1998 when the show debuted. Creator/MilaKunis was 14, younger than her character was meant to be. However, because it ran for 8 years but was set between 1976 and 1979, she soon caught up with her character's age, then overtook it.
* On ''Series/ThatsSoRaven'', 18-year-old Creator/RavenSymone played 14-year-old Raven Baxter and 19-year-old Anneliese van der Pol played 14-year-old Chelsea.
* Then-18-year-old Olivia Burnette was cast as a preteen Justine O'Neil in 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.
* Supposed teenagers in ''Series/TowerPrep'' include Dyana Liu (29) as Suki and Ryan Pinkston (22) as Gabe.
* Kal Penn was 29 when he played a high school student in Season 6 of ''Series/TwentyFour''.
* In ''Series/{{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.
* Italia Ricci is ever so slightly too old to play a high-schooler in ''Series/UnnaturalHistory'' at 24.
* Period drama ''UpstairsDownstairs'' is an interesting {{justified|Trope}} case: at the beginning of the series, Elizabeth Bellamy is 17, played by 26-year-old Nicola Pagett. But there are frequent {{Time Skip}}s 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.
* An inversion seems to have been the original four series of ''UpstairsDownstairs'', 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.
* The teenage characters of ''Series/TheVampireDiaries'' 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 [[OlderThanTheyLook 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'' in her late 20s to Dobrev and [=McQueen's=] characters, when she is younger than some of the actors who play their classmates.
** May or may not be true with Katherine. Her age of turning is never stated. If nothing else she's done this {{In-Universe}} when pretended to be 17-year-old Elena.
* In their junior year (season one), when you would expect them all to be about 16 or 17, some of the main characters of ''Series/VeronicaMars'' 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 [[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0739544/ 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 [[Series/ArrestedDevelopment 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; Creator/AmandaSeyfried 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 ''Film/MeanGirls'' (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 [[spoiler:Kendall had assumed the identity of a younger highschool student and was actually older than first thought.]]
*** Even then [[spoiler: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 {{lampshade|Hanging}}d 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.
* In ''Series/{{Victorious}}'', Creator/DaniellaMonet, who is 21 years old, is playing a 17-year-old character.
* ''Series/TheWalkingDead'' -- Fans are usually shocked 27-year-old actress Emily Kinney plays the 17-year-old Beth Greene. This is a rare case where the older actress might even look younger than the young character she portrays.
* ''Series/{{Webster}}'' -- Teenaged Emmanuel Lewis plays a seven-year-old.
* Gabe Kaplan stated [[WordOfGod in interviews]] that he believed part of the reason the ratings for ''Series/WelcomeBackKotter'' 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.
* A truly bizarre example from ''Series/TheWestWing''. 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.
* Both averted and played straight in ''Series/WhatILikeAboutYou''. 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.
* ''Series/WillAndGrace'' jokes about this with Jack saying.
-->''I want to live in Series/DawsonsCreek, where the kids are in their 20s and their parents are in their 30s.''
* Creator/WillSmith was 21 when he began playing the 16-year-old titular character of ''Series/TheFreshPrinceOfBelAir''. 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.
* J.D. Williams was 24 when he began playing then-16-year-old Bodie Broadus on ''Series/TheWire''. 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 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.
* ''Series/{{Popular}}'' -- A show about two opposite groups of high school sophomores, some explicitly stated as 15 and 16. From youngest to oldest, there's Carly Pope (19), Sara Rue (20), Bryce Johnson (22), Tamara Mello (23), Leslie Bibb (25), Christopher Gorham (25), Tammy Lynn Michaels (25), Leslie Grossman (28). Ron Lester was 29 in the first season, therefore 30 in the second season and still playing a teen.
* In ''Creator/{{Telemundo}}'''s soap opera Marina, the main character of the same name played by Sandra Echeverría had a son called Chuy played by Alfonso Dosal and an adoptive daughter called Patty played by Ilean ALmaguer. Curiously Sandra and Ilean were the same age (23) and Alfonso just one year younger (22) when the series was filmed.
* Inverted with Maura West, who was born in 1972, playing Diane Jenkins on Series/TheYoungAndTheRestless during 2010-2012, a character that was created when West was ten years old and was already an adult of at least 25. So not only was she playing a character old enough to be her mother, but she looked young enough that she could have been more convincingly Dawson cast than play a woman in her 50s.
* A rare example from the other end of the age spectrum can be seen in ''Series/RescueMe'' when Jerry Adler joins the cast as Chief Feinberg. Feinberg is an old man, but since he is still working a regular shift in a firehouse he presumably must be a good deal younger than the 78 years Adler was when he took the part.
* In the Creator/TimAllen series ''Series/LastManStanding'' Middle daughter Mandy Baxter, who is supposed to be a senior in high school during the first season, is played by Molly Ephraim, who was 26 when the series started in 2011.
* ''HeadOfTheClass'' -- Most of the cast members are in their 20s, but Dan Frischman was in his late 20s and early 30s during the show's run from 1986 to 1991. The creators and producers of the show have said this... Season One: 9th grade, Season Two: 10th grade, Season Three: 11th grade, Season Four: First semester of 12th grade, Season Five: Second semester of 12th grade. So they were all playing 14 year olds in the first season.
* ''Series/{{Tinsel}}'' has a 27-year-old playing the character of [[JailBait 17-year-old Emil]]. Cue fans feeling the [[LikesOlderWomen romance]] between him and the older Angela Dede as TooSexyForThisTimeslot. Same show has a woman who is obviously in her twenties playing teenager Shalewa.
* On ''Series/HawaiiFive0'', Max hasn't been given a specific age, but his biomom was killed in the 80s and he has no memory of her, making it ''likely'' that's the decade he was born in; actor Creator/MasiOka was born in '74. His love interest Sabrina is played by Creator/RummerWillis, a full ''thirteen years'' his junior and ''actually'' born in the late 80s, but they look like they could share a birthday.
* Creator/DickClark, host of ''American Bandstand'' and ''New Year's Rockin' Eve'' was called "America's oldest teen." Seriously at first back in his 20s, then humorously, then fondly with headlines like [[http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/dick-clark-entertainment-icon-nicknamed-americas-oldest-teenager/story?id=16076252 America's Oldest Teen Dead at 82]]
* Creator/JennetteMcCurdy began playing Sam Puckett on ''Series/{{ICarly}}'' when she was 14; by the time the series ended she was 20, and when the spinoff ''Series/SamAndCat'' ceased production she was 21. Similarly, her ''Sam & Cat'' costar Creator/ArianaGrande was 20 when Nickelodeon shut it down (they turned 22 and 21 - both actresses celebrate their birthday on June 26 - before the network officially cancelled the show).
* ''Rags to Riches'' is a 1980s TV show about a millionaire who adopts five orphan girls, each "girl" played by a woman over the age of 18, and most of whom were over the age of 20.
* A weird example happened in ''Series/TruCalling'': 22-year-old Tru is played by the 23-year-old Eliza Dushku, which is reasonable. However, she's apparently able to pass for 17 in the episode "Star Crossed".
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Exceptions]]
* Claire Danes (Angela) and Devon Gummersall (Brian) from ''Series/MySoCalledLife'' 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 teens on ''Series/{{Degrassi}}'' are all played by real teens -- but they're much more attractive than the typical bunch of high schoolers (see HollywoodHomely).
** 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.
** An odd recent aversion is casting 17 year old (16 during filming) Niamh Wilson as a 12th grader, making her younger than her character and all but one of the cast regulars, who plays a 9th grader.
* ''Series/BeverlyHills90210'' did manage to avoid this in a few cases: Shannen Doherty (19) and Jennie Garth (18) were borderline, but at least they were still teenagers. Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling, both 17, were clear aversions. Douglas Emerson, who played Scott Scanlon, was actually 16, making him the only actor the same age as his character, but he was [[TonightSomeoneDies written off]] in the second season.
* Most of the original cast on ''Series/SavedByTheBell'' 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.
** The two kids from ''Good Morning Miss Bliss'' who did ''not'' carry over to ''Saved By The Bell'', Max Battimo and Heather Hopper, were 14 and 12 respectively.
** Mario Lopez (Slater) started out at age 16, graduating at 20; Tiffani(-Amber) Thiessen started at 15, making her the same age as Gosselaar and Voorhees. The eldest was Elizabeth Berkley, 17 when she started and 21 when it ended.
* In general, Creator/DisneyChannel is pretty good at averting this trope.
** The ''other'' kids on ''Series/HannahMontana'', including star Music/MileyCyrus, were actually in their early-to-mid-teens when the show started, making the casting of Jackson all the more glaring -- and baffling, though that only applies when you find out his actual age; seriously, if you didn't think he looked like he was in his late teens, you are either blind or ''really'' need your eyes checked. This is funny in that he's more believable as a teen in ''Hannah Montana'' than he is as a grown adult in ''Dadnapped''.
** Averted in ''Series/ShakeItUp'', where the characters are supposed to be in high school. In fact, leads Creator/BellaThorne (Cece) and Adam Irigoyen (Deuce) were only 13 years old playing high school freshmen at the start of the series.
** Mostly averted with ''Series/SonnyWithAChance'' and its spinoff ''Series/SoRandom'', except for one member of the core cast, Tiffany Thornton, who was 24 years of age when she played 17-year-old Tawni Hart.
* Franchise/SuperSentai often averts the trope: post-2000 series rarely feature main cast members older than 22-23 maximum, save for some {{Sixth Ranger}}s who were older than the main heroes. Several recent series have had 15 to 17-year-old characters played by actors of the same age and even teenagers playing characters ''older'' than themselves -- ''[[Series/SamuraiSentaiShinkenger 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 ''[[Series/TensouSentaiGoseiger Goseiger]]'' where 20-year-old Mikiho Niwa plays 17-year-old Moune.
** In ''Series/TokumeiSentaiGobusters'', Ryuji is played at 28 years old by Ryouma Baba (who turned 27 soon after the start of filming) and at 15 years old by Koudai Matsuoka (a year younger than the character.)
** At 15 years old, Tsuruhime/Ninja White from ''Series/NinjaSentaiKakuranger'' is currently the youngest female hero in the franchise's history. She was played by Satomi Hirose, who was actually ''14'' at the time the show began.
** Possibly the most hilariously exaggerated inversion yet -- in ''Series/HikoninSentaiAkibaranger'', 23-year-old Yumeria Moegi is played by ''16''-year-old Karin Ogino.
* ''Series/MarriedWithChildren''
** Creator/ChristinaApplegate was 15 years old and playing a 15-year-old in the first season of (her character's age was said to be 16 a few months before Christina herself, making it a rare case of a teen actor ''younger'' than her role).
** David Faustino was much the same, playing a 12-year-old boy when he was in fact 12 years old. In both cases, the characters aged at the same rate as the actors. Of course, while Kelly was repeatedly stated to have an active sex life, Applegate wasn't actively portrayed making out on camera until after she turned 18.
