Dawson Casting / Live-Action TV

In-Universe Examples

• In The Late Show (1992), there was a sketch in which Jane Kennedy parodied a young girl who was experiencing 15 minutes of fame after delivering a speech at the Olympic Games. Kennedy was in her late 20s at the time and described herself as "an 11-year-old girl... with slightly overdeveloped breasts".
• Lizzie McGuire was an exception because Hilary Duff was 13 when she started playing the title character (who is in middle school), but in one episode, her animated conscience lampshades this trope: "maybe when [Miranda's] thirty, she can play a teenager on Dawson's Creek."
• Parodied in the MADtv (1995) sketch "Pretty White Kids with Problems", a spoof of late 1990s teen dramas. The actors are obviously way too old to be playing teenagers, which they constantly make sure to point out; one of the "boys" insists he's a teenager despite his obvious hairloss:
  15 can be a difficult age. And that's how old I am. 15. [he turns to put his things in his locker, showing the bald spot on the back of his head]
• Mr. Show features a sketch in which adult members of a youth outreach group play the roles of Totally Radical teens to deliver conservative aesops. One member of the group is bald, with a full beard, and his teen character states, "I love playing those damn video games!"
• Never Have I Ever: Conversed when Devi and Kamala watch Riverdale. Kamala expresses shock since the characters don't look like high schoolers; Devi jokes that the actors are older than her mother.
• The O.C. has teens in their late 20s and parents in their early 30s. It hangs a lampshade on this trope, among many others, with their show-within-a-show, "The Valley".
  Seth: That guy plays high school?
  Ryan: Hollywood, man.
• Preacher plays the trope for laughs by having the middle-aged Pip Torrens play his character Herr Starr in a flashback to his early teens with only a wig to delineate him from his present day self.
• Saved by the Bell (2020): The seniors at Bayside were middle aged. Only Aisha notices.
• The titular town of Schmigadoon! parodies theater casting by having then-mid-20's Dove Cameron play the sexualized Farmer's Daughter character Betsy, who is vaguely aged but heavily implied to be a teenager. Melissa points out this is common, comparing it to The Sound of Music casting the 16-year-old Liesl with a woman in her 20s.
• In Smash when Rebecca Duvall joins the cast of Bombshell it's pointed out that she's older than Marilyn Monroe was when she passed away. Duvall is played by Uma Thurman, 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!

Straight Examples

Creators

• Selma Blair examples:
  • The Adventures of Pete & Pete 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 Kath & Kim with 36-year-old Blair as twenty-something Kim (though this wasn't nearly as bad as the Australian version; see below).
• Dick Clark, 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 America's Oldest Teen Dead at 82. He looked around 40 when in his 70s. After his stroke, he aged substantially, but still looked around 65 in his early 80s.
• Matt LeBlanc played underaged boys from his first appearance at age 18 on TV 101, until age 26 when he landed his role in Friends. He specialized in playing the boyfriend to underaged female characters on sitcoms such as Married... with Children and Just the Ten of Us as the good-looking, Italian "hunk" (from some unspecified East Coast city).
• Senta Moses is an actress who is very short and has very curly hair... which contributed to her playing a 17-year-old at age 27 on the show Bull. She wasn't alone on this part, however: Her 16-year-old brother was played by 25-year-old Fred Koehler.
  • Similarly, she played a 16-year-old computer genius in an episode of Vengeance Unlimited two years earlier (at 25).
  • And in 2009, at 35, she's playing an apparently early 20-something computer tech on General Hospital.
• German actress Josefine Preuss has looked mostly the same since she was about 15. Guess which roles she's usually cast in.
• 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.
• Legendary football coach Joe Paterno (whose career nowadays is unfortunately Overshadowed by Controversy) looked like he was much younger than his age until his last five years of coaching, when the effects of injuries and terminal cancer caught up to him. Compare the appearance of Joe Pa in 2005 to 2008 or 2011 and you'll notice a huge difference.

Works

• In 7th Heaven, Barry Watson was 22 when he started playing high school junior Matt Camden, though the rest of the actors playing the Camden kids were of the right age.
  • Beverley Mitchell was 15 playing the 12-year-old Lucy Camden in season 1, making her older than Jessica Biel, who was around the same age as the 14-year-old Mary Camden in season 1.
• 8 Simple Rules: Amy Davidson, who was 25 in real-life, plays a 15-year-old.
• The 10th Kingdom: 23-year-old Lucy Punch as a girl turning 18.
• 13 Reasons Why:
  • Timothy Granaderos playing 17-year-old Montgomery de la Cruz at 32. Otherwise, the majority of the cast are in their mid- to late-20s, with Devin Druid (Tyler) being the youngest at 21.
  • A strange example in that Chelsea Alden (Mackenzie) is 30 and Bryce Cass (Cyrus) is 22, Mackenzie being Cyrus' younger sister.
• This trope is invoked in 21 Jump Street, where the main characters are clearly identified as adults, but they are assigned to this undercover unit because they all look young enough to pass as teens, though many of the non-cops play this trope straight.
  • And it is questionable whether the main characters actually look young enough to pass as teens, or whether they just look young enough to play teenagers on TV.
• Kal Penn was 29 when he played a high school student in Season 6 of 24.
• The 100 runs on this trope: Bob Morley played 23-year-old Bellamy beginning at age 29, while Lindsey Morgan (24), Eliza Taylor (24), Marie Avgeropoulos (27), Christopher Larkin (26), Devon Bostick (22), Richard Harmon (22), Thomas McDonell (27), and more played teenaged main characters. The six-year time jump between seasons four and five averts this to some extent. Meanwhile, beginning in season two, then-20-year-old Alycia Debnam-Carey as Lexa (who is in her early twenties according to Word of God) averts this trope.
• Chiara Zanni, who plays the main character "Amy" on The N show About A Girl, was 29 years old during filming, yet she plays a supposedly "young college student."
• In the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous, 16-year-old Saffron is played by 24-year-old Julia Sawalha. Also somewhat inverted with her mother Edina; in an episode dealing with Edina's 40th birthday, actress (and writer) Jennifer Saunders was only 34.
• 31-year-old Gerard Christopher was cast as the title character in The Adventures of Superboy. Superboy/Clark Kent was supposed to be a 19- or 20-year-old college sophomore at the time.
• Alice (1976) - Susan Lanier, age 30, described as a "teenager" (no more than 19), in an episode called Mel's in Love.
• The entire cast of All American. Daniel Ezra, who plays Spencer, was 26 when filming started, and he is only 13 years younger than Karimah Westbrook, who plays his on-screen mom, Grace. Bre-Z (Coop) is the worst, playing a junior high school student at 31 years old.
• On the Soap Opera All My Children, 15-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar first appeared on the show as 16-year-old Kendall, the long-lost teenage daughter of the series' main character, Erica Kane (Susan Lucci), in 1993. Since Susan Lucci had been on the show as Erica Kane since its 1970 premiere and the show said 16-year-old Kendall was conceived when her mother was a teenager, timeline errors were pointed out and Gellar's character was rapidly aged from 16 to her early twenties sometime later (nonetheless, even after being rapidly aged, Kendall was still written as a teenager). After this, a teenage Gellar played a young adult character in her early twenties, and nobody really bought it (Kendall still being written like a 16-year-old didn't help much) but just wrote it off as Willing Suspension of Disbelief. However, Gellar was lauded in the role, called the "second coming of Erica" for her portrayal of Kendall, but decided to leave in order to pursue other opportunities. 6.5 years later, Kendall's character was recast with actress Alicia Minshew. At this time, Kendall's age was changed again with her birth year being reverted back to her original birth year, making her a 16-year-old girl again in 1993.
• Alex Rider (2020): 22-year-old Otto Farrant plays the teenaged title character. In the books he's 14-15, and while the TV version of the character does seem to have had a slight Age Lift, he's still in high school.
• American Horror Story:
  • American Horror Story: Murder House: 24-year-old Evan Peters as Tate, a high school student. The five classmates that are shown are played by people in their early 20's, as well. Among the girls who bullied Violet there is 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.
  • American Horror Story: Asylum, episode "Tricks and Treats" — 25-year-old Devon Graye as 16-year-old Jed Potter.
• A.P. Bio features a cast of high schoolers played by actors mostly in their twenties. It gets worse with each season, because the whole show is supposed to take place within a single school year. By the fourth season, Nick Peine, who plays Marcus, is 31 years old and sports a receding hairline and a noticeable five-o'clock shadow.
• To a minor extent in Are You Being Served?. Mr. Lucas was supposed to be in his mid-twenties when the show began, but Trevor Bannister was 36 years old. In fact, he was only a few months younger than Nicholas Smith, who played Mr. Rumbold, and nearly a year older than John Inman, who played Mr. Humphries. Inverted for "Old" Mr. Grace who was played by Kenneth Waller age 54; his younger brother was played by Harold Bennett, who was 28 years older.
• Arrow: 21-year-old Willa Holland was cast as Thea Queen, who started out as a senior high school student. She's actually older than Emily Bett Rickards, who played recent college graduate Felicity Smoak.
• Ambassadorial aide Lennier from Babylon 5 is a young Minbari man, probably in his twenties or thereabouts; he is definitely significantly younger than Ambassador Delenn. He is played by Bill Mumy, who was almost forty when the show began and is actually a year older than Mira Furlan, who played Delenn.