** KateySagal was 33 and Creator/EdONeill 41 when the series started, though for comedic effect Al and Peg often referred to the other as being several decades older than that.
* ''Series/TheBill'' features a 19-year-old character, played by an actress who was 17 when she started filming.
* Creator/SarahMichelleGellar was 16 when she started playing Erica Kane's long lost daughter Kendall Hart on ''Series/AllMyChildren'' in 1993. The character was initially 16 years old but, via a {{retcon}}, her age was later changed to 23 due to the continuity errors of Erica having a teenaged daughter from a teenaged pregnancy created. When the character was brought back 6.5 years later, Kendall's birth year and age were reverted back to her original age when she first appeared as a teenager in 1993.
* ''Series/FreaksAndGeeks'' 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 ''Series/{{Bones}}'', in which a now 24-year-old John Francis Daley plays 24-year-old [[ReplacementScrappy wunderkind]] psychologist Lance Sweets.
* In ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'', 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. Creator/KateeSackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
** For that matter, the fact that she was cast could be considered an [[InvertedTrope 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.
* ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' has twenty-year-old Creator/JewelStaite playing Kaylee, who is implied to be older than 17-year-old River (played by Creator/SummerGlau, who IRL was a year older than Jewel).
* ''Series/FTroop'''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.
* ''Series/That70sShow''
** The 15-year-old character of Jackie Burkhart was played by the actually 15-year-old Creator/MilaKunis. The story goes that when asked how old she was, Mila said, "I'll be 18 [[ExactWords on my birthday]]." [[LoopholeAbuse She just didn't say which birthday.]] The producers liked her so much that they decided to keep her even when they found out the truth. Thus, she was 14 when they started filming the series, but the producers thought she was 16.
** When the show started, Creator/LauraPrepon and Wilmer Valderrama were also teens; however, they aged normally, while their characters did not.
* In ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'', Jared Padalecki and Creator/JensenAckles are actually almost exactly the same ages as their characters, Sam and Dean Winchester. They are each one year older than their characters[[note]]Although that may have just been an accident. There's a pretty large gap of time between when an episode films and when it airs, and their birthdays might have just happened in the meantime.[[/note]], 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.
** ''Grey's Anatomy'' watchers might also find it strange Sarah Drew plays 17-year old Nora in the season 5 episode Swap Meat despite being 30-year old, and playing an age-appropriate doctor in Grey's at the time.
* The cast of ''Series/{{Skins}}'' are generally the same age as the characters they play -- which makes it a rather interesting exception given the show's apparent policy of "sex, drugs, and nudity whenever possible."
** The American version landed in hot water with the MoralGuardians for casting teenaged actors, who accused the producers of violating "child pornography laws" for a semi-nude scene using a 17-year-old actor. They weren't actually doing anything illegal, but the resulting {{Squick}} did put a lot of viewers off the show.
* ''Series/GilmoreGirls'' featured 33-year-old Lauren Graham as 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore, and 18-year-old (at the time of casting) Creator/AlexisBledel as 16-year-old Rory Gilmore.
* Lucy Griffiths, who played Marian in the BBC's 2006 version of ''Series/RobinHood'' was 18 and playing a 21-year-old character in the first series.
* On ''Series/TheWire'', 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 Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} shows using a live-action cast actually used actors around the same age as their characters.
** Notably, ''Series/TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'' 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.
** ''Series/DrakeAndJosh'' 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.
** Same situation for ''Series/NedsDeclassifiedSchoolSurvivalGuide'', sort of. Devon Werkheiser and Daniel Curtis Lee were both 13 when they started the show which is fine for 7th graders. However, for the next 2 years the show never went past 8th grade and ended with the 2 boys 16 years old still playing 8th graders. Lindsey Shaw on the other hand, was 15 playing a 7th grader when the show started, a true Dawsons Casting. She ended the show playing an 8th grader at age 17.
** Melissa Joan Hart was fifteen when she started playing [[Series/ClarissaExplainsItAll Clarissa Darling]], and her character aged up accordingly.
** Also on ''Series/{{Zoey 101}}'': the characters grew from 8th (season 1) to 10th grade (seasons 3/4), along with the main cast who were 13/14 when the show started. There's in an inversion with ''{{Victoria Justice}}'', who is two years younger but was seemingly placed in the same grade.
*** What made it notable was that the amount of fanservice also grew each season.
* ''Series/{{Heroes}}''
** Claire was 17 years old -- and played by 16-year-old (when the series started) Creator/HaydenPanettiere -- 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 TheReveal of [[spoiler: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 ''Series/HomeImprovement'' 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.
* ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'' had Creator/MichaelCera and Creator/AliaShawkat at almost the exact age of 14-15.
** Season 4 continues this but plays around with this and OlderThanTheyLook. George Micheal becomes the target of sex offenders due to his youthful looks despite being and perhaps because he's 22. Maeby is still in high school, purposely posing as a senior for the last five years. Of course she's barely fooling anyone.
* Tyler James Williams, the young Chris Rock on ''Series/EverybodyHatesChris'', was 12 when he began playing his middle-school-aged role. Unfortunately, he's since hit puberty ... and now his voice is noticeably more baritone than that of the adult Chris Rock, who narrates the show.
** Not to mention one of the early jokes of the show was that Chris' younger brother was taller than him (mirroring Chris Rock's real life younger brother who grew taller than him at an early age). After puberty, Williams was much taller than the other actor, not to mention his constant bully (though the bully remained much bulkier than the skinny Williams).
* Holly Tyler of ''Series/WhatILikeAboutYou'' 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 ''Film/WhatAGirlWants'', Bynes was a sixteen-year-old playing a seventeen-year-old.
* Creator/NeilPatrickHarris was more or less the same age as his character when he was in ''Series/DoogieHowserMD'', although the show does illustrate why this trope exists -- he really grew from season one to season two. However, Max Casella was 22 years old when he began playing 16-year-old Vinnie.
* Most of the ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'' 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 {{aver|tedTrope}}sion.
** The reason this exists was perfectly demonstrated in the episode "Better than the Average Cory", where we meet 13-year-old artist Alexandra Nechita ([[SpecialGuest 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 [[http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/bmw/index.php?episode=96 one reviewer]] [[RealityIsUnrealistic could not believe they were the same age, even though they were]].
** On the other hand, the use of accurately-aged actors added a nice flavor of realism to the physical changes during puberty for the main characters. For example, Topanga grows breasts over the summer at the same time that Danielle Fishel grew them during the hiatus between seasons. And in season 1, Rider Strong is more than six inches taller and considerably larger-boned than Ben Savage (to the point where their difference in size was the subject of a few gags), although both the actors and their characters are only a few months apart in age. Fast-forward to season 3, and not only have ''both'' actors grown considerably, but Savage has shot up to a couple of inches taller than Strong, as well as becoming noticeably bulkier than the latter.
* Willa Holland really was fourteen when she played fourteen-year-old Kaitlin Cooper on ''Series/TheOC''. Actually, she didn't turn fourteen until just after her first episode ''aired'', but that's fine because [[SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome Kaitlin was eleven two seasons earlier, anyway.]] (Though humorously played by an actress who was the same age)
** Mischa Barton was 17 when Marissa was 16 in the first season.
* ''Series/MalcolmInTheMiddle'' does this by a couple years; at the beginning, 14-year-old Frankie Muniz played (approximately) 11-year-old Malcolm; 9-year-old Erik Per Sullivan played his 6-year-old younger brother Dewey; 20-year-old Christopher Masterson played his 16-year-old brother Francis; but his older brother Reese was played by ''13''-year-old Justin Berfield (who was taller than Frankie, and remained so throughout the entire series, to the producers' probable relief).
** Invoked in one episode, an adult woman in her early 20s poses as a student in order to bust drug dealers. Nobody is fooled.
* ''Series/GrowingPains'' had their CousinOliver characters played by actors around their ages. By the final season in 1991, Creator/AshleyJohnson was eight, playing the [[SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome suddenly six-year-old Chrissy Seaver]]. Luke Brower was fifteen years old, played by sixteen-year-old Creator/LeonardoDiCaprio.
* Matthew in ''Series/OneLifeToLive'' is canonically about a year ''older'' than actor Eddie Alderson.
* Richard Series/{{Castle}}'s daughter Alexis is eighteen, as is her actress Molly Quinn.
** The whole Castle family falls under this trope. The actors portraying Richard Castle and his mother (Creator/NathanFillion and Susan Sullivan) were 37 and 66 when filming began. [[AbsurdlyYouthfulMother That makes]] [[FlexibleTrope Castle]] [[AbsurdlyYouthfulDad a young father]], but it does work out.
* ''Series/LieToMe'': Cal Lightman's daughter is 15/16; the actress playing her 18.
* Although the flagship character of ''Series/{{Caprica}}'' (Zoe Graystone) is played by someone about six years older than the character, Tamara is herself a semi-exception. GenevieveBuechner ''is'' older than Tamara Adama but she's much closer than her colleagues to her character's age, being only 18 while her character is about 15.
* Claire Danes subverted this somewhat in her first major role in My So-Called Life. The producers thought she looked too old for the role of Angela Chase, when she was actually younger, and the character's age was revised downward to match the actress's actual age of 15.
* A deleted scene from the {{Pilot}} of ''Series/TheXFiles'' 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.
** Creator/DavidDuchovny was only a year older than his character, Mulder.
* New Zealand series ''Series/TheTribe'' 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 ''Literature/RamonaQuimby'' books, subverted this surprisingly well. Ramona is 8 years old and in third grade. So is her actress. ([[Film/RamonaAndBeezus The film]], on the other hand, is a ludicrous example of this trope played very straight!)
* ''Series/BreakingBad'''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.
* ''Series/TheGeorgeLopezShow'' 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 ''Series/TheWonderYears'' had ages to match their roles, with star Fred Savage being 11 years old when the show first began. Following this trope, Fred Savage has had trouble finding work as an adult after his lauded childhood acting career (acting work, that is -- he's been considerably busier as a director).
* ''Series/PrettyLittleLiars'' {{avert|edTrope}}s this with Sasha Pieterse who began playing the role of [[AlphaBitch Alison DiLaurentis]] at age 14, one year ''younger'' than the character. As [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]] puts it, "being only 14 at the time, she is the youngest actress on the show, all her co-stars being in their late teens to early 20s."
* Averted in ''Series/{{Earth 2}}''. 8-year-old Uly Adair and 10-year-old True Danziger were played by actors aged 8 and 10 respectively.
* The kids on ''Series/FullHouse''.
* ''{{Series/Buffy|TheVampireSlayer}}''
** Unlike almost all of her costars, Michelle Trachtenberg was the same age as her character, Dawn (14 years old when she first appeared on the show).
** Another aversion: At the time of Faith's first appearance in "Faith, Hope and Trick", Creator/ElizaDushku 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 ''Literature/GossipGirl'' 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 ''Series/TheSecretWorldOfAlexMack'' were within a few years of their characters' ages.
* In ''Series/YoungBlades'', 16-year-old RobertSheehan plays the nearly 16-year-old King Louis XIV.
* In ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'', 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 ''Series/TheWestWing''. Elizabeth Moss is at least a year younger than Zoey Bartlet.
* On ''Series/ThirdRockFromTheSun'', Tommy was ReallySevenHundredYearsOld, but his fake Earth age was always the same as Creator/JosephGordonLevitt'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.
* On ''Series/SouthOfNowhere'' Chris Hunter was 18 at the time of filming playing the 17- to 18-year-old Glenn. It's notable because he was three years younger than the actress playing his younger sister.
* In the MadeForTVMovie ''Birds Of Prey'' David Janssen plays an ex-WWII pilot who now flies a traffic helicopter. The film was made when Janssen was 41, and he was 14 when the war ''ended''!
* The LifetimeOriginalMovie ''Film/AmandaKnoxMurderOnTrialInItaly'' cast Creator/HaydenPanettiere (21 at the time of filming) as Miss Knox (20 at the time of the incident).
* Totally averted by BBC children's dramas ''Series/BykerGrove'' and ''Series/GrangeHill'', where all the actors playing children were about the same age as their characters. Some were even a year or so younger.
* Effectively averted in one case on ''Series/{{Glee}}'', in which Creator/ChrisColfer was not only 18 years old when he was cast as 16-year-old Kurt Hummel, but went through a rather dramatic late burst of puberty after being cast, supplying a very effective visual of Kurt growing up (literally, as he gained about three inches in height) on screen. As Colfer still looks Kurt's age (19) in Season 4, it's becoming disconcerting to see Kurt standing next to his on-screen stepbrother Finn, who is supposed to be roughly the same age but was played by Creator/CoryMonteith, who was closer to 30 than 20 and starting to show it.
* In the ''Series/{{UFO}}'' episode "Destruction" Sarah Bosanquet is said to have "ten years' service" at her job, which is a little tricky given that actress Stephanie Beacham would have been about twenty-three at the time of production.
* Averted by Creator/ArianaGrande for the duration of ''Series/{{Victorious}}'' (she began playing Cat on the show aged 16, and was 19 when it ended)... if not [[Series/SamAndCat the spinoff]].
* The children on ''Series/{{Blackish}}'' are played by similarly aged actors. For example fifteen year old Zoey is played by a fourteen year old.
* Sadie Calvano, who plays Violet on ''Series//{{Mom}}'', was 16, the same age as her character, when the show premiered in 2013. Spencer Daniels, who plays her boyfriend Luke, is a slight case since he was 20 when the show began.
[[/folder]]
* ''Series/TheTenthKingdom'' -- 23-year-old Lucy Punch as a girl experiencing her 18th birthday.
* ''Just the Ten of Us'' -- Teen characters Marie and Connie were played by 24-year-old Heather Langenkamp and 25-year-old [=JoAnn=] Willette.
* This trope is subverted in ''Series/TwentyOneJumpStreet'', 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, though many of the non-cops play this trope straight.
* Chiara Zanni, who plays the main character "Amy" on [[Creator/TeenNick The N]] show ''AboutAGirl'', was 29 years old during filming, yet she plays a supposedly "young college student."
* In the British comedy ''Series/AbsolutelyFabulous'', 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.
*** This was heavily Lampshaded in a ''French and Saunders'' sketch where Sawalha also appeared as Saunders's daughter and claimed that, at 42 (much older than she really was), she was getting too old for it.
* 31-year-old Gerard Christopher was cast as the title character in the live-action ''[[Series/TheAdventuresOfSuperboy 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.
* On the SoapOpera ''Series/AllMyChildren'', Creator/SarahMichelleGellar first appeared on the show at the real-life age of 15 in 1993 as the main character Erica Kane's previously-unknown teenaged daughter, Kendall Hart. Since Susan Lucci, the actress who portrays Erica, had been on the show since it first aired in 1970 and the show had claimed Kendall was conceived when Erica was raped as a teenager, Gellar's character was rapidly aged from 16 to 23 years old several months after the character's debut. For two years, a teenaged Gellar played a character in her early twenties and nobody really bought it but just wrote it off as WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. After Gellar left and Kendall's character was brought with a recast 6.5 years later, the character's birth year was reverted back to her original birth year, making her a 16-year old girl again in 1993.
* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryMurderHouse'' - 24-year-old Evan Peters as Tate, a high school student. The five classmates that are shown are played by people in their early 20s, as well. Among the girls who bullied Violet are 32-year old Bianca Lawson. The only teens on the show who aren't portrayed by someone over the age of 20 are Violet and Leah, portrayed by 17-year-old Taissa Farmiga and 19-year-old Shelby Young.
* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryAsylum'', episode ''Tricks and Treats'' -- 25-year-old Devon Graye as 16-year-old Jed Potter.
* Burt Ward, the teenaged Robin in the 60s ''Series/{{Batman}}'', was already 20 when the show started filming.
* ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'' plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life GracePark, who plays Sharon, is actually six years ''older'' than Creator/KateeSackhoff as Kara.
* ''Series/TheBeverlyHillbillies'': 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.
* ''Series/BeverlyHills90210'' is well-known for this sort of thing, but [[CommonKnowledge 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 JustForFun/{{egregious}}, coupled with the fact that ''90210'' predates the {{Trope Namer|s}} 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!
** Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode, "Marge Vs. The Monorail" in reference to "Springfield Heights 90210" star, the Luke Perry-esque Kyle Darren:
---> "Let's have a warm welcome for the stars of the popular teen soap opera, Springfield Heights 90210! He's cool, he's sexy, he's 34 years old! Say hello to Kyle Darren!" (Darren smiles, excessive wrinkles show on his face)
* On ''Series/BigTimeRush'', 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.
* 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...
* In ''Series/BoardwalkEmpire'' 37-year-old Stephen Graham plays UsefulNotes/AlCapone, who was 21 at the time the show is set.
%%* ''Series/BostonPublic''%%
* Trina [=McGee=] started playing high school senior Angela Moore on ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'' at age 28; this is really glaring because ''every'' other major cast member was more-or-less age-appropriate.
* The Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Nicholas Brendon as Xander (25), Creator/AlysonHannigan as Willow (22) and Creator/CharismaCarpenter (26, making Carpenter the same age as her teacher played by Robia [=LaMorte=]. Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d when Wesley first meets her and mistakes her for a teacher. The RunningGag surrounding the supposed inappropriate nature of Wesley's attraction to Cordelia is also rather ruined by the fact that Alexis Denisof (Wesley) was 33 while Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) was 29.) On the show's spinoff, ''Series/{{Angel}}'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by then-22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser. Creator/SarahMichelleGellar, 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. Flash forward to Season 2, when there's an extended flashback to when Buffy is 15, played by 21-year-old S.M.G.
* Creator/SentaMoses 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 ''Series/VengeanceUnlimited'' two years earlier (at 25).
** And in 2009, at 35, she's playing an apparently early 20-something computer tech on ''Series/GeneralHospital''.
* ''Series/{{Californication}}'' -- 22-year-old Madeline Zima as 16-year-old Mia Lewis. [[LampshadeHanging Few of the other characters can believe she is really 16.]]
* The plot of ''Series/{{Caprica}}'' revolves partially around two 16-year-old girls. Of the actresses who play them, one was 21. The other was 23.
* In ''Series/CodeLyokoEvolution'', Quentin Merabet, Mélanie Tran, and Diego Mestanza, who play Ulrich, Yumi, and William, all characters in their early-to-mid teens, are 21, 20, and 19, respectively. This is made all the stranger by the fact that the rest of the main characters avert Dawson Casting -- Gulliver Beverenage, who plays Ulrich's best friend Odd, is ''14''.
* ''Series/ColdCase'' -- In the episode "Love Conquers Al," then-22-year-old Summer Glau plays a teen athlete.
* ''Series/{{Community}}'':
** In the first season, Annie is explicitly stated to be 18, but Alison Brie was three months and change shy of 27 when the first episode aired. Troy, who was in the same high school classes as Annie and in the second season is also revealed to be a year older, is played by Donald Glover, who is [[PlayingGertrude nine months younger than Brie]]. The real kicker is the fact that Gillian Jacobs, who is all of 78 days older than Brie, plays a character who's close to ten years older than Troy and Annie.
** It's {{vague|Age}} how old Abed is (around the same age as Troy), but Danny Pudi was 30 while filming most of the first season.
* The ''Series/{{CSI}}'' episode "Neverland" heavily featured three fourteen-year-old characters. Two were played by actual kids of that age (one from ''Series/{{Heroes}}''). The last was played by an [[Series/ICarly actor]] who's 18.
* In ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' "Grounds for Deception", Stella Bonasera is revealed to have been born in 1975, making her character 35. Melina Kanakaredes who portrays Bonasera is currently 42.
* In ''Series/DadsArmy'', 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 [[FrozenInTime Pike had not aged]].
** Also {{inverted|Trope}}. 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 UsefulNotes/WorldWarI) was played by Clive Dunn, 48. This meant that the oldest member of the platoon was actually played by one of the youngest cast members.
* The 1998 MadeForTVMovie of ''David And Lisa'' has Lukas Haas (22 at the time) and Creator/BrittanyMurphy (21) as the title teens (which is nowhere near as extreme as the 1962 cinema version elsewhere on this page).
* Back to the {{trope namer|s}}, ''Series/DawsonsCreek'': 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) [[SuddenlySexuality Jack]] and [[GenkiGirl Andie]] [=McPhee=] starting in Season 2. Worse considering that Andie was likely the ''younger'' sibling.
** On the behind-the-scenes parts of the SeriesFinale 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).
* A five year TimeSkip between the fourth and fifth seasons of ''Series/DesperateHousewives'' 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).
* ''Series/DoctorWho'' had numerous examples:
** 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (a [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld Time Lord]] posing as a 15-year-old girl). A woman in one episode is said to be "only a few years older" than Susan. Her actress was in fact two years ''younger'' than Ms. Ford.
*** In one First Doctor story, ''The Aztecs'', we get a reverse-Dawson in Cameca. We find her in basically a retirement village; minimum age to live there is at least 51 and they are often consulted for their wisdom. We don't get a number, but as the first girl-of-the-week to fall in love with the Doctor, and the Doctor being the grandfatherly William Hartnell version, she is probably ''not'' intended to be a new arrival on her 51st birthday. Actress' age: '''29'''. (No, she's not secretly a Time Lord.)
** 21-year-old Maureen O'Brien as 15- to 16-year-old Vicki.[[note]]Her exact age isn't given, but in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E3TheMythMakers The Myth Makers]]" she says a 16-year-old character is 'hardly any older than me'.[[/note]]
** 25-year-old Jackie Lane as 18-year-old Dodo Chaplet.
** 21-year-old Wendy Padbury as 15-year-old Zoe Heriot (though Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart says Zoe looks "about 19").
*** And again at the age of 27 in the stage adaptation "Seven Keys To Doomsday", she played 17- to 18-year-old Jenny Wilson.