• Batman (1966): Burt Ward, the teenaged Robin, was already 20 when the show started filming. Yvonne Craig, the just out of college Batgirl, was already 30 when she debuted.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) plays this straight with Sharon Valerii, who is supposed to be younger than Kara Thrace. In real life Grace Park, who plays Sharon, is actually six years older than Katee Sackhoff as Kara.
• The Beverly Hillbillies: One early episode states that Elly May is "almost eighteen". Donna Douglas was 29 at the time.
• Beverly Hills, 90210 is well-known for this sort of thing, but believe it or not, quite a few of the cast members were actual teenagers. Of course, some of the core cast of high school juniors (ages 15-16) were well into their twenties: Luke Perry (25), Ian Ziering (26), and, most famously, Gabrielle Carteris, who was 29. Series star Jason Priestley was comparatively young at 21. Still, these examples alone are so egregious, coupled with the fact that 90210 predates the Trope Namer by several years, that it is also called "90210 Syndrome".
  • The youngest cast members of the sequel series were 19 when the series started, and the rest range from their early twenties to Trevor Donovan 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!
• The four male protagonists of The Big Bang Theory are all presumably meant to be around the same age, as at the start of the show they're all implied to be post-doctoral (or equivalent) researchers who are just beginning to get established in their careers. In one early episode Howard states that he's twenty-six, which seems about right, and was roughly the actor's age at the time. However, Johnny Galecki (Leonard) and Jim Parsons (Sheldon) are, respectively, six and eight years older than Simon Helberg (Howard) and Kunal Nayyar (Raj) despite being portrayed as Raj's contemporaries - and furthermore, Sheldon is revealed to have been accelerated through the education system from an early age, meaning that if anything he would probably be younger than other researchers at the same level, despite being played by the oldest actor. At least Penny was known to have been younger.
  • Courtney Henggeler, who played Sheldon’s twin sister Missy, is almost 6 years younger than Parsons.
• In Big Time Rush, Carlos Pena (21), Logan Henderson (21), James Maslow (20) and Kendall Schmidt (20) play 16-year-olds. It sort of works out, though, because of their rather boyish yet still mature good looks and their mid-pitched voices. Stephen Kramer Glickman, who played Gustavo, was 30 at the time of the show’s start, however his character was active in the ‘90s, even signing acts such as Green Day.
• 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 Boardwalk Empire 37-year-old Stephen Graham plays Al Capone, who was 21 at the time the show is set. Due to the occasional Time Skip, The show eventually catches up to the actor's actual age.
• Little Joe Cartwright on Bonanza was 17 when the series first began, and was portrayed by then-22-year-old Michael Landon. Additionally, Hoss Cartwright, who began the series at age 23, was played by then-30-year-old Dan Blocker.
• Trina McGee started playing high school senior Angela Moore on Boy Meets World at age 28; this is really glaring because every other major cast member was more-or-less age-appropriate, because the show started with them as kids.
• Breaking Bad:
  • While RJ Mitte was around the same age as Walt Jr. during the first few seasons, since the show relies on Comic-Book Time (taking place over two years while it aired over the course of five years) he quickly became older than Walt Jr., which began to get noticeable in season four. By the final season, Mitte was twenty-one playing a character who was still seventeen.
  • Jesse is twenty-four at the beginning of the series, and Aaron Paul was twenty-nine when it first began airing. Due to the aforementioned Comic-Book Time, Paul only got older, and by the end of the show, he was seven years older than Jesse. This got worse when Paul reprised the role six years later in El Camino, since he was forty while Jesse was still only twenty-six (though given the hell Jesse went through in the last three episodes of Breaking Bad, him looking older than his actual age could easily be chalked up to stress from his experiences).
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (pictured on the main page) was an offender as well, as the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Sarah Michelle Gellar (19) as Buffy, Nicholas Brendon (25) as Xander, Alyson Hannigan (22) as Willow, and Charisma Carpenter (26) as Cordelia. Possibly lampshaded when Wesley (Alexis Denisof, who is four years older than Carpenter) first meets Cordelia and mistakes her for a teacher. Particularly funny is that Robia LaMorte, who played Jenny Calendar (a teacher), is less than three weeks older than Charisma Carpenter.
  • Later additions to the cast included Seth Green (23) as Oz (18), Marc Blucas (27) as Riley (22), and Amber Benson (22) as Tara (19). As for immortal/unaging characters, we have James Marsters (35) as Spike (27-29) and Emma Caulfield (25) as Anya (18-19), though it's mentioned in season 4 that Anya started aging again at some point.
  • On the show's spinoff, Angel, the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by 22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser.
    • The age difference between Carpenter and Cordelia becomes egregious in Angel by Season 3, in which Cordelia is supposed to be 21 and Carpenter obviously ten years older. Fortunately, by that point the story also seems to cut most references to her age for it to be jarring. The one exception is an episode referring to her 21st birthday, where in a parallel universe where she didn't join Angel or get the visions she's a very popular talk show host after her successful acting career, where just a little more than two years prior she hadn't gotten any acting gigs yet.
    • Though it didn't apply in the first season of Buffy, David Boreanaz quickly and visibly aged past the eternally 26 old Angel over the years, ending up at 34 by Angel's final season.
• Californication: 22-year-old Madeline Zima as 16-year-old Mia Lewis. Few of the other characters can believe she is really 16.
• The plot of Caprica revolves partially around two 16-year-old girls. Of the actresses who play them, one was 21. The other was 23.
• Charmed (2018) had 22-year-old Sarah Jeffery playing college freshman Maggie Vera.
• The Mexican comedy El Chavo del ocho has all of its child characters (around eight years old or so) played by adults over 30. The result is, of course, hilarious.
• In The Cherry Queen, Johanna Wokalek, then-29, played Ruth Goldfisch von Roll from her twenties to her fifties over a period of time spanning from 1913 to 1946. So did the actresses who play Ruth's sisters, who remained unchanged even when the characters aged.
• Mostly averted in Chucky which has teen actors playing the teenage leads, until season 3 brought 22 year old Jackson Kelly as 16 year old Grant.
• Class (2016): Although playing high schoolers, nearly all of the main cast were actually in their early 20s (one even got married soon after filming ended), likely in part due to the fact several of them were required to do love scenes.
• Club der roten Bänder: Most relevant examples are:
  • Leo, who in series is 16 while actor Tim Oliver Schultz is 27.
  • And Toni who is also supposed to be 16 but because of his Aspergers acts much younger. Actor Ivo Kortlang is 21.
• Cobra Kai: Most of the main cast members are in their 20s as high school students around the age of 16. The oldest being 22-year-old Mary Mouser as Samantha.
• In Code Lyoko: Evolution, 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.
• Cold Case: In the episode "Love Conquers Al", then-22-year-old Summer Glau plays a teen athlete.
• 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 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 how old Abed is (around the same age as Troy), but Danny Pudi was 30 while filming most of the first season.
• Control Z: The teenage characters are all played by actors in their twenties.
• Conversations with Friends: Sasha Lane is older than her character Bobbi's meant to be (being about 21). She actually was around 25 when the series had been made.
• The first season of Cougar Town ends with Travis graduating high school, making him approximately eighteen. His actor, Dan Byrd, turned twenty-four that season.
• Criminal Minds:
  • 23-year-old Evan Peters plays a 16-year-old abductee in the episode "Mosley Lane".
  • Jamie Gray Hyder played a character who's about nine years younger than her. At the time she was 33, meaning she's playing a 23- or 24-year-old at most.
• The Polish historical drama Crown of Kings has a 22-year-old actress play the 12-year-old Jadwiga, King of Poland. This is deliberate to hide the Unfortunate Implications of the fact that the Jadwiga is about to marry Prince Jagiela, who was 35 at the time of the wedding. Subverted with Jagiela's actor who looks to be in his twenties but is actually 34. The audience sees a couple who appear close in age and are not squicked out by the fact that a child is about to marry someone 13 years older than her.
• The CSI episode "Neverland" heavily features three fourteen-year-old characters. Two are played by actual kids of that age (one from Heroes). The last is played by an actor who was 18 at the time.
• In the CSI: NY episode "Grounds for Deception", Stella Bonasera is revealed to have been born in 1975, making her character 35 at the time that Melina Kanakaredes, who portrays her, was 42.
• Dad's Army:
  • 17-year-old Frank Pike was played by Ian Lavender, who was 22 years old when the series started and 31 when it ended, while Pike had not aged.
  • Also inverted. The oldest members of the cast were Arnold Ridley (Charles Godfrey) and John Laurie (James Frazer), both into their seventies as the programme started, while 70-year-old L/Cpl. Jack Jones (having served in the Mahdist War, the Boer Wars and World War I) 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.
• Daredevil (2015): All of the cast get this whenever flashback episodes occur.
  • In Matt and Foggy's flashback episodes, this means that Charlie Cox is about five years older than Matt is supposed to be at those points, and Elden Henson is about seven years (give or take) older than Foggy. This also extends to Élodie Yung for flashbacks in "Kinbaku" to Matt's college relationship with Elektra.
  • Karen's limelight episode in season 3 sees an 18 year old Karen being portrayed by a 33 year old Deborah Ann Woll.