** 23-year-old Mark Strickson as Turlough. This one is perhaps less JustForFun/{{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.
** 26-year-old Creator/SophieAldred as 16-year-old Ace.
** The new series two-parter The Doctor Dances/The Empty Child has a subversion. [[spoiler:Nancy, played by 21-year-old Florence Hoath, appears to be about 16, having a 5-year-old [[CreepyChild "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 mother.]]
** The ultimate inversion, however, in the case of the Doctor. As pointed out in numerous interviews with the writers and actors in 2013, whether it's 55-plus William Hartnell or Peter Capaldi playing the role, or 20-something Peter Davison or Matt Smith, they're still hundreds, if not thousands of years younger than the character.
*** Of course, even within that, Doctors are sometimes played 'younger'. For one example, 40-year-old Tom Baker was supposed to appear to be in his early 30s, and started out dressed in a costume intended to resemble a university student in order to exaggerate his apparent youth (which soon got switched out for more mature AwesomeAnachronisticApparel as both he and the character aged). ExpandedUniverse books tend to describe him as appearing to be in his thirties, which is [[AdaptationalAttractiveness rather generous towards the end of his tenure]] -- Chris in the "Shada" novelisation struggles to accept the idea of the Doctor being "any older than forty", causing Romana to observe that he's [[Really700YearsOld 760]]. For another example, Matt Smith was 27 when he started playing the role, but is described by other characters to look about 18 or 19, with his first outfit based on {{Hipster}} fashion. River even describes him to Amy as resembling a twelve-year-old, but she was exaggerating for tragicomic effect.
* ''Series/DowntonAbbey'' 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 [[DashedPlotLine progresses considerably faster than real time]], this doesn't last; by the end of season 2, Sybil has actually passed Findlay's real age.
* 22-year-old Justin Long in ''Series/{{Ed}}''.
* The Mexican comedy ''Series/ElChavoDelOcho'' has all of its child characters (around eight years old or so) played by adults over 30. The result is, of course, hilarious.
** Considering all the AmusingInjuries that the "kids" go through in the show, it'd be pretty disturbing otherwise.
* In ''Series/{{Fortysomething}}'', Creator/BenedictCumberbatch was about six or seven years older than university student Rory; 16-year-old Edwin was played by 20-year-old Joe Van Moyland.
** In the ''Series/{{Sherlock}} Case Book'', Sherlock Holmes is revealed to have been born in 1981. Creator/BenedictCumberbatch was born in ''1976''.
* ''Series/FridayNightLights'' is way guilty of this; many of the actors playing juniors and seniors in highschool are in their mid-to-late twenties.
* ''Series/{{Friends}}''
** Parodied in an episode 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, as every flashback to (and video evidence from) Ross, Monica, and Rachel's high school days featured the regular actors playing themselves at 18, with very little attempt to disguise it.
** Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow were 30 and 31 when the show premiered, despite their characters being in their mid-20s.
* All the older teenage characters in the HBO adaptation of ''Series/GameOfThrones'', such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two [[spoiler: Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer]]. The characters are all between 15 and 20 (aged up roughly two years from the books), the actors between 23 and 29.
** Creator/PeterDinklage (mid 40s) playing Tyrion Lannister (early 20s) is a rather extreme example, even though the character is out of his teens. {{Justified|Trope}}, 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 [[Creator/MaisieWilliams Arya Stark]], who are now relatively close in age to their characters, grow up.
*** Tyrion's case can become FridgeBrilliance: the character is described in the books as being horribly ugly as well as a dwarf, and while Dinklage is quite good-looking, it can be inferred that Tyrion's ugliness is actually looking much older than he is.
*** Subverted with Sansa Stark's actress Creator/SophieTurner, who ''looks'' in her late teens or early twenties due to her mature features and [[StatuesqueStunner being five foot seven]], but is [[YoungerThanTheyLook only slightly older than Sansa]].
* Lampshaded(?) on ''Gidget''. 15-year-old Gidget (played by 19-year-old Sally Field) fails to convince a job interviewer that she's 19.
* At 26 years old Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in ''Series/GilmoreGirls''.
** Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old Jess.
* ''Series/{{Glee}}'' is extremely guilty of this with most of their cast being HighSchool characters. The youngest member of the original "teen" cast is the now 23-year-old Creator/ChrisColfer (who was 18 when he was cast) playing a now college freshman with the oldest being 31-year-olds Cory Monteith and Mark Salling playing 19-year-olds.
** 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.
** HilarityEnsues with a recent [[MoralGuardians Parents' Television Council]] statement on the "near pedophilia" of a recent racy GQ shoot starring Lea Michele and Diana Agron. Both were 24. That said, their clothes and hairstyles were clearly designed to make them ''look'' as young as possible, so the legitimacy of this accusation is in the eye of the viewer. And that's putting aside the [[YouKeepUsingThatWord incorrect definition of pedophilia that they were using]].
** Of the season 4 additions to the cast, 20 year old Blake Jenner is now playing high school sophomore Ryder Lynn.
* The TV adaptation of ''Literature/GossipGirl'' is chock full of this. Spoofed on ''Series/TheDailyShow'' 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.
** Which actually ended up causing problems when Chace Crawford objected to his character's romance with Momsen's character, because while the characters were only two years apart Momsen was fifteen and he was twenty-three. They ended up scuppering the pairing because of how uncomfortable he was with it.
* ''Series/GreysAnatomy'' pulls this off 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 [[InsufferableGenius Cristina]] would never do.
** Cristina is said to have a [=PhD=], however, which might explain why she's a bit older -- she might never have taken time ''off'' from her education, but that doesn't mean she went straight to med school after getting her Bachelor's.
* Music/MileyCyrus averted this during ''Series/HannahMontana'', being in her teenage years at the time. However, her character's still-teenaged older brother was played by Jason Earles. For the record, Earles is currently 35.
* Arthur Fonzarelli in ''Series/HappyDays'' was supposed, in the early episodes at least, to be eighteen/nineteen 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. Also featuring Creator/RonHoward as Richie Cunningham, a high-schooler with a lacquered combover.
* ''Series/HardyBoysNancyDrewMysteries'' had Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy (24 and 18, when the series started filming) playing Literature/TheHardyBoys, who were supposedly 17 & 16. Inverted in Disney's adaptation for ''TheMickeyMouseClub'', in which the actors Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk were younger than the books -- 12 and 11.
** The series also had 24-year-old Pamela Sue Martin as 16-year-old Nancy Drew. [[TheOtherDarrin Her replacement]], Janet Louise Johnson, was 19.
* In ''Series/{{Heroes}}'', Nicholas D'Agosto was 27 years old when he started playing high school student West Rosen.
** Hiro Nakamura is stated to be 24, but actor Creator/MasiOka was 32 at the time.
* Some of the younger patients on ''Series/{{House}}'' have this. One example is the 15-year-old supermodel in the 2nd season episode "[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0606039/ Skin Deep]]" played by an actress aged 25.
** Several of the doctors on the team invert this to some extent, [[Series/DoogieHowserMD at least presumably]], being played by actors who would be extraordinarily young to be in their position.
** The episode "Not Cancer" had an ''incredibly'' obvious example, with an alleged 4-year-old (who was only seen briefly) being played by a kid who was clearly, like, eleven.
** A younger example, Cuddy's daughter was also played by a girl who was at least four years old. She was two at her oldest, and treated as such, which to some made it seem like the child had developmental difficulties.
* 25-year-old Steve Burns (of WesternAnimation/BluesClues fame) played a bullied high-school student in a 1998 episode of Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet.
* ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'' is a minor example in that Ted, Lily and Marshall are all supposed to be the same age yet Jason Segel is 6 years younger than Josh Radnor and Alyson Hannigan. The age gap between Cobie Smulders and Neil Patrick Harris is 9 years, as opposed to the 4 between Robin and Barney. A more obvious example is the flashbacks to scenes in college, with the characters' younger selves still played by the same actors. The same goes for the flash forward scenes, though the actors are usually heavily made up to look older. In "Time Travellers" however, 20-years-from-now Ted and Barney, who'd both be in their fifties look pretty much the same as before.
* ''Series/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 Music/MirandaCosgrove, who was 15 when they filmed them. Miranda apparently got to choose which guy they casted.
* In ''Series/IClaudius'', because the series takes place over nearly eighty years, this is both played straight and later inverted with many of the same characters. Just to name a few major examples:
** Creator/DerekJacobi, aged 38, played Claudius from the age of 19 to his death at 63.
** Siân Phillips, aged 43, played Livia from the age of 34 to her death at 86.
** George Baker, aged 45, played Tiberius from the age of 18 to his death at 77.
** Margaret Tyzack, also aged 45, played Antonia from the age of 27 to her death at 73.
** Some examples where this is purely played straight include Creator/JohnHurt (aged 36) as Caligula from the age of 17 to his death at 28, Christopher Biggins (aged 28) as 17-year-old Nero, and Graham Seed (aged 26) as ''13''-year-old Britannicus.
* 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.
* ''Series/TheInbetweeners''. The four main characters, 17-year-olds, are played by actors ranging from 22 to 26.
* The WB's ''Jack & Bobby'' featured 24-year-old Matt Long as 15-year-old Jack [=McCallister=]. Made glaringly obvious by the fact that Creator/LoganLerman, who played Jack's 13-year-old brother Bobby, was actually 12 at the time of filming.
* ''Series/JeevesAndWooster'' has it both ways. Both Creator/HughLaurie and Creator/StephenFry 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 PowersThatBe could get away with it. By way of contrast, the Jeeves movies of the mid-1930s starred 40-year-old Arthur Treacher as Jeeves and 25-year-old David Niven as Bertie.
* German actress Josefine Preuss (b. 1986) has not visibly aged since she was about 15. Guess which roles she usually gets.
* ''Series/{{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.
* ''Franchise/KamenRider'' shows usually avert this, since they have a habit of casting late-teens actors for their late-teens characters. However, Renn Kiriyama as Shotaro in ''Series/KamenRiderDouble'' was 25 when the show was airing, and while Shotaro's never given an explicit age, he is shown wearing a high-school uniform. This would indicate he's in his late teens as well.
* ''Series/KathAndKim's'' Kim is supposed to be in her mid-to-late 20s. Gina Riley, the actress who plays her, is pushing 50.
** Jane Turner, who plays her mother, is only five months older than her... but when the sketches the show originated from began, they were both in their early thirties, making Turner's Kath an inversion of this trope. She's only recently caught up with her character's age. In the second season, there were flashbacks to Kim's birth (when Kath would be in her early twenties) and to Kim as a teenager. Both actresses were 42 at the time.
* ''SeriesLawAndOrderCriminalIntent'': Tony Goldwyn played Vincent D'Onofrio's older (by several years) brother. Goldwyn is actually a year younger than D'Onofrio.
* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'' which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools [[spoiler: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 RippedFromTheHeadlines: [[http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2010/11/fake-teens-iv-serial-teen-treva.html see it here.]] (And see below)
** In an episode of ''Series/LawAndOrder'' with a similar plot, the female murderer is played by a 20-year-old actress. The character is a 26-year-old woman pretending to be a 16-year-old girl.