• Dark (2017): Jonas, Martha, and Franziska, all of whom are 16, were all played by actors who were 19 during the filming of the first season. Magnus, who is 18, was played by a 21-year-old, and Bartosz, another 16-year-old, was played by a 22-year-old.
• In Dark Matter (2015), Five, stated to be 16 years old, is played by 22-year-old Jodelle Ferland.
• The 1998 Made-for-TV Movie David and Lisa has Lukas Haas (22 at the time) and Brittany Murphy (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, Dawson's Creek: Much worse than Dawson's leads were the actors introduced later on: Kerr Smith (26) and Meredith Monroe (29) playing siblings (and high school sophomores) Jack and Andie McPhee starting in Season 2. Worse considering that Andie was likely the younger sibling.
  • On the behind-the-scenes parts of the Series Finale movie, James Van Der Beek was amused that it was the first time he and Dawson were the same age (because there was a five-year time skip from the last episode to the movie).
  • The short-lived spin-off, Young Americans, also did this, albeit not as severely. There were Rodney Scott (22), Mark Famiglietti (20), Katherine Moennig (22), and Ian Somerhalder (21) all playing teenagers. The only exception was Kate Bosworth, who was 17 at the time.
• The early seasons of the entire Degrassi franchise are praised for avoiding this trope most of the time. In fact, both in the 80s and 2000s incarnations, it was actually the producers' intention to cast real kids. Except even those weren't safe.
  • In Degrassi Junior High we have 14-year-old Christine "Spike" Nelson, played by then 17-year-old Amanda Stepto. However, apart from not being the biggest age gap in the world, you can't really tell. Amanda doesn't look older; in fact, during the first season, she looked and sounded younger than 14. But by the time Degrassi High began filming in the spring of 1989, Amanda would have been already out of high school before her character even began it. For context, Amanda was born in 1970. Degrassi High started in 1989.
  • In Degrassi High, we have Dwayne Myers played by Darrin Brown, who was only born a few months after Amanda. He too would have already been at university while his character was in high school.
  • Degrassi: The Next Generation began continuing the trend of casting real kids as a backlash to other teen dramas, but even from the beginning it veered into this trope, with Sean and Hazel's actors already being 16 playing middle schoolers. Then in season 3, there is Jay Hogart, played by 19-year-old Mike Lobel, and Rick Murray, played by 18-year-old Ephraim Ellis. As for Rick, he doesn't look that much older than his character. As for Jay, people have cracked jokes about him looking 25 and still going to high school.
  • Starting from season 10 of Next Generation, when said subtitle was dropped, we have Eli Goldsworthy, played by Munro Chambers, who was already 20. By the time his character graduated, his actor would have been of or close to the age to graduate college. There's also countless other examples. It's worth noting that this is when they switched episode formats and the timeline began to move slowly, so this trope would gradually get worse over time.
• Derry Girls is a comedy about a group of high school students in Northern Ireland. The main cast of students is played by actors who range in age from 23 (Saorise Jackson, as Erin) to 31 (Nicola Coughlan, as Clare).
• Desperate Housewives has John Rowland, who is 17 at the start of the seires, played by Jesse Metcalfe, who was 25 at the time.
  • A five year Time Skip between the fourth and fifth seasons 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).
• In HBO's The Deuce, early college dropout who is "not old enough to drink" Abby is portrayed by the at the time 37 year old Margarita Levieva; and quite convincingly shockingly enough
• In the first series of Doctor in the House, Michael Upton and Duncan Waring are supposed to be 18 or 19, Paul Collier, Huw Evans, and Dave Briddock about 20 or 21, and Dick Stuart-Clark about 23. However, they were played respectively by Barry Evans (26), Robin Nedwell (23), George Layton (26), Martin Shaw (24), Simon Cuff (25), and Geoffrey Davies (27). Evans and Nedwell were perhaps most successful at passing for younger (Evans in particular looked and sounded 17 or 18 years old for most of his acting career).
• Doctor Who had numerous examples:
  • 23-year-old Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (a 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.
  • 21-year-old Maureen O'Brien as 15- to 16-year-old Vicki.^note Her exact age isn't given, but in "The Myth Makers" she says a 16-year-old character is 'hardly any older than me'.
  • 24-year-old Jackie Lane as 18-year-old Dodo Chaplet.
  • Deborah Watling was 19 when she started playing Victoria.. Her age is never specified onscreen, but she is generally assumed to have been in her early-to-mid-teens.
  • 20-year-old Wendy Padbury as 15-year-old^note According to the initial publicity; her age is never specified in the show itself, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart says Zoe looks "about 19" Zoe Heriot.
  • 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, Waterhouse 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 Killed Off for Real, the character hasn't aged.
  • 23-year-old Mark Strickson as Turlough. This one is perhaps less egregious, as Turlough was actually an alien of indeterminate age, but he was posing as a human boy in boarding school, and did not look young enough at all. For that matter, neither did most of his classmates.
  • 26-year-old Sophie Aldred as 16-year-old Ace.
  • 22-year-old Billie Piper as 19-year-old Rose Tyler. The 26 y.o. Piper later returned as a 19 y.o. Rose in "The End of Time", her earliest chronological appearance as the character.
  • The new series two-parter "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" has a subversion. Nancy, played by 21-year-old Florence Hoath, appears to be about 16, having a 5-year-old "little brother" and helping out a band of homeless children. The Doctor realizes she is actually about twenty, old enough to be the boy's mother.
  • 30-year-old Mandip Gill and 26-year-old Tosin Cole as Yasmin Khan and Ryan Sinclair respectively, both aged 19.
  • The 60th anniversary specials bring us 18-year-old Yasmin Finney as Rose Noble, who is stated by Word of God to be 15, but given the series' established chronology would be no older than 13. (Russell T Davies admitted he fudged the numbers on this one to accommodate Finney's casting.)
• Don't Look Deeper: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their 20s.
• Downton Abbey starts out by doing this; for example, Lady Sybil is in her mid-teens at the time the show begins, but played by the 21-year-old Jessica Brown Findlay. Since the show's time progresses considerably faster than real time, this doesn't last; by the end of season 2, Sybil has actually passed Brown Findlay's real age. There's also 25-year-old Sophie McShera playing Daisy, whose age isn't specified, but the character acts (and looks) like a teenager.
• Although they played high school geeks who were best friends on Drake & Josh, when the show premiered, Scott Halberstadt, who played Eric was nearing 28, making him double the age of Alec Medlock, who played Craig.
  • Josh Sussman, who played the character of Clayton in a couple episodes, was around 23.
  • Taran Killam and Johnny Lewis, who portrayed Drake's bandmates, were 21 and 20 around the premiere.
• The Dropout is a partial case: Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews are about the same age as Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the real people they're playing. However, the action starts when Holmes is supposed to be 17-18 years old, so the appearance of 35-year-old Seyfried is jarring in scenes where Holmes's young age is brought up, like when she is on the phone with Balwani and wondering what is she doing at 19 with a guy his age. It's less obvious in the case of Andrews since Balwani is already in his thirties when the story begins.
• When Ed premiered, Justin Long was 22 playing a high school student. He was 26 by the time it ended.
• Euphoria: All of the actors are older than their high school-age characters, usually by at least four years, likely due to the nature and large amount of sexual content.
  • Considering all the Amusing Injuries that the "kids" go through in the show, it'd be pretty disturbing otherwise.
• Faking It: 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). It's also lampshaded a couple of times through Shane, who is often mistaken for a college student.
• A mild case in Fawlty Towers, but Sybil's medical chart in "The Germans" gives her age as 33 years old; Prunella Scales was 43 years old when the first series was broadcast.
• Pretty much all the teens in Fate: The Winx Saga are portrayed by twentysomethings. Eliot Salt (Terra) was actually in her late twenties when she filmed her part; egregiously so considering the same year she starred in Normal People playing a college student. In fact, Sadie Soverall (Beatrix) was the only cast member to be under twenty; she was eighteen when she filmed her part.
• Fear the Walking Dead:
  • Nick and Alicia Clark were 19 and 17 at the start of the series, while Frank Dillane and Alycia Debnam-Carey were five years older.
  • Bailey Gavulic was 21 when she played 16 year-old Annie.
  • Finch is 6 or 7 and played by 14 year-old Gavin Warren.
• 27-year-old Peta Wilson as 18-year-old Nikita in La Femme Nikita. 31-year-old Marnie McPhail as her childhood friend of the same age in the second episode of the first season. Though it turns out she's an imposter, but this trope is still pretty glaring until the Heel–Face Turn.
• Kathryn Prescott was 23 when she played a 16-year-old in Finding Carter. The actress playing her twin sister, Anna Jacoby Heron, was 19 starting out (which is admittedly not as big of a difference).
• Firefly: Summer Glau's portrayal of River Tam. She was 21 (23 during the filming of Serenity), but River was only seventeen. And in the R. Tam Sessions, it went even further, with Glau 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.
• The Flash (2014)'s fifth season introduces Nora West-Allen, who is the daughter of Barry Allen and Iris West-Allen that came from the future. Nora's parents are in their late 20s-early 30s, which fit their actors' ages - Grant Gustin (29) and Candice Patton (31). Nora, who's still meant to only be in her mid-20s, was played by Jessica Parker Kennedy, who was 35.
• In Fortysomething, Benedict Cumberbatch was about six or seven years older than university student Rory; 16-year-old Edwin was played by 20-year-old Joe Van Moyland.
• Frasier: A more senior example but in real life John Mahoney is only a few years older than Kelsey Grammer. Even so, he was asked to play Frasiers father, meaning Mahoney's character is actually about 10 years old than the actor. His hair was dyed grey in the early seasons to make it more believable.
• Shaquille O'Neal guest-starred as himself on Fresh Off the Boat. However, since the series is a mid-1990s Period Piece, this meant that he had to play himself as a 23-year-old despite being in his mid-40s when the show was being filmed. This is given a Lampshade Hanging when Louis is visibly shocked by Shaq's appearance, noting that he looks much bigger in real life than on TV, as he got bigger over the years. Shaq attempts to play it off by saying that all he has to do is "Skip third lunch" to get back in shape for the next NBA season.
• Will Smith was 21 when he began playing the 16-year-old titular character of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 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.
• Friday Night Lights is way guilty of this; many of the actors playing juniors and seniors in highschool are in their mid-to-late twenties.
• Friends
  • Parodied in an episode where Joey tries to play a 19-year-old at 31, 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. In fact, Kudrow is 6 years older than Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston. 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 31), but the rest of the characters are realistic about it. Despite Monica being portrayed as Ross's younger sister, Cox is two years older than Schwimmer.
  • Phoebe's little brother Frank Jr is introduced saying he's 18. His actor Giovanni Ribisi was 22.
  • A season 1 episode has a subplot where Monica discovers her boyfriend Ethan is a high school senior (17 to be specific). His actor Stan Kirsch was actually 26 and was in fact a year older than Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. In the story he was pretending to be a college senior when Monica met him.
• All the older teenage characters in Game of Thrones, such as Jon Snow, Danaerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Samwell Tarly, Theon Greyjoy, Loras Tyrell, Gendry and for Season Two Margaery Tyrell, as played by Natalie Dormer. The characters are all between fifteen (aged up roughly two years from the books) and early twenties (in Margaery's case), the actors between 23 and 29.
• General and I: Although Wallace Chung and Angelababy play characters of the same age, Chung is 14 years older than Angelababy.
• The National Service recruits in Get Some In! were supposed to be about 18 years old, and certainly no older than 21, but when the series began, Robert Lindsay, David Janson, and Brian Pettifer were all around 25 years old, and Karl Howman was also around 25 years old when he took over the role of Jakey for Series 5.
• Lampshaded(?) in Gidget. 15-year-old Gidget (played by 19-year-old Sally Field) fails to convince a job interviewer that she's 19.
• At 27 years old, Keiko Agena played the then 15- or 16-year-old character Lane Kim in Gilmore Girls. Milo Ventimiglia was 25 when he started playing 17-year-old 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.
• Ginny and Georgia: Antonia Gentry was 23 playing the 15-year-old Ginny when the series started. This also goes for most other teenage characters on the show.
• 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.
• Glee is extremely guilty of this with most of their cast being High School characters. The youngest member of the original cast was Chris Colfer, who was 18 in the first season, nine years younger than his classmates Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, who were both 27. Made even more awkward when half of the series finale was a flashback to 2009, demonstrating just how much Colfer had physically matured over the show's run.
  • 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.
  • Lampshaded when Hunter Clarington is mobbed by reporters about a steroid scandal. One reporter asks "What about the report that you look way too old to still be in high school?" Hunter responds by punching the guy.
  • Hilarity ensued with a Parents' Television Council statement on the "near pedophilia" of a racy GQ shoot starring Lea Michele and Dianna 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 incorrect definition of pedophilia that they were using.
  • Of the season 4 additions to the cast, 20-year-old Blake Jenner was playing high school sophomore Ryder Lynn.
• Gossip Girl (2007) is chock-full of this. There were Blake Lively, Penn Badgley, Ed Westwick (all 20), Leighton Meester (21), Chace Crawford and Jessica Szohr (both 22) playing teenagers. Spoofed on The Daily Show after the 2008 Olympics scandal of the Chinese gymnasts possibly being underage; Stewart questioned how qualified Americans are to judge such a thing with a shot of the GG cast.
  • This also rings true of the 2021 reboot. The main cast are mostly played by actors either in their late teens/early twenties, which given the Hotter and Sexier content displayed onscreen is justified. The youngest actor in the main cast, Whitney Peak, was seventeen when filming the first season, making her only two years older than her character.
• Gotham: Cameron Monaghan is 22 while his character of Jerome Valeska is 16-17.
• Grey's Anatomy 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.
• Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: Kim Go-eun was in her twenties when she played nineteen-year-old Eun Tak.
• Although the majority of the characters were played by teens in Hannah Montana, Jason Earles was nearly 29 when the show premiered and 34 when it ended.^note When the show began, Earles' resume claimed he was 21, or eight years younger than he really was.
  • Romi Dames, who played Traci Van Horn, was 26 when the show premiered.
  • Willis, who appears in Season 1, is 11, but was played by Drew Osborne, who was 15 years old at the time. Justified, however, as he's supposed to look far older than he really is.
• Arthur Fonzarelli in Happy Days was supposed, in the early episodes at least, to be eighteen/nineteen years old. The Fonz was played by Henry Winkler who was 29 when the show started, and 39 when it ended. His age seemed all the more obvious when he was seen romancing an actress clearly in her teens or twenties.
  • Ron Howard was almost twenty years old when he started playing high school student Richie Cunningham. His similarly friends Potsie and Ralph were played by twenty-four year old Anson Williams and twenty year old Donny Most. After Richie and Ralph moved away to join the army, the focus of the show shifted to Richie's younger sister Joanie and her romance with The Fonz's younger cousin Chachi. Erin Moran and Scott Baio were teenagers when they joined the show several seasons earlier, but they were about two years older than Joanie and Chachi were supposed to be, resulting in them playing high school students in their early twenties.
• The Hard Times of RJ Berger is an American television comedy series about RJ Berger (22-year-old Paul Iacono) an unpopular sophomore at the fictional Pinkerton High School in Ohio who has an exceptionally large penis. Berger's two best friends are Miles Jenner (31-year-old Jareb Dauplaise), whose ambitions for popularity cause him to clash with Berger, and goth girl Lily Miran (29-year-old Kara Taitz), who has been lusting after Berger for several years. Berger's love interest is Jenny Swanson (30-year-old Amber Lancaster), a cheerleader who is involved with Max Owens (34-year-old Jayson Blair), a popular jock and bully.
• The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries had Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy (24 and 18, when the series started filming) playing The Hardy Boys, who were supposedly 17 & 16. Inverted in Disney's adaptation for The Mickey Mouse Club, in which the actors Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk were younger than the books — 12 and 11.
  • The series also had 24-year-old Pamela Sue Martin as 16-year-old Nancy Drew. Her replacement, Janet Louise Johnson, was 19.
• In Hawaii Five-0, 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 Masi Oka was born in '74. His love interest Sabrina is played by Rumer Willis, a full thirteen years his junior and actually born in the late 80s, but they look like they could share a birthday.
  • Grace Park is already an example, but a flashback takes it even further, having Park in her late 30s play Kono in her mid-teens.
• Head of the Class: 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.
• Hemlock Grove: 17-year-old Roman Godfrey is portrayed by then 23-year-old Bill Skarsgård in season 1. And although Peter Rumancek's age isn't explicitly mentioned, since they're both in their senior year he can be assumed to also be around 17-18, but Landon Liboiron was 22 at the time.
• 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 Masi Oka was 32 at the time.
• In Hogfather, Mr. Teatime is a recent graduate of the Assassins Guild and implied to be around 20 at the oldest. In the TV movie, he is played by the 39-year-old Marc Warren. Warren was babyfaced enough to pull it off.
• Played for Laughs in Home Movie: The Princess Bride- four of the seven actors portraying the Grandson, who was played in the original by a ten-year-old, are clearly adults, with the youngest two actors out of the seven being fourteen and looking a little too old to be requesting bedtime stories. One of those is the Grandson's original actor, Fred Savage, 43 years old at the time of this production. Taken to an extreme with Rob Reiner, who was 73 at the time.
• 25-year-old Steve Burns (of Blue's Clues fame) plays a bullied high-school student in a 1998 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street.
• Some of the younger patients on House have this. One example is the 15-year-old supermodel in the 2nd season episode "Skin Deep" played by a 25 year old actress.
  • Several of the doctors on the team invert this to some extent, at least presumably, being played by actors who would be extraordinarily young to be in their position.
  • 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.
• House of the Dragon:
  • 21-year-old Milly Alcock plays Rhaenyra Targaryen, who starts the series at age 15. However, the series has a lot of timeskips which bring the age gap closer; in the final episode where Alcock plays Rhaenyra, the latter is about 18.
  • Downplayed with Alicent Hightower, a woman Rhaenyra's age, who is played by 18-year-old Emily Carey.
  • Laena Velaryon, whose teenage and adult selves are each played by actresses a decade older. Her 15-year-old self is played by 25-year-old Savannah Steyn. Her 25-year-old self is played by 35-year-old Nanna Blondell.
  • Aegon Targaryen, at age 13, is played by Ty Tennant, who was 19. There is a scene where Aegon masturbates in the nude, which would have been impossible to film with an underage actor. When Aegon actually reaches 19 years old, he is recast with Tom Glynn-Carney, who was 26 at the time.