** The RippedFromTheHeadlines (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 ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' [[spoiler:this 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]].
* 27-year-old Peta Wilson as 18-year-old Nikita in ''Series/LaFemmeNikita''. 31-year-old Marnie [=McPhail=] as her childhood friend of the same age in the second episode of the first season. [[spoiler:Though it turns out she's an imposter, but this trope is still pretty glaring until the HeelFaceTurn]].
* Julianna Rose Mauriello was 13 when she took on the role of 8-year-old Stephanie on the children's show ''Series/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 ''Lazy Town Extra'', filmed when she was 17, the character mentions she's lived in Lazy Town for a year, which would make her 9.
* The six main characters of the short-lived show ''Series/LifeAsWeKnowIt'' 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.
* The Canadian sitcom ''Series/LifeWithDerek'' 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.
* ''Series/LincolnHeights'' has quite an extreme example with the 27- to 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.
* Due to the fact that time on the show passes much slower than in real life, 10-year-old Walt Lloyd on ''Series/{{Lost}}'' was played by roughly 14-year-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 [[spoiler:it's in flashforwards set three years after he left the island]], which still doesn't work because he's too old for [[spoiler:13]]. Prior to his appearance in [[spoiler: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 few months that had passed on the show to explain.
** Inverted in the case of Locke's father, played by Kevin Tighe, who is only eight years older than Terry O'Quinn.
* In the miniseries ''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.
* ''Series/MaddigansQuest'' 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.
* ''Series/MADtv'' parodies and lampshades this repeatedly in "Pretty White Kids With Problems". The actors are obviously way too old to be playing teenagers, which they constantly make sure to point out.
-->'''Actor in his mid-30s:''' 15 can be a difficult age. And that's how old I am. 15.
* Gary Burghoff of ''Series/{{MASH}}'' 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 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. Mike Farrell was 36 when he was cast as 28-year-old BJ Hunnicutt, Harry Morgan was 60 when he played a character who was young enough to be underage at the time of World War I.
** These issues were exacerbated by the fact that the show ran almost four times as long as the actual Korean War, making the disparities in long-running characters even more striking near the end of the series. Not relevant in the cases of characters whose ages are not given.
* Matt [=LeBlanc=] played underaged boys from his first appearance at age 18 on ''TV 101'', until he landed his role on ''Series/{{Friends}}''. He specialized in playing the boyfriend to underaged female characters on sitcoms such as ''Series/MarriedWithChildren'' and ''Just the Ten of Us''. as the good-looking, Italian "hunk" (from some unspecified East Coast city).
* ''[=McHale=]'s Navy'' ran from 1962 to 1966. In peacetime, to find a Third or Second Class Petty Officer (E-4, E-5) in their thirties or forties, you would have to look extremely hard. Most are in their twenties. This is especially true in wartime when advancement is obscenely easy. Ernest Borgnine served in the real Navy during WWII, getting out as a First Class Petty Officer at age 28, but also played a Commander at age 45, which is not unreasonable. Another actor, Victor Mature, was in the Coast Guard in WWII, and he made Chief Petty Officer (E-7) in 14 months. Given this, some of the casting for "[=McHale=]'s Navy" was extremely egregious. Carl Ballantine (PO2 Gruber) was 47, in real world he would have been an E-7/E-8, not an E-5. Billy Sands was 51, too old for the military, peacetime or wartime. Surprisingly, most of the others were at least close to their appropriate age. I believe it was a case of the producers not caring.
* In the 1998 series ''{{Series/Merlin|1998}}'', Sam Neill (who was 51 when the film was released) played Merlin for about two-thirds of the first half of the film and all of the second half. However, it wasn't until the second half that Merlin would have been around that age in-story (because of the time skip necessary for Arthur to grow up). During the entire first half, he was less than half that age. [[JustifiedTrope The reason for this is probably because having Merlin portrayed by an actor of the appropriate age at all times would have left Sam Neil playing Merlin for only one half of the entire film]].
* The cast in ''Series/TheMiddle'' 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.
** Siblings Axl Heck (15 in Season 1) and Sue Heck (13 in season 1) are portrayed by actors born in 1990 and late 1991 respectively, even though both do a good job of acting and looking (almost) the right age. Brick Heck (8 in Season 1), is portrayed by Atticus Shaffer, who was 11 at the time. Shaffer is now 14 playing an 11 year old, but due to his small stature (a result of osteogenesis imperfecta), he pulls it off most convincingly.
* ''Literature/TheMistsOfAvalon'' miniseries had an extreme example, where 13-year-old Morgause at the beginning was played by Joan Allen, who was 44 and looked it.
* In the MiniSeries adaptation of Arthur Hailey's ''The Moneychangers'', callgirl Avril Devereaux -- a blonde in her twenties in the novel -- is played by Joan Collins. While the hair colour can be overlooked, her being 43 years old at the time is another matter. (Then again, producer Ross Hunter was known for skewing older in his casting choices.)
* When ''Series/MyFamily'' began, only one of the Harper children was played by an actor close to the character's age; 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 Janey was "almost 30" and only two years younger than Denby-Ashe (thanks to SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome, 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.
* The star of Creator/{{Nickelodeon}}'s ''Series/TheMysteryFilesOfShelbyWoo'' was extraordinarily unconvincing as a "KidDetective," even to the target audience.
* 23-year-old Don Cheadle played the role of 16-year-old Jack in the April 1, 1988 "Jung and the Restless" episode of ''Series/NightCourt.''
* 25-year-old John Hensley playing 16-year-old Matt on ''Series/NipTuck'' (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 made glaringly obvious when he started getting a receding hairline.
* ''Series/TheOC'' is guilty of this, as mentioned in the quote at the top, with teens in their late 20s and parents in their early 30s. It [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] on this trope, among many others, with their show-within-a-show, "The Valley."
* ''Series/OnceUponATime''
** In the first season, the show was criticized for having what looked like a 40-year-old actress playing 28-year-old Emma Swan, though the actress was actually more around the age of 32. In the second season, the same actress, now 33, is spending half an episode in a flashback to when Emma was 18.
** Though the age may not be explicitly stated like the Emma example, many of the actors play the younger version of their characters, at least a decade younger, for instance Ginnifer Goodwin playing Snow White as a young adult/late teens, though Goodwin was in her early 30s. Other people in their 30s playing much, much younger versions include Lana Parrilla and Josh Dallas.
** And then there's 40-year-old Rose [=McGowen=] as "young Cora." She does look like "old Cora" (65-year-old Barbara Hershey) due to their matching plastic surgery.
** 26-year-old Parker Croft as Felix, one of the Lost Boys. The casting call describes him: "A few teen boy roles are being cast that might be recurring. One of the boys is named Felix, and he's their leader."
* Georgina Haig (29 as of late 2014) as [[Disney/{{Frozen}} Elsa]](20; she was 18 in the movie when she was coronated, and the flashback scenes with her and Anna take place 2 years later).
* In the BritCom ''Series/OnTheBuses'', ''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 BBC sitcom ''Series/OpenAllHours'', 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.
* Charlotte Coleman was in her early 20s when playing teenage Jess in the TV adaptation of ''Literature/OrangesAreNotTheOnlyFruit''.
* ''Series/ParkerLewisCantLose'' -- Older actors playing teens include Corin Nemic, Billy Jayne, Abraham Benrubi, Jennifer Guthrie, Harold Pruett, all in their early 20s.
* ''Series/PartyOfFive'' 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. {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d in season 3 where Bailey's friend, seeing his fake ID, was very surprised that anyone would believe he's 27. On the other hand 11-year-old Creator/LaceyChabert (Claudia) and 16-year-old Creator/JenniferLoveHewitt (Sarah) were the same ages as their characters.
* All of the secondary school pupils in the seventies Britcom ''Series/PleaseSir'' were quite visibly in their late twenties or early thirties.
* ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' is a common offender, with the [[Series/MightyMorphinPowerRangers original season's]] 15-year-old characters being played by actors as old as 24. ''[[Series/PowerRangersOperationOverdrive Operation Overdrive]]'' had an 18-year-old [[TheSmartGuy Smart]] [[TheChick Chick]] being played by a 28-year-old actress (who, however, looks quite young and seems to actually be able to get away with it) and a guy of 19-20 being played by a 29-year-old.
** The early seasons had most actors between 18-21, with subsequent seasons going off in many different directions.
** ''Series/MightyMorphinPowerRangers'' 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.
*** As far as high school seniors go, some of the cast members weren't all that bad for the role. The male actors were the only problem. Walter Jones actually somewhat looked the part, even at 22, but David Yost, Jason Narvy (Skull), and Paul Schrier (Bulk) were 19 (Narvy), 23 (Schrier), and 24 (Yost) respectively and looked like it.
*** David Yost was 27 when Billy graduated high school [[UpToEleven a year early]].
** The 28-year-old actress from ''Operation Overdrive'' has stated in interviews that she was also given an audition for the ''Film/HarryPotter'' films as 15-year-old Cho Chang...
** Melanie Vallejo, who plays the 17/18-year-old Madison in ''[[Series/PowerRangersMysticForce Mystic Force]]'', was 27 at the time of filming...
** Played straight and inverted in the case of Olivia Tennet (Dr. K) from ''[[Series/PowerRangersRPM 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").
** [[WebVideo/AtopTheFourthWall Linkara]] summed it up nicely in his ''WebVideo/HistoryOfPowerRangers'' series: "Clearly, the casting director has never seen a teenager."
** ''Series/PowerRangersDinoThunder'' actually wasn't bad compared to just about all the other seasons, though it was still sort of played straight. The characters were 18-year-old high school seniors, and Emma Lahana (Kira) and Kevin Duhaney (Ethan) were both 19 at the time of filming. James Napier (Conner), however, was 21 and (to an extent) looked it, and Jeffrey Parazzo (Trent) was ''25''. Except Jeffrey looked very young for his age, was arguably the youngest-looking of the cast members, and [[http://images.yodibujo.es/_uploads/membres/articles/20081146/trent48_syo.jpg actually pulled it off the best.]] Also, Jason David Frank was 30 playing Tommy at 25. [[http://de.prwiki.info/images/0/07/DT_Tommy_Oliver.jpg He pulled it off, too.]]
** ''Series/PowerRangersJungleFury'' has Casey and Lily, both 18, played by Jason Smith (24) and Anna Hutchison (22). Theo, 17, was played by Aljin Abella (23).
** ''Series/PowerRangersSPD'' has Bridge, canonically 21 (despite the Jetix website inexplicably listing him as 17), played by 27 year old Matt Austin.
** In ''Series/PowerRangersWildForce'', Max (Blue Ranger) is supposed to be younger than the other rangers, but is played by then-24-year-old Philip Jeanmarie. This is justified, however, as Philip looked reasonably young for his age.