  • 17-year-old Aemond Targaryen is played by 25-year-old Ewan Mitchell. It becomes obvious when you compare him to Jacaerys and Lucerys Velaryon, who are only a few years younger than Aemond, but are played by age-appropriate Harry Collett and Elliot Grihault, as Mitchell noticeably towers over them, and looks far older to boot (this is actually touched upon in-universe, as Jace and Luke are shocked when they reunite with Aemond after six years and see how much of a Hunk he has become).
• How I Met Your Mother is a minor example in that Ted, Lily and Marshall are all supposed to be the same age, yet Jason Segel is nearly 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.
• The Lifetime Movie of the Week I Am Elizabeth Smart has 20-year-old Alana Boden as the then 14–15-year-old Smart. Completely necessary, given the numerous rapes Elizabeth suffered during her captivity, which obviously could not be depicted with an underage actress (even then, Boden actually looks like a teenager, making a Rape Discretion Shot necessary anyway).
• Jennette McCurdy began playing Sam Puckett on iCarly when she was 14; by the time the series ended she was 20, and when the spinoff Sam & Cat ceased production she was 21. Similarly, her Sam & Cat costar Ariana Grande was 20 when Nickelodeon shut it down (they turned 22 and 21 - both actresses have their birthdays on June 26 - before the network officially cancelled the show).
  • Griffin, Carly's love interest and a high school senior in "iDate A Bad Boy", was played by 23-year-old Drew Roy and looked like it, especially in some shirtless scenes. The episode involved some heavy make out sessions with the star of the show Miranda Cosgrove, who was around 15 when they filmed them. Miranda apparently got to choose which guy they casted.
• In I, Claudius, 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:
  • Derek Jacobi, 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 John Hurt (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.
  • An earlier series depicting the Julio-Claudian dynasty, The Caesars, also employs this. The events of the series span 27 years, so some actors go from playing this trope straight to averting it, or from averting it to inverting it, or both. Just to give a few examples:
    • André Morell, aged 58, played Tiberius from the age of 54 to his death aged 77.
    • Ralph Bates, aged 27, played Caligula from the age of 18 to his death aged 28.
    • Freddie Jones, aged 40, played Claudius from the age of 23 to his declaration as Emperor aged 50.
• The Inbetweeners. The four main characters, 17-year-olds, are played by actors ranging from 22 to 26.
• In From the Cold: Lydia Fleming, 25 at the time of the series' debut, plays teenager Becca Franklin.
• Parodied in the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode Frank's Brother", in which a teenage Frank Reynolds is just Danny DeVito in a toupee despite supposedly "not looking a day over twelve".
• The WB's Jack & Bobby featured 24-year-old Matt Long as 15-year-old Jack McCallister. Made glaringly obvious by the fact that Logan Lerman, who played Jack's 13-year-old brother Bobby, was actually 12 at the time of filming.
• Jeeves and Wooster has it both ways. Both Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry were in their early 30s when the series started in 1990. The ages of the characters are never given in the books, but it would seem that Bertie Wooster (Laurie) was in his early-to-mid 20s and Jeeves (Fry) in his 40s. Of course, their ages are never given in the series, either, so Powers That Be 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.
• The Jeffersons: Isabel Sanford (Louise) was 21 years older than Sherman Hemsley (George)!
• Jessica Jones (2015):
  • In "AKA I Want Your Cray Cray" in season 2, 36 year olds Krysten Ritter and Rachael Taylor play Jessica and Trish Walker in their late teens.
  • In season 2, Janet McTeer is likely much older than Jessica's mother is supposed to be. This is justified given that she's said to have undergone extensive reconstructive surgery following the car accident.
• While filming Just Shoot Me!, fiftyish Wendie Malick was just a couple years older than her character, Nina Van Horn, but the trope comes in when she had to play Nina in flashbacks to her glory days as a supermodel. Presumably, there was no other feasible option.
• Just the Ten of Us: Teen characters Marie and Connie were played by 24-year-old Heather Langenkamp and 25-year-old JoAnn Willette.
• 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.
• Kamen Rider 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 Kamen Rider Double was 25 when the show was airing, and while Shotaro's never given an explicit age, he is only shown wearing a high-school uniform in a flashback- though the police officer chasing him seems to not have aged much since then. It's likely that Shotaro was meant to be in his early twenties, which would still be Dawson Casting, but to a smaller degree.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid has an inversion in that most of the main cast’s actors were younger than their characters’ ages: Taiga is 29 years old while his actor was 22 at the time (1994), Kiriya is 27 and his actor was 23 (1993), Emu and Hiiro are both 24 while their actors were 20 (1996) and 21 (1995), respectively. Kuroto is a rare aversion in this series as his actor (1986) was the same age as him - 30 years old.
• Kath & Kim:
  • 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.
• Kim's Convenience: 26-year-old (at the start of the series) Andrea Bang played 20-year-old college student Janet.
• In the Tim Allen series Last Man Standing, 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.
• In HBO's The Last of Us (2023), 19 year old (20 by the end of filming) Bella Ramsey portrays the 14 year old Ellie; and funnily enough was initially criticised for looking too childish to play the character. Even funnier when you consider Ellie in the sequel to the source material is actually the age Bella was when they debued and looks even older.
• Law & Order: In the season 13 episode 22 Sheltered, Sebastian Stan played a teenage sniper named Justin Capshaw. Justin is 15, according to the investigators, and he looks 15. Sebastian Stan was actually 21.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: Tony Goldwyn played Vincent D'Onofrio's older (by several years) brother. Goldwyn is actually a year younger than D'Onofrio.
• A 2006 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent guest-stars 21-year-old Michelle Trachtenberg as a 17-year-old known as weepingwillow17. Though apparently based on the lonelygirl15 phenomenon, weepingwillow17 actually is 17.
• Subverted in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which featured an adult conwoman who posed as a teenager in several different high schools to the point of having sex with her teenaged boyfriends, and had her current lover killed when he found out. The actress in question is actually younger than the role she was cast in, she was 26 and the character was 28. As many other cases, the plot was Ripped from the Headlines: here it is.
  • In an episode of Law & Order 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 Ripped from the Headlines (sort of) precursor of the above, an adult writer posed as a teenager in order to sell her scripts; naturally this was made into TV movie.
  • In CSI: NY, this was gender-reversed; the con woman was turned into a pair of pedophiles, the girlfriends were date-raped and the guidance counselor was killed when he found out.
• Julianna Rose Mauriello was 13 when she took on the role of 8-year-old Stephanie on the children's show LazyTown. 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. Her last song for LazyTown was released in 2010, when she was almost in her 20s. She left the show in 2011 because she had aged out of the role. Her replacement, Chloe Lang, was 10 at the time of casting.
• The Legend of Xiao Chuo: Tiffany Tang plays the youngest of the Xiao sisters, but is six years older than Lu Shan, who plays her older sister.
• The six main characters of the short-lived show Life as We Know It were all supposed to be high school sophomores (15/16), but all of their actors were 21 or 22 during filming, except for Jessica Lucas, who was 19.
• The Canadian sitcom Life with Derek premiered in 2005 with lead characters Casey (15) and Derek (16) played by then 19-year-old Ashley Leggat, and then 18-year-old Michael Seater, respectively.
• Lincoln Heights 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 Russell Hornsby and Nicki Micheaux, who played her parents, were 5 and 8 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 birth date was reported to been in 1984 which would have made her about 22-23 during season 1 before her actual birth date was revealed.
• Liv and Maddie: Despite playing a teenage character, Jessica Maria Garcia was 26 when the show premiered and 30 when it ended.
• 10-year-old Walt Lloyd on 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 it's in flashforwards set three years after he left the island, which still doesn't work because he's too old for 13. Prior to his appearance in the flashforwards he had appeared a few times and the show began to lampshade the changes to Walt; for instance, Locke described how Walt suddenly showed up, but was taller, more so than the 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.
  • Miles and Daniel were 27 and 26 in Season 4 respectively, but their actors were 38 and 39 during filming.
  • Ethan Rom was 27 in Season 1 but played by 39-year-old William Mapother.
  • It is worth mentioning that several actors play the younger versions of their characters in flashbacks, some of which are over 10 years in the past. For example, Jeremy Davies, at age 40, appeared as 17-year-old Daniel Faraday in a flashback in Season 5.
• Lost Love in Times: The princes, from oldest to youngest, are played by Gao Yi Qing (born 1983), Ji Chen (born 1981), William Chan (born 1985), Wang Ruo Lin (born 1980), Xu Hai Qiao (born 1983), Zhang He (born 1984), Gong Jun (born 1992), and Xu Jia Wei (born 1989).

The Love Boat - In the episode "The Old Man and the Runaway/The Painters/A Fine Romance," 21-year-old Bayn Johnson plays 15-year-old Nancy, the runaway / stowaway who tries to pass herself off as 26-years-old to an elderly man who can't believe her despite that the actress is nearer to the age of 26 than 15.

• 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.
• Lucifer (2016): Season 5 reveals that 17-year-old Linda gave birth to a daughter in 1994, meaning she was born in either 1976 or 1977. Her actress, Rachael Harris, was born in 1968.
• Maddigan's Quest is full of this: Jordan Metcalfe and Rose McIver were 18 and played Timon, aged 15, Garland, 14, respectively. Olivia Tennet was 14 and Zac Fox was 15 when they played 11-year-olds Lilith and Eden.
• Malcolm in the Middle: 23-year-old Devin Sidell as Teenage Lois in the episode "Goobye Kitty"
• The Brazilian soap opera Malhação (Young Hearts, in English) is infamous for this. Most of the seasons are set in the Ensino Médio (the Brazilian equivalent of High School) with adult actors in their early-mid 20's playing students of ages around 15-17 years old.
• Season 2 of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett brought in 60-year-old Temuera Morrison as 41-year-old Boba Fett. The extensive scarring due to exposure to the suns of Tatooine makeup helps make it more believable, as does the fact he's aged like fine wine.
• Marie-Antoinette (2022): Emilia Schüle, who was 29 when the series was filmed, as 14 year old Marie-Antoinette at the start of the series.
• In 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 A Lmaguer. Curiously Sandra and Ilean were the same age (23) and Alfonso just one year younger (22) when the series was filmed.
• Gary Burghoff of M*A*S*H fame. He was already 27 when playing the teenaged Radar, and continued the role well into his 40s. Burghoff, however, had such a childish frame and voice, that little besides his thinning hairline betrayed his true age. The producers tried hard to get him to keep his hat on in later episodes.
  • There was a heavy dose 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, who was 36 when the series started (which would have made Hawkeye of draft age during WWII), and 47 by the time it ended. Mike Farrell was 36 when he was cast as 28-year-old BJ Hunnicutt. Harry Morgan was 60 for Colonel Potter's introductory episode; Potter's exact age is never given, but it is stated that he was 15 during World War I, which would put him in his late 40s at the time of the Korean War.
  • In a late season episode, Sydney Freedman asks Potter how old he is and the Colonel claims he's 60, which fits the actor but breaks continuity of the character.
  • 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.
  • In the episode, "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet," Hawkeye is adminstering care to a Marine named Wendell. Hawkeye asks Wendell's age, and Wendell replies with, "Twenty." When Hawkeye knows that Wendell is lying, Wendell changes the answer to, "Eighteen." Hawkeye replies with, "For somebody who's both twenty and eighteen, you look awfully sixteen to me." It turns out that Wendell is actually fifteen, and too young for the military. Wendell is played by twenty-year-old Ron Howard.
• Maverick (episode The Lazy Ace: Part 1) - At 63, John McLiam was the oldest actor to play Doc Holliday, who died at the age of 36.
• 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 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. 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 The Middle are a lot older than they actually are. However to be fair, Brick's actor (Atticus Shafer) has Type IV Osteogenesis Imperfecta and is a lot shorter than someone his age would be otherwise.
  • 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 was 14 playing an 11-year-old, but due to his small stature (a result of osteogenesis imperfecta), he pulls it off most convincingly.
• Mimpi Metropolitan:
  • The 19-turning-20-year-old main trio, Bambang, Alan, and Prima, are respectively played by Madkucil (28, ironically playing the youngest), Rifat Sungkar (25), and Sakurta Ginting (23). In Bambang's case, people in-universe occasionally comment that he doesn't look his age.
  • Bambang's younger cousin Dian is played by Dian Sidik, who was 38. Alan comments how Younger Than They Look seems to run in the family.
• The Mists of Avalon miniseries had an extreme example, where 13-year-old Morgause at the beginning was played by Joan Allen, who was 44 and looked it.
• Modern Family mostly had the children played by actors approximately the same age as the characters, with the notable exception of Claire and Phil's eldest daughter, Haley, who was 15 in the first season but played by the already 18-year-old Sarah Hyland. Ironically, Hyland is so young-looking that early reviews criticised her casting for looking too young to realistically portray a high school student.
  • Furthermore, in season 5, they cast 30-year-old Adam Devine to play 21-year-old Andy. Just with Sarah, Adam is so baby-faced that he can successfully play a character much younger than him. Compounded with the fact that Andy was meant to only be 4-5 years older than Alex, yet Adam was actually double her actor's age.
• 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.)
• Mr. Belvedere: Kevin is a sophomore in high school (around 16 years old) and played by 23-year-old Rob Stone, who had recently attended the University of Southern California.
• My Dead Ex: All of the teenagers were played actors in their twenties. Some were even almost thirty.
• When My Family 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 Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, since the show ran for eleven years.) Marshall left after three series of the show, and has stated in interviews that the fact that he was much older than Nick made it more difficult for him to play the character.
• When My So-Called Life premiered, Jared Leto was 22 playing a high school student. He was 7 years older than Claire Danes, who played his love interest at 15.
  • Danes later said she felt odd having a much older man play her love interest.
• Nickelodeon's The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo: Irene Ng was between the ages of 22 and 24 while portraying teen "Kid Detective" Shelby Woo.
• Despite Paxton of Never Have I Ever being around 16, his actor Darren Barnet was 29 when the first season premiered and is over 10 years older than Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who played his love interest.
• 23-year-old Don Cheadle played the role of 16-year-old Jack in the "Jung and the Restless" episode of Night Court, the episode being released in 1988.
  • Also, in the episode "Crossroads", the characters recount stories of their younger selves and then the middle-aged actors play the younger version of their characters in the flashback. Most notably 40-year-old Markie Post as a 19-year-old version of Christine.
• 25-year-old John Hensley playing 16-year-old Matt on Nip/Tuck (made glaringly obvious off-screen when Hensley began dating Joely Richardson, the actress, only 13 years his senior IRL, who played his mom on the show). Also made glaringly obvious when he started getting a receding hairline.
• NOS4A2: In the series, Vic (who's seventeen at the start) is played by twenty six year old Ashleigh Cummings. Similar age gaps exist with the actors who play other teenage characters.
• Taken to something of an extreme in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Hayden Christensen was 40 during filming, and plays Anakin Skywalker in his late teens in a flashback. (He also plays Anakin/Darth Vader at the age of 32 in the main storyline, but it's not noticable since Vader is a horribly mutilated cyborg near-permanently encased in heavy armor by this point.)
• The main cast of One Piece (2023) are all older than their characters' pre-timeskip ages in the manga, with 19 year old Iñaki Godoy as 17 year old Luffy as the smallest difference and 30 year old Emily Rudd as 18 year old Nami as the biggest.
• Stan from On the Buses was supposed to be in his mid-thirties, but Reg Varney was 52 when the series began.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • In the first season, the show was criticized for having what some thought 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. By Season 3, they cast a younger actress to play Emma's teenage self in flashbacks.
  • 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 early 30s Ginnifer Goodwin playing Snow White as a young adult/late teen. Other people in their 30s playing much, much younger versions include Lana Parrilla and Josh Dallas.
  • And then there's 40-year-old Rose McGowan as "young Cora," who in the episodes where she plays the role is probably meant to be late-teens and in her very early twenties at most (it's a plot point in one episode that Cora is unmarried). 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."
  • In the Frozen (2013) arc in season 4, 29-year-old Georgina Haig is a 23-year-old Queen Elsa (official Frozen tie-in material states that Elsa was 21 in the movie when she was coronated, and the flashback scenes with her and Anna take place 2 years later). Less so with 22-year-old Elizabeth Lail playing 20-year-old Princess Anna. This is a downplayed (nearly averted) trope in this case.
  • Jared Gilmore as Henry Mills is an interesting case: he starts off the same age as his character in season 1, ten years old, but the extremely compressed timeline of the show makes it so that, even with a few time jumps, his character stays behind Jared's real age in later seasons. Although how much is left ambiguous, Jared hitting puberty makes it all more obvious.
  • Lily is introduced as a teenager in a Season 4 flashback, played by Nicole Munoz at 20. Her adult self is played by Agnes Bruckner, who is seven years younger than Jennifer Morrison. Their characters are the same age.
  • Wendy Darling is meant to be twelve or thirteen. Freya Tingley was nineteen, but didn't look it.
  • Peter Pan has a Vague Age since he's the boy who never grows old, but his actor Robbie Kaye was already 18.
  • Ruby is treated like she's late teens or young adult in the first season, but Meghan Ory was nearly thirty.
• One of Us is Lying: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their twenties.
• At the start, the main teenaged characters on One Tree Hill 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 Ackles as Rachel in season 3, and Antwon Tanner as Skills, who was 28 when the show started and 37 by the time it ended, which made him around 12 years older than the character.
  • Surprisingly, one of the only characters (and possibly the only main one) who actually looked like he was in high school (Mouth) was played by 22-year-old Lee Norris, who just happened to look young for his age. He easily looked the most convincing in the cast, to the point that the handful of characters played by actual teenagers looked closer in age to him and after the Time Skip he actually looked less believable as a character his own age than the others did.
  • The character of Quentin Fields was played by then 30-year-old Robbie Jones (though he surprisingly did look really young).