** ''Series/PowerRangersNinjaStorm'' both averts and plays this straight. Dustin was played by 18-year-old Glenn McMillan, and Tori was played by 17-year-old Sally Martin. Shane, however was played by Pua Magasiva, who was 22 at the time and looked it, which made him appear noticeably older than the other two main characters. Adam Tuominen (Hunter) was also 22 and Jorgito Vargas Jr. (Blake) was 25.
* One episode of ''Series/{{Psych}}'' quite possibly took advantage of this trope. [[spoiler: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 be.]]
* 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|Trope}} as the Arthurian legends tend to suggest a fairly wide age gap between Morgause and Morgan le Fay/Morgana
* 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 ''Film/HalfBaked'', 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''.
* Patrick [=McKenna=] was '''''31''''' when he started playing teen-aged Harold on ''Series/TheRedGreenShow''. Interestingly, Harold ''did'' slowly age as the series progressed, eventually going to college and getting various full-time jobs.
* In series three of ''Series/RobinHood'', 29-year-old Clive Standen played 20-year-old Archer and 30-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.
* Inverted to the point of absurdity on ''Series/{{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.
* ''Series/{{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 (joining in mid-season) 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.
* Melissa Joan Hart started playing 16-year-old ''Series/SabrinaTheTeenageWitch'' 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 she'd been going to college and then on to a career in journalism.
** A rather glaring example of this trope is the casting of a [[http://ruinedchildhood.com/post/56002643924/worb-sabrina-the-teenage-witch-hired-this BALDING MAN]] to play a highschool student.
** 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 ''Series/ClarissaExplainsItAll'' which ran from 1991 to 1994.
* ''Doctor Who'' spinoff ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'' features 20-year-old Daniel Anthony as 14-year-old Clyde Langer and 18-year-old Anjli Mohindra as 15-year-old Rani Chandra. Considering they had to write out two of the lead characters because their actors were taking exams, this is a rare justified example.
* Played straight, naturally in ''Series/TheSecretCircle''. The youngest cast member of the main cast, Britt Robertson, is 21 and the oldest, Jessica Parker Kennedy is 27. The rest of the cast members include Thomas Dekker who's 24, Phoebe Tonkin who's 23, Louis Hunter who's 22, Chris Zylka who's 27, and Shelly Hennig who's 25.
** Not to mention Adam Harrington plays the younger version of Ethan from the 90s (Adam Harrington is 42).
* Exaggerated in a few October 1968 episodes of the soap opera ''The Secret Storm''. Christina Crawford (of ''Literature/MommieDearest'' fame), the 29-year-old actress who played the 28-year-old Joan Borman Kane, called in sick for about a week. Her replacement was her adoptive mother, legendary actress Joan Crawford, who was ''63 years old'' at the time. (Thankfully, few clips of these episodes survive.)
* More SelmaBlair examples:
** ''Series/TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'' almost avoided this until 23-year-old Selma Blair arrived in the episode "Das Bus."
** ''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 ''Series/KathAndKim'' with 36-year-old SelmaBlair as twenty-something Kim (though this wasn't nearly as bad as the Australian version; see below.)
* In ''Series/SeventhHeaven'' 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.
* On the UK "dramedy" ''Series/{{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."
** ''{{Shameless}}'' also gives us 15-year old Ian (played by 20-year old Gerard Kearns) and 16-year olds Lip, Mandy and Karen, played by actors who were 22, 22 and 21 respectively.
** 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.
* In ''Series/SixFeetUnder'', the initially high-school-aged Claire Fisher was played by the initially twenty-three-year-old Lauren Ambrose.
* ''Series/{{Smallville}}''
** 24-year-old Tom Welling, and (let's face it) pretty much everyone else except Lex Luthor, who is supposed to be several years older. But Tom is particularly noticeable, as the character is fourteen in the pilot. [[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y2JaOhXV0Lw/Tb2QmF3JvmI/AAAAAAAAAF4/9vs3gXIdmvo/s1600/clark-kent.jpg How many fourteen-year-olds are built like a tank?]] (Then again, this is [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Clark Kent]].)
** 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.
** Erica Durance was 26 when she first appeared. Lois is [[ContinuitySnarl supposed to be]] 19 at the time.
** Tom Welling is two years older than Brandon Routh (Clark/Superman in ''Film/SupermanReturns''), 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.
* In-universe example: in ''Series/{{Smash}}'' when Rebecca Duvall joins the cast of ''Bombshell'' it's pointed out that she's older than Creator/MarilynMonroe was when she passed away. Duvall is played by Creator/UmaThurman, who is indeed several years older than Marilyn -- in fact, she turned 42 (Marilyn left us aged 36) the day before one of her episodes premiered!
* ''Series/SquarePegs'' is a show from the 1982/1983 season about the two groups of 14-year-old freshmen 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.
* Nog, in ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' was supposedly a young teenager as of the first season, 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.
** Justified since he wore so much makeup that you couldn't really tell what age he actually was.
** When first introduced, 19-year old Ziyal was played by (then) 23-year old Cyia Batten and (then) 25-year old Tracy Middendorf. During her major appearances in seasons five and six, she was around 21-22 years old and was played by (then) 34-year old Melanie Smith.
** Creator/WilWheaton was 15 when playing a 15-year-old [[CreatorsPet Wesley Crusher]]. ''Franchise/StarTrek'' in general has avoided this with the child characters, with several recurring children on ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' being played by the appropriate age.
** The best-known example 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 [[Film/StarTrek 2009 movie]] retcons this by giving him a birthdate that would have made him 26 when he debuted in the show.
* ''Series/StrangersWithCandy'' -- 30-something Creator/AmySedaris 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 Creator/WinonaRyder played "Fran" [[AlphaBitch the coolest girl at school]].
* In the Canadian series ''Series/StudentBodies'', all the actors playing teenagers were in their early 20s.
* Franchise/SuperSentai examples:
** A 28-year-old Tarumi Touta played the 22/23-year-old Jin in ''Series/ChoushinseiFlashman''.
** Inverted in ''Series/SamuraiSentaiShinkenger'' with 14-year-old Runa Natsui playing 17-year-old Kaoru Shiba
** Inverted with ''Series/HikoninSentaiAkibaranger'' with 16-year-old Karin Ogino playing 23/24-year-old Yuko Yamada aka Yumeria Moegi. Justified and lampshaded in that she's supposed to look much younger then she is.
* Although not as egregious as the main cast of some other shows set in high school, the youngest of the main cast of ''Series/TeenWolf'', Tyler Posey (Scott) and Dylan O'Brien (Stiles), were both 19 when the show started. Gage Golightly (Erica) is the new youngest at 19 during the second season.
** This has gradually changed due to the show progressing only a few ''months'' over the length of four seasons. Holland Roden (Lydia), Keahu Kahuanui (Danny), and Charlie and Max Carver (Ethan and Aiden) were all 24 during their first seasons, Daniel Sharman (Isaac) was 25, Crystal Reed (Allison), Sinqua Walls (Boyd), and Shelley Hennig (Malia) were 26, and Arden Cho (Kira) was 28. Well over half of the cast have been on the show for two or four years, so the majority of ''Teen Wolf's'' actors are late-20-somethings playing high school students over 10 or 12 years younger than them.
** Although he was 23-years-old when filming started, no one's quite sure of the supposed age of Tyler Hoechlin's character, Derek Hale. He was stated to be 19-years-old in the first season, but it's bounced up and down the age brackets since then, randomly altering the age of both Derek and his older sister Laura depending on when the creators wanted the Hale family fire to take place.
** Several actors and actresses, including Crystal Reed, have cited this as being one of the main reasons why they decided to leave the show. Playing a 16/17-year-old high school student while in your late 20s to early 30s, especially one who doesn't appear to be ageing or graduating any time soon, can be quite frustrating for an ageing performer. And depending on their appearance, it has become increasingly difficult for some of the show's actors to be passed off to audiences as still being in high school.
* In ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}: Series/TheSarahConnorChronicles'', 26-year-old Creator/SummerGlau 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 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, playing 15.
** 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 Creator/SummerGlau's portrayal of River Tam in ''Series/{{Firefly}}''. Summer was 21 (23 during the filming of ''Film/{{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.
** 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 in the first movie. Linda Hamilton would have been 28 at the time of the first movie.
* ''Series/That70sShow'' -- Danny Masterson (Hyde), Topher Grace (Eric) and Ashton Kutcher (Kelso) were respectively 22, 20 and 20 in 1998 when the show debuted. Creator/MilaKunis was 14, younger than her character was meant to be. However, because it ran for 8 years but was set between 1976 and 1979, she soon caught up with her character's age, then overtook it.
* On ''Series/ThatsSoRaven'', 18-year-old Creator/RavenSymone played 14-year-old Raven Baxter and 19-year-old Anneliese van der Pol played 14-year-old Chelsea.
* Then-18-year-old Olivia Burnette was cast as a preteen Justine O'Neil in 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.
* Supposed teenagers in ''Series/TowerPrep'' include Dyana Liu (29) as Suki and Ryan Pinkston (22) as Gabe.
* Kal Penn was 29 when he played a high school student in Season 6 of ''Series/TwentyFour''.
* In ''Series/{{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.
* Italia Ricci is ever so slightly too old to play a high-schooler in ''Series/UnnaturalHistory'' at 24.
* Period drama ''UpstairsDownstairs'' is an interesting {{justified|Trope}} case: at the beginning of the series, Elizabeth Bellamy is 17, played by 26-year-old Nicola Pagett. But there are frequent {{Time Skip}}s 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.
* An inversion seems to have been the original four series of ''UpstairsDownstairs'', 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.
* The teenage characters of ''Series/TheVampireDiaries'' 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 [[OlderThanTheyLook 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'' in her late 20s to Dobrev and [=McQueen's=] characters, when she is younger than some of the actors who play their classmates.
** May or may not be true with Katherine. Her age of turning is never stated. If nothing else she's done this {{In-Universe}} when pretended to be 17-year-old Elena.
* In their junior year (season one), when you would expect them all to be about 16 or 17, some of the main characters of ''Series/VeronicaMars'' 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 [[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0739544/ 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 [[Series/ArrestedDevelopment 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; Creator/AmandaSeyfried 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 ''Film/MeanGirls'' (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 [[spoiler:Kendall had assumed the identity of a younger highschool student and was actually older than first thought.]]
*** Even then [[spoiler: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 {{lampshade|Hanging}}d 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.
* In ''Series/{{Victorious}}'', Creator/DaniellaMonet, who is 21 years old, is playing a 17-year-old character.
* ''Series/TheWalkingDead'' -- Fans are usually shocked 27-year-old actress Emily Kinney plays the 17-year-old Beth Greene. This is a rare case where the older actress might even look younger than the young character she portrays.
* ''Series/{{Webster}}'' -- Teenaged Emmanuel Lewis plays a seven-year-old.
* Gabe Kaplan stated [[WordOfGod in interviews]] that he believed part of the reason the ratings for ''Series/WelcomeBackKotter'' 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.