• Only Fools and Horses:
  • Del Boy is said to have been a teenager in The '60s. David Jason was born in 1940, making him roughly five to ten years older than the character.^note The show was inconsistent about Del's date of birth with this getting earlier over time. Early in the show's run A Losing Streak explained Del's father left on his 16th birthday, with Thicker than Water placing this in 1965 (suggesting a birth around 1949). Big Brother (the first episode) also established there was a 13-year gap between Del and Rodney. Later in the show's run, however, Sleepless in Peckham mentioned that Del was 15 in July 1960 (suggesting a birth of 1945) while Rodney had not been born yet. The school reunion episode has a banner celebrating class 4C (from context, the fourth year of secondary school) of 1962, meaning Del, Trigger, Boycie, and Denzil would all have been around 14 that year. The prequel Rock & Chips similarly has Del as 15 in 1960, supporting a birth year around 1945, with Rodney not born until later that year. This suggests the age gap between the Trotters was at least 15 years.
  • Although Cassandra was supposed to be five years younger than Rodney, in real life Gwyneth Strong is actually two years older than Nicholas Lyndhurst.
• In BBC sitcom Open All Hours, David Jason plays Granville, nephew and errand boy of Ronnie Barker's Arkwright. Jason would have been around 35 when the series proper started and 44 or 45 when it finished. In itself, it's not technically implausible that he could be Barker's nephew (even without stretching their ten year age difference, 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 — 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 play a visibly elderly Granville.
• Orange Is the New Black:
  • 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 Older Than She Looks, but not to the extent of convincing anybody that she's a teenager.
  • Most of the flashbacks in Orange Is the New Black qualify since they take place years before. Particularly Sophia, who is portrayed by Laverne Cox's older-looking twin brother.
• Charlotte Coleman was in her early 20s when playing teenage Jess in the TV adaptation of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
• Our Miss Brooks 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 The Movie in 1956, and you have the 29-year-old Richard Crenna playing Walter Denton for the last time.
• Parker Lewis Can't Lose: Older actors playing teens include Corin Nemic, Billy Jayne, Abraham Benrubi, Jennifer Guthrie, Harold Pruett, all in their early 20s.
• Parks and Recreation: April started the series at 19, while her actress, Aubrey Plaza, was 24.
• The Partridge Family: Keith Partridge is in high school for the majority of the series. He was played by David Cassidy, who was twenty when the series began. His younger (but also high school aged) sister, Laurie, was played by seventeen-year-old Susan Dey. However, the series ran for four years, resulting in her still playing a high school student at the age of twenty-one.
• Party of Five had the (then) 26-year-old Scott Wolf and 20-year-old Neve Campbell playing the respectively 16- and 15-year-old Bailey and Julia. Lampshaded 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 Lacey Chabert (Claudia) and 16-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt (Sarah) were the same ages as their characters. They did intend to cast an age appropriate actress for Julia, but they liked Neve Campbell's audition so much that they cast her - and then wrote a storyline in where Julia is able to pass for over 21 with a fake ID and work in a bar.
• An Exaggerated Trope on PEN15, with series co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, both 31, playing fictionalized versions of themselves as teenage best friends. The show is set in the early 2000s, a time period when both actors were actually teenagers. Every other teenage character in the show is an aversion, which serves to make the two leads seem more awkward.
• Perfect Strangers episode, "Happy Birthday, Baby," 32-year-old Mark Linn-Baker plays Larry, who is depressed on his 24th birthday.
• All of the secondary school pupils in the seventies Britcom Please Sir! were quite visibly in their late twenties or early thirties.
• Poirot: In Cat Among the Pigeons, schoolgirls from the same year, implied to be in their early teens, are played by 20-year-old Jo Woodcock (Jennifer Sutcliffe), 16-year-old Lois Edmett (Kid Detective Julia Upjohn), and 21-year-old Katie Leung (Hsui Tai). Another classmate of theirs, Shaista, is played by 24-year-old Amara Karan, but it's a subversion as the character is revealed to be an adult impostor.
• 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.
• The Power (2023): The teenagers on the show are as usual played by actors in their early twenties.
• Power Rangers is a common offender, with the original season's 15-year-old characters being played by actors as old as 24. Operation Overdrive had an 18-year-old Smart Girl 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 (Dax). It was egregious enough that the general assumption is that in the movie, Dulcea (played by 27-year old Gabrielle Fitzpatrick who certainly looked her age but looked younger than David Yost, wo played Billy) was supposed to have the appearance of a teenager..
  • The early seasons had most actors between 18-21, with subsequent seasons going off in many different directions.
  • As of recent seasons, the production team attempts to limit the age difference between adult actors and their teenaged characters in order to avoid potential Younger Than They Look situations, putting an age range for legible auditionees to be between 18 to 26 year old.
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers has an excuse: the characters were originally intended to be high school seniors, as evidenced by the original plot for the two-part episode "Doomsday" involving the Rangers going to Senior Prom. When the show became a hit, they needed to keep the characters around, so they refrained from actually giving ages for the Rangers in order to keep the high school setting as long as possible.
    • Though in that case, the trope still would've been played straight as several of the actors were a few years older than a high school senior. The trope would've been averted, though, with Austin St. John (Jason), 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 Emanuel Jones (Zack) actually somewhat looked the part, even at 22, but David Yost (Billy), 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 a year early, making him at least an entire decade older than his character.^note Depending on what month you were born in, it is conceivable in the United States to graduate at 17, meaning Yost could have been playing a 16-year-old at 27.
    • Johnny Yong Bosch (Adam) and Karan Ashley (Aisha) were also aversions, both actually being teens when they started on the show.
  • Rhoda Montemayor (Rose), the aforementioned 28-year-old actress from Operation Overdrive has stated in interviews that she was also given an audition for the Harry Potter films as 15-year-old Cho Chang...
  • The Rocca sisters in in Power Rangers Mystic Force were in their late teens. The actresses were both in their mid/ late twenties at tthe time of filming.
  • Played straight and inverted in the case of Olivia Tennet (Dr. K) from RPM, in which the 17-year-old actress (when production began) played her character at ages 14 (during a flashback in "Doctor K"), 18, 19 (as of "The Road to Corinth"), and then 20 (as of "If Venjix Won").
  • Linkara summed it up nicely in his History of Power Rangers series: "I don't think anyone in the casting department has ever seen a real teenager."
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder 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 actually pulled it off the best.◊.
  • Power Rangers Jungle Fury has Casey and Lily, both 18, played by Jason Smith (24) and Anna Hutchison (22). Theo, 17, was played by Aljin Abella (23).
  • Power Rangers S.P.D. has Bridge, canonically 21 (despite the Jetix website inexplicably listing him as 17), played by 27-year-old Matt Austin.
  • Power Rangers in Space has Astronema/Karone as the younger sister of Red Ranger Andros. Not only was actress Melody Perkins in her mid-20's when played the role, she's also some 4 years older than Christopher Khayman Lee, who played Andros. Not that anyone would notice, however.
    • Taking this a step further, Christopher was born in 1978; the other four former Turbo rangers (who were still in high school at the time) were portrayed by actors and actresses who were born between 1975 and 1977 and Andros's best friend Zhane (Silver Ranger), who should have been the about same age as Andros, was played by Justin Nimmo, who was born in 1974 along with Melody Perkins. Christopher was the youngest actor on the set and seriously looked it compared to the other male characters.
  • In Power Rangers Wild Force, 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.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Storm 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.
  • Power Rangers Dino Charge averts is slightly, since most of the characters are in the 20-22 range and the actors are in the 21-25 range. And then it's Inverted with Kendall, who is listed on the official website as being 26 despite actress Claire Blackwelder being 22, the third youngest member of the cast (and only older than the second youngest by a little less than three months).
    Tyler: I can morph again? Cool!
    Kendall: Yes, I suppose it is... "cool".
    Linkara: (as Kendall) Oh, you kids these days, who are the same age as me, and your weird lingo.
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy inverts this with Mike, who was played by 21-year-old Russell Lawrence and is supposed to be the older brother of Leo, played by 25-year-old Danny Slavin.
• Most of the teenagers on Pretty Little Liars were played by people who were very much not in their teens. The Time Skip to five years in the future was a smart move, given that Troian Bellisario (whose character of Spencer Hastings was born in 1994) turned 30 in October 2015. That's not even the worst case, considering Tammin Sursok was 27 when she started playing Jenna Marshall. Troian was actually older than Drew Van Acker, who played her older brother.
• Princess Silver has a mild example; Rong Qi is in his early twenties (and it's a minor plot point that he's so ill he'll die before he turns twenty-five), while his actor Luo Yun Xi was thirty during filming.
• The Princess Wei Young:
  • Vanness Wu (Tuoba Yu) is ten years older than Mao Xiao Tong (Chang Ru), but their characters were childhood friends. Made even stranger when flashbacks to their childhood show Tuoba Yu and Chang Ru are the same age, while as adults they clearly aren't.
  • Luo Jin plays the grandson of Canti Lau despite being 17 years younger.
• One episode of Psych quite possibly took advantage of this trope. The killer was a young-looking adult posing as a high school student. Because of Dawson Casting, it's easy for the viewer to dismiss his possibly looking older than he should, when in-universe, he IS older than he should be.
• In the Miniseries Queen (based on the life of Alex Haley's paternal grandmother), Halle Berry plays the teenaged Queen even though she was in her early 20's at the time, though this is justified by her continuing to play the part as her character aged.
• The Channel 4 docudrama series The Queen had a mild case with the 26-year-old Katie McGrath playing the 21-year-old Princess Margaret (though she is 25 by the end of the episode). More extreme is the 35-year-old Emilia Fox playing the 25-year-old Queen Elizabeth II.