* A truly bizarre example from ''Series/TheWestWing''. 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.
* Both averted and played straight in ''Series/WhatILikeAboutYou''. 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.
* ''Series/WillAndGrace'' jokes about this with Jack saying.
-->''I want to live in Series/DawsonsCreek, where the kids are in their 20s and their parents are in their 30s.''
* Creator/WillSmith was 21 when he began playing the 16-year-old titular character of ''Series/TheFreshPrinceOfBelAir''. 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.
* J.D. Williams was 24 when he began playing then-16-year-old Bodie Broadus on ''Series/TheWire''. 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 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.
* ''Series/{{Popular}}'' -- A show about two opposite groups of high school sophomores, some explicitly stated as 15 and 16. From youngest to oldest, there's Carly Pope (19), Sara Rue (20), Bryce Johnson (22), Tamara Mello (23), Leslie Bibb (25), Christopher Gorham (25), Tammy Lynn Michaels (25), Leslie Grossman (28). Ron Lester was 29 in the first season, therefore 30 in the second season and still playing a teen.
* In ''Creator/{{Telemundo}}'''s soap opera Marina, the main character of the same name played by Sandra Echeverría had a son called Chuy played by Alfonso Dosal and an adoptive daughter called Patty played by Ilean ALmaguer. Curiously Sandra and Ilean were the same age (23) and Alfonso just one year younger (22) when the series was filmed.
* Inverted with Maura West, who was born in 1972, playing Diane Jenkins on Series/TheYoungAndTheRestless during 2010-2012, a character that was created when West was ten years old and was already an adult of at least 25. So not only was she playing a character old enough to be her mother, but she looked young enough that she could have been more convincingly Dawson cast than play a woman in her 50s.
* A rare example from the other end of the age spectrum can be seen in ''Series/RescueMe'' when Jerry Adler joins the cast as Chief Feinberg. Feinberg is an old man, but since he is still working a regular shift in a firehouse he presumably must be a good deal younger than the 78 years Adler was when he took the part.
* In the Creator/TimAllen series ''Series/LastManStanding'' Middle daughter Mandy Baxter, who is supposed to be a senior in high school during the first season, is played by Molly Ephraim, who was 26 when the series started in 2011.
* ''HeadOfTheClass'' -- Most of the cast members are in their 20s, but Dan Frischman was in his late 20s and early 30s during the show's run from 1986 to 1991. The creators and producers of the show have said this... Season One: 9th grade, Season Two: 10th grade, Season Three: 11th grade, Season Four: First semester of 12th grade, Season Five: Second semester of 12th grade. So they were all playing 14 year olds in the first season.
* ''Series/{{Tinsel}}'' has a 27-year-old playing the character of [[JailBait 17-year-old Emil]]. Cue fans feeling the [[LikesOlderWomen romance]] between him and the older Angela Dede as TooSexyForThisTimeslot. Same show has a woman who is obviously in her twenties playing teenager Shalewa.
* On ''Series/HawaiiFive0'', Max hasn't been given a specific age, but his biomom was killed in the 80s and he has no memory of her, making it ''likely'' that's the decade he was born in; actor Creator/MasiOka was born in '74. His love interest Sabrina is played by Creator/RummerWillis, a full ''thirteen years'' his junior and ''actually'' born in the late 80s, but they look like they could share a birthday.
* Creator/DickClark, host of ''American Bandstand'' and ''New Year's Rockin' Eve'' was called "America's oldest teen." Seriously at first back in his 20s, then humorously, then fondly with headlines like [[http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/dick-clark-entertainment-icon-nicknamed-americas-oldest-teenager/story?id=16076252 America's Oldest Teen Dead at 82]]
* Creator/JennetteMcCurdy began playing Sam Puckett on ''Series/{{ICarly}}'' when she was 14; by the time the series ended she was 20, and when the spinoff ''Series/SamAndCat'' ceased production she was 21. Similarly, her ''Sam & Cat'' costar Creator/ArianaGrande was 20 when Nickelodeon shut it down (they turned 22 and 21 - both actresses celebrate their birthday on June 26 - before the network officially cancelled the show).
* ''Rags to Riches'' is a 1980s TV show about a millionaire who adopts five orphan girls, each "girl" played by a woman over the age of 18, and most of whom were over the age of 20.
* A weird example happened in ''Series/TruCalling'': 22-year-old Tru is played by the 23-year-old Eliza Dushku, which is reasonable. However, she's apparently able to pass for 17 in the episode "Star Crossed".
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Exceptions]]
* Claire Danes (Angela) and Devon Gummersall (Brian) from ''Series/MySoCalledLife'' 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 teens on ''Series/{{Degrassi}}'' are all played by real teens -- but they're much more attractive than the typical bunch of high schoolers (see HollywoodHomely).
** 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.
** An odd recent aversion is casting 17 year old (16 during filming) Niamh Wilson as a 12th grader, making her younger than her character and all but one of the cast regulars, who plays a 9th grader.
* ''Series/BeverlyHills90210'' did manage to avoid this in a few cases: Shannen Doherty (19) and Jennie Garth (18) were borderline, but at least they were still teenagers. Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling, both 17, were clear aversions. Douglas Emerson, who played Scott Scanlon, was actually 16, making him the only actor the same age as his character, but he was [[TonightSomeoneDies written off]] in the second season.
* Most of the original cast on ''Series/SavedByTheBell'' 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.
** The two kids from ''Good Morning Miss Bliss'' who did ''not'' carry over to ''Saved By The Bell'', Max Battimo and Heather Hopper, were 14 and 12 respectively.
** Mario Lopez (Slater) started out at age 16, graduating at 20; Tiffani(-Amber) Thiessen started at 15, making her the same age as Gosselaar and Voorhees. The eldest was Elizabeth Berkley, 17 when she started and 21 when it ended.
* In general, Creator/DisneyChannel is pretty good at averting this trope.
** The ''other'' kids on ''Series/HannahMontana'', including star Music/MileyCyrus, were actually in their early-to-mid-teens when the show started, making the casting of Jackson all the more glaring -- and baffling, though that only applies when you find out his actual age; seriously, if you didn't think he looked like he was in his late teens, you are either blind or ''really'' need your eyes checked. This is funny in that he's more believable as a teen in ''Hannah Montana'' than he is as a grown adult in ''Dadnapped''.
** Averted in ''Series/ShakeItUp'', where the characters are supposed to be in high school. In fact, leads Creator/BellaThorne (Cece) and Adam Irigoyen (Deuce) were only 13 years old playing high school freshmen at the start of the series.
** Mostly averted with ''Series/SonnyWithAChance'' and its spinoff ''Series/SoRandom'', except for one member of the core cast, Tiffany Thornton, who was 24 years of age when she played 17-year-old Tawni Hart.
* Franchise/SuperSentai often averts the trope: post-2000 series rarely feature main cast members older than 22-23 maximum, save for some {{Sixth Ranger}}s who were older than the main heroes. Several recent series have had 15 to 17-year-old characters played by actors of the same age and even teenagers playing characters ''older'' than themselves -- ''[[Series/SamuraiSentaiShinkenger 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 ''[[Series/TensouSentaiGoseiger Goseiger]]'' where 20-year-old Mikiho Niwa plays 17-year-old Moune.
** In ''Series/TokumeiSentaiGobusters'', Ryuji is played at 28 years old by Ryouma Baba (who turned 27 soon after the start of filming) and at 15 years old by Koudai Matsuoka (a year younger than the character.)
** At 15 years old, Tsuruhime/Ninja White from ''Series/NinjaSentaiKakuranger'' is currently the youngest female hero in the franchise's history. She was played by Satomi Hirose, who was actually ''14'' at the time the show began.
** Possibly the most hilariously exaggerated inversion yet -- in ''Series/HikoninSentaiAkibaranger'', 23-year-old Yumeria Moegi is played by ''16''-year-old Karin Ogino.
* ''Series/MarriedWithChildren''
** Creator/ChristinaApplegate was 15 years old and playing a 15-year-old in the first season of (her character's age was said to be 16 a few months before Christina herself, making it a rare case of a teen actor ''younger'' than her role).
** David Faustino was much the same, playing a 12-year-old boy when he was in fact 12 years old. In both cases, the characters aged at the same rate as the actors. Of course, while Kelly was repeatedly stated to have an active sex life, Applegate wasn't actively portrayed making out on camera until after she turned 18.
** KateySagal was 33 and Creator/EdONeill 41 when the series started, though for comedic effect Al and Peg often referred to the other as being several decades older than that.
* ''Series/TheBill'' features a 19-year-old character, played by an actress who was 17 when she started filming.
* Creator/SarahMichelleGellar was 16 when she started playing Erica Kane's long lost daughter Kendall Hart on ''Series/AllMyChildren'' in 1993. The character was initially 16 years old but, via a {{retcon}}, her age was later changed to 23 due to the continuity errors of Erica having a teenaged daughter from a teenaged pregnancy created. When the character was brought back 6.5 years later, Kendall's birth year and age were reverted back to her original age when she first appeared as a teenager in 1993.
* ''Series/FreaksAndGeeks'' 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 ''Series/{{Bones}}'', in which a now 24-year-old John Francis Daley plays 24-year-old [[ReplacementScrappy wunderkind]] psychologist Lance Sweets.
* In ''Series/BattlestarGalacticaReimagined'', 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. Creator/KateeSackhoff, the actress who played Kara, was only 26 at the time.
** For that matter, the fact that she was cast could be considered an [[InvertedTrope 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.
* ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' has twenty-year-old Creator/JewelStaite playing Kaylee, who is implied to be older than 17-year-old River (played by Creator/SummerGlau, who IRL was a year older than Jewel).
* ''Series/FTroop'''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.
* ''Series/That70sShow''
** The 15-year-old character of Jackie Burkhart was played by the actually 15-year-old Creator/MilaKunis. The story goes that when asked how old she was, Mila said, "I'll be 18 [[ExactWords on my birthday]]." [[LoopholeAbuse She just didn't say which birthday.]] The producers liked her so much that they decided to keep her even when they found out the truth. Thus, she was 14 when they started filming the series, but the producers thought she was 16.
** When the show started, Creator/LauraPrepon and Wilmer Valderrama were also teens; however, they aged normally, while their characters did not.
* In ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'', Jared Padalecki and Creator/JensenAckles are actually almost exactly the same ages as their characters, Sam and Dean Winchester. They are each one year older than their characters[[note]]Although that may have just been an accident. There's a pretty large gap of time between when an episode films and when it airs, and their birthdays might have just happened in the meantime.[[/note]], 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.
** ''Grey's Anatomy'' watchers might also find it strange Sarah Drew plays 17-year old Nora in the season 5 episode Swap Meat despite being 30-year old, and playing an age-appropriate doctor in Grey's at the time.
* The cast of ''Series/{{Skins}}'' are generally the same age as the characters they play -- which makes it a rather interesting exception given the show's apparent policy of "sex, drugs, and nudity whenever possible."
** The American version landed in hot water with the MoralGuardians for casting teenaged actors, who accused the producers of violating "child pornography laws" for a semi-nude scene using a 17-year-old actor. They weren't actually doing anything illegal, but the resulting {{Squick}} did put a lot of viewers off the show.
* ''Series/GilmoreGirls'' featured 33-year-old Lauren Graham as 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore, and 18-year-old (at the time of casting) Creator/AlexisBledel as 16-year-old Rory Gilmore.
* Lucy Griffiths, who played Marian in the BBC's 2006 version of ''Series/RobinHood'' was 18 and playing a 21-year-old character in the first series.
* On ''Series/TheWire'', 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 Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} shows using a live-action cast actually used actors around the same age as their characters.
** Notably, ''Series/TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'' 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.
** ''Series/DrakeAndJosh'' 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.
** Same situation for ''Series/NedsDeclassifiedSchoolSurvivalGuide'', sort of. Devon Werkheiser and Daniel Curtis Lee were both 13 when they started the show which is fine for 7th graders. However, for the next 2 years the show never went past 8th grade and ended with the 2 boys 16 years old still playing 8th graders. Lindsey Shaw on the other hand, was 15 playing a 7th grader when the show started, a true Dawsons Casting. She ended the show playing an 8th grader at age 17.
** Melissa Joan Hart was fifteen when she started playing [[Series/ClarissaExplainsItAll Clarissa Darling]], and her character aged up accordingly.
** Also on ''Series/{{Zoey 101}}'': the characters grew from 8th (season 1) to 10th grade (seasons 3/4), along with the main cast who were 13/14 when the show started. There's in an inversion with ''{{Victoria Justice}}'', who is two years younger but was seemingly placed in the same grade.
*** What made it notable was that the amount of fanservice also grew each season.
* ''Series/{{Heroes}}''
** Claire was 17 years old -- and played by 16-year-old (when the series started) Creator/HaydenPanettiere -- 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 TheReveal of [[spoiler: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 ''Series/HomeImprovement'' 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.
* ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'' had Creator/MichaelCera and Creator/AliaShawkat at almost the exact age of 14-15.
** Season 4 continues this but plays around with this and OlderThanTheyLook. George Micheal becomes the target of sex offenders due to his youthful looks despite being and perhaps because he's 22. Maeby is still in high school, purposely posing as a senior for the last five years. Of course she's barely fooling anyone.
* Tyler James Williams, the young Chris Rock on ''Series/EverybodyHatesChris'', was 12 when he began playing his middle-school-aged role. Unfortunately, he's since hit puberty ... and now his voice is noticeably more baritone than that of the adult Chris Rock, who narrates the show.
** Not to mention one of the early jokes of the show was that Chris' younger brother was taller than him (mirroring Chris Rock's real life younger brother who grew taller than him at an early age). After puberty, Williams was much taller than the other actor, not to mention his constant bully (though the bully remained much bulkier than the skinny Williams).
* Holly Tyler of ''Series/WhatILikeAboutYou'' 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 ''Film/WhatAGirlWants'', Bynes was a sixteen-year-old playing a seventeen-year-old.
* Creator/NeilPatrickHarris was more or less the same age as his character when he was in ''Series/DoogieHowserMD'', although the show does illustrate why this trope exists -- he really grew from season one to season two. However, Max Casella was 22 years old when he began playing 16-year-old Vinnie.
* Most of the ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'' 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 {{aver|tedTrope}}sion.
** The reason this exists was perfectly demonstrated in the episode "Better than the Average Cory", where we meet 13-year-old artist Alexandra Nechita ([[SpecialGuest 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 [[http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/bmw/index.php?episode=96 one reviewer]] [[RealityIsUnrealistic could not believe they were the same age, even though they were]].
** On the other hand, the use of accurately-aged actors added a nice flavor of realism to the physical changes during puberty for the main characters. For example, Topanga grows breasts over the summer at the same time that Danielle Fishel grew them during the hiatus between seasons. And in season 1, Rider Strong is more than six inches taller and considerably larger-boned than Ben Savage (to the point where their difference in size was the subject of a few gags), although both the actors and their characters are only a few months apart in age. Fast-forward to season 3, and not only have ''both'' actors grown considerably, but Savage has shot up to a couple of inches taller than Strong, as well as becoming noticeably bulkier than the latter.
* Willa Holland really was fourteen when she played fourteen-year-old Kaitlin Cooper on ''Series/TheOC''. Actually, she didn't turn fourteen until just after her first episode ''aired'', but that's fine because [[SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome Kaitlin was eleven two seasons earlier, anyway.]] (Though humorously played by an actress who was the same age)
** Mischa Barton was 17 when Marissa was 16 in the first season.
* ''Series/MalcolmInTheMiddle'' does this by a couple years; at the beginning, 14-year-old Frankie Muniz played (approximately) 11-year-old Malcolm; 9-year-old Erik Per Sullivan played his 6-year-old younger brother Dewey; 20-year-old Christopher Masterson played his 16-year-old brother Francis; but his older brother Reese was played by ''13''-year-old Justin Berfield (who was taller than Frankie, and remained so throughout the entire series, to the producers' probable relief).
** Invoked in one episode, an adult woman in her early 20s poses as a student in order to bust drug dealers. Nobody is fooled.
* ''Series/GrowingPains'' had their CousinOliver characters played by actors around their ages. By the final season in 1991, Creator/AshleyJohnson was eight, playing the [[SoapOperaRapidAgingSyndrome suddenly six-year-old Chrissy Seaver]]. Luke Brower was fifteen years old, played by sixteen-year-old Creator/LeonardoDiCaprio.
* Matthew in ''Series/OneLifeToLive'' is canonically about a year ''older'' than actor Eddie Alderson.
* Richard Series/{{Castle}}'s daughter Alexis is eighteen, as is her actress Molly Quinn.
** The whole Castle family falls under this trope. The actors portraying Richard Castle and his mother (Creator/NathanFillion and Susan Sullivan) were 37 and 66 when filming began. [[AbsurdlyYouthfulMother That makes]] [[FlexibleTrope Castle]] [[AbsurdlyYouthfulDad a young father]], but it does work out.
* ''Series/LieToMe'': Cal Lightman's daughter is 15/16; the actress playing her 18.
* Although the flagship character of ''Series/{{Caprica}}'' (Zoe Graystone) is played by someone about six years older than the character, Tamara is herself a semi-exception. GenevieveBuechner ''is'' older than Tamara Adama but she's much closer than her colleagues to her character's age, being only 18 while her character is about 15.
* Claire Danes subverted this somewhat in her first major role in My So-Called Life. The producers thought she looked too old for the role of Angela Chase, when she was actually younger, and the character's age was revised downward to match the actress's actual age of 15.
* A deleted scene from the {{Pilot}} of ''Series/TheXFiles'' 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.
** Creator/DavidDuchovny was only a year older than his character, Mulder.
* New Zealand series ''Series/TheTribe'' 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 ''Literature/RamonaQuimby'' books, subverted this surprisingly well. Ramona is 8 years old and in third grade. So is her actress. ([[Film/RamonaAndBeezus The film]], on the other hand, is a ludicrous example of this trope played very straight!)
* ''Series/BreakingBad'''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.
* ''Series/TheGeorgeLopezShow'' 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 ''Series/TheWonderYears'' had ages to match their roles, with star Fred Savage being 11 years old when the show first began. Following this trope, Fred Savage has had trouble finding work as an adult after his lauded childhood acting career (acting work, that is -- he's been considerably busier as a director).
* ''Series/PrettyLittleLiars'' {{avert|edTrope}}s this with Sasha Pieterse who began playing the role of [[AlphaBitch Alison DiLaurentis]] at age 14, one year ''younger'' than the character. As [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]] puts it, "being only 14 at the time, she is the youngest actress on the show, all her co-stars being in their late teens to early 20s."
* Averted in ''Series/{{Earth 2}}''. 8-year-old Uly Adair and 10-year-old True Danziger were played by actors aged 8 and 10 respectively.
* The kids on ''Series/FullHouse''.
* ''{{Series/Buffy|TheVampireSlayer}}''
** Unlike almost all of her costars, Michelle Trachtenberg was the same age as her character, Dawn (14 years old when she first appeared on the show).
** Another aversion: At the time of Faith's first appearance in "Faith, Hope and Trick", Creator/ElizaDushku 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 ''Literature/GossipGirl'' 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 ''Series/TheSecretWorldOfAlexMack'' were within a few years of their characters' ages.
* In ''Series/YoungBlades'', 16-year-old RobertSheehan plays the nearly 16-year-old King Louis XIV.
* In ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'', 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 ''Series/TheWestWing''. Elizabeth Moss is at least a year younger than Zoey Bartlet.
* On ''Series/ThirdRockFromTheSun'', Tommy was ReallySevenHundredYearsOld, but his fake Earth age was always the same as Creator/JosephGordonLevitt'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.
* On ''Series/SouthOfNowhere'' Chris Hunter was 18 at the time of filming playing the 17- to 18-year-old Glenn. It's notable because he was three years younger than the actress playing his younger sister.
* In the MadeForTVMovie ''Birds Of Prey'' David Janssen plays an ex-WWII pilot who now flies a traffic helicopter. The film was made when Janssen was 41, and he was 14 when the war ''ended''!
* The LifetimeOriginalMovie ''Film/AmandaKnoxMurderOnTrialInItaly'' cast Creator/HaydenPanettiere (21 at the time of filming) as Miss Knox (20 at the time of the incident).
* Totally averted by BBC children's dramas ''Series/BykerGrove'' and ''Series/GrangeHill'', where all the actors playing children were about the same age as their characters. Some were even a year or so younger.
* Effectively averted in one case on ''Series/{{Glee}}'', in which Creator/ChrisColfer was not only 18 years old when he was cast as 16-year-old Kurt Hummel, but went through a rather dramatic late burst of puberty after being cast, supplying a very effective visual of Kurt growing up (literally, as he gained about three inches in height) on screen. As Colfer still looks Kurt's age (19) in Season 4, it's becoming disconcerting to see Kurt standing next to his on-screen stepbrother Finn, who is supposed to be roughly the same age but was played by Creator/CoryMonteith, who was closer to 30 than 20 and starting to show it.
* In the ''Series/{{UFO}}'' episode "Destruction" Sarah Bosanquet is said to have "ten years' service" at her job, which is a little tricky given that actress Stephanie Beacham would have been about twenty-three at the time of production.
* Averted by Creator/ArianaGrande for the duration of ''Series/{{Victorious}}'' (she began playing Cat on the show aged 16, and was 19 when it ended)... if not [[Series/SamAndCat the spinoff]].
* The children on ''Series/{{Blackish}}'' are played by similarly aged actors. For example fifteen year old Zoey is played by a fourteen year old.
* Sadie Calvano, who plays Violet on ''Series//{{Mom}}'', was 16, the same age as her character, when the show premiered in 2013. Spencer Daniels, who plays her boyfriend Luke, is a slight case since he was 20 when the show began.
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