  • The same two actresses played sisters again in the BBC's Merlin, although this is arguably more justified as the Arthurian legends tend to suggest a fairly wide age gap between Morgause and Morgan le Fay/Morgana
• Queen for Seven Days: All three of the leads are older than their characters. This has the side-effect of making Lee Yeok and Lee Yung seem closer in age than they were — in real life Lee Yung was twelve years older than Lee Yeok.
  • Chae-gyeong was nineteen when she became queen and was deposed, and is played by thirty-one-year-old Park Min-young.
  • Lee Yeok was eighteen when he became king, and is played by thirty-three-year-old Yeon Woo-jin.
  • Lee Yung was twenty-nine when he died, and is played by thirty-seven-year-old Lee Dong-gun.
• 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.
• Raising Hope: In the 2012 episode "Poking Holes in the Story", 31-year-old Kara Taitz and 28-year-old Igal Ben Yair play teen characters Natalie and Robert who are wrestling with the decision to take each other's virginities. Natalie discusses this issue with 38-year-old Virginia (played by 42-year-old Martha Plimpton). Virginia is married to 40-year-old Burt (played by 48-year-old Garret Dillahunt), as they both have a son who is 23, who was born when they were 15 and 17.
• Reba had this with Cheyenne and Van who were high school seniors when the series began. At the time, JoAnna Garcia Swisher was 22 years old and Steve Howey was 24.
• Patrick McKenna was 31 when he started playing teen-aged Harold Green on The Red Green Show. Interestingly, Harold did slowly age as the series progressed, eventually going to college and getting various full-time jobs. In fact, one of the reasons McKenna temporarily left the show during the late 90s was that he found it ridiculous that he was still playing a teenage character in his forties.
• A rare example from the other end of the age spectrum can be seen in Rescue Me 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 Resident Alien episode "Family Day", teen daughter Liza Vanderspeigle is played by Taylor Blackwell, who was in her early 20s at time of filming.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: Ning Yi is in his late twenties, while Chen Kun was 41 during filming. Luckily, he looks younger than he is.
• Riverdale: Almost all of the actors are in their twenties playing teenagers, with the exception of KJ Apa, who was 18 playing high schooler Archie. The most egregious example is 29-year-old Ashleigh Murray playing fellow high schooler Josie. Season 5 features a seven-year Time Skip, because the showrunners realized that they could not keep the cast in high school forever.
  • Special mention goes to Cole Sprouse as Jughead, whose case is particularly interesting as audiences knew him as Cody Martin, who he played during his childhood and teenage years, therefore viewers knew what he really looked like in high school. However, even so, he still looked the most convincing in the cast despite being in his mid-20s when the show premiered.
• In series three of Robin Hood, 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 Rome, as 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.
• Roseanne (1992 episode "Halloween IV") 23-year-old Abraham Benrubi as 16-year-old Dan Conner.
• 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) Emiliede 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.
• With one exception, Runaways (2017) concerns a group of high schoolers played by 20-year-olds (up to 25 in Gregg Sulkin's case).
• Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace: At the start of the series Ruyi and Hongli are teenagers. Zhou Xun was 42-43 and Wallace Huo was 37-38 during filming. Justified, though, since the same actors play the characters throughout their lives, up until Ruyi's death aged 48.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch:
  • Melissa Joan Hart was twenty when she first starred as Sabrina Spellman, who turns sixteen in the pilot. She does graduate high school and move onto college, and a career in journalism by the seventh season (where Melissa was now 27).
  • Nate Richert was a mild case, as he was 18 in the first season (Harvey is 16).
  • Jenna Leigh Green and Michelle Beaudoin were among the older high school cast members - twenty and twenty-one respectively. Lindsay Sloane however was the same age as Valerie.
  • The college seasons contain this as well. Morgan's age isn't stated but she has to be very early twenties, and Elisa Donovan was nearly thirty. Soleil Moon Frye was 24 as 19-year-old Roxie. Trevor Lissauer was 25 as Miles.
  • The infamous balding adult extra that appeared as a student in the background of a scene in Westbridge High School.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures features 20-year-old Daniel Anthony as 14-year-old Clyde Langer and 18-year-old Anjli Mohindra as 15-year-old Rani Chandra. Considering they had to write out two of the lead characters because their actors were taking exams, this is a rare justified example.
• Saved by the Bell (2020):
  • Dexter Darden, who plays musical student Devante, was 29 when the reboot premiered.
  • Although Principal Ron Toddman was supposedly a high school student at Bayside around the time of the original gang, John Michael Higgins is about a decade older than the original gang.
• Scarlet Heart: At the start of the series Liu Shi Shi is 25 playing a 16-year-old, while Nicky Wu is 40 playing a character in his late twenties.
• The School Nurse Files: The students of Mokryeon High were portrayed by adults. Song Hee-jun, who was casted in the role of Hye-min was 25 in 2020, and Park Hye-eun, who was casted in the role of Ara, was 23 in 2020.
• Played straight, naturally in The Secret Circle. The youngest cast member of the main cast, Britt Robertson, was 21 and the oldest, Jessica Parker Kennedy was 27. The rest of the cast members include Thomas Dekker (24), Phoebe Tonkin (23), Louis Hunter (22), Chris Zylka (27), and Shelly Hennig (25).
  • Not to mention Adam Harrington, who was 42, portraying the younger version of Ethan from the 90s.
• Exaggerated in a few October 1968 episodes of the soap opera The Secret Storm. Christina Crawford (of Mommie Dearest 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.)
• Seinfeld rarely made use of flashback sequences, but when it did, it employed their characters' original actors and mainly played it for laughs. The most egregious example (possibly in all of television) was in "The Fatigues", where Frank's depiction as a ~20-year-old Army cook was portrayed by Jerry Stiller himself, who was 69 years old when the episode aired.
• In Sex Education, Asa Butterfield was 21 in the first series playing 16-year-old Otis. All the other teen characters were played by actors aged 22-25 (except supporting cast member Chaneil Kular who was 19). Some amount of Dawson Casting was inevitable given the significant amount of sexual content on this show.
• In Shameless (UK), 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."
  • The show 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 the Sherlock Case Book, Sherlock Holmes is revealed to have been born in 1981. ‘’ Benedict Cumberbatch'' was born in 1974.
• In The Simone Biles Story: Courage to Soar, a Lifetime biopic, 29-year-old Jeanté Godlock plays 19-year-old Simone Biles.
• The Sinner: 35-year-old Jessica Biel plays Cora Tanetti, who's 26 or 27 (judging by the fact her parents said she left in 2012 at age 23, and the show is set in 2016).
• In Six Feet Under, the initially high-school-aged Claire Fisher was played by the initially twenty-three-year-old Lauren Ambrose.
• Smallville:
  • 24-year-old Tom Welling as 14-year-old Clark Kent. How many fourteen-year-olds are built like a tank?◊ (Then again, this is Clark Kent.) He's fourteen in human years, remember. Goodness knows what is in Kryptonian.
  • The rest of the teenage characters were also played by actors several years older, although not as blatant as Welling. Sam Jones III (Pete), Kristin Kreuk (Lana), and Allison Mack (Chloe) were all 18 when first cast, while Eric Johnson (Whitney) was 21.
  • Michael Rosenbaum was 29 playing the supposedly 21-year-old Lex.
  • Erica Durance was 26 when she first appeared. Lois is supposed to be 19 at the time.
  • Tom Welling is two years older than Brandon Routh (Clark/Superman in Superman Returns), yet plays the same character at a much earlier point in his life (although admittedly in a different continuity). Welling also began playing Clark at about the same age (maybe a year younger) that Christopher Reeve made his screen tests to play Superman in the mid-1970s.
• Sneaky Pete: In the final season, Carly is still a 17-year-old high school student, while the actress playing her was about 26 at the time of filming.
• In Someday or One Day, this is in effect with all the high school-aged characters, though special mention with Huang Yu Xuan (27 years old) and Chen Yun Ru (17 going on 18) being quite younger than their actress Alice Ke (who was 34-35 when the show was airing).
• Sorry!: At the beginning of the series, Timothy Lumsden is mentioned to be 41 years old. In reality, he was played by Ronnie Corbett, who was 50 when the show first aired. Amusingly, this makes him only ten years younger than Barabara Lott (who played Timothy's mother on-screen).
• Square Pegs 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.
• Star-Crossed has an example that trumps even Gabrielle Carteris from 90210: Matt Lanter portrays a 16-year-old (admittedly alien) boy, despite Lanter himself being only a couple of months shy of 31 years old at the time (Carteris was 29). Made more hilarious by the fact that Lanter was in the 90210 reboot, playing a teenager when he himself was in his mid-20s.
• Stargirl (2020): Most of the teenage cast were already in their early twenties by the time the show began filming.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • The best-known example is Ensign Pavel Chekov, who was supposed to be 22 years old when 31-year-old Walter Koenig joined the show in 1967.
    • In the episode "Miri", the Enterprise finds a group of children who age very slowly, so even though they are all several hundred years old, they all look like preteens. Miri believably looks 13-14 even though she's played by a 19-year-old (Kim Darby). Jahn is played by a 27-year-old actor (Michael J. Pollard) - granted, one who doesn't look 27, but he also clearly isn't 14.
    • In "Charlie X", the titular character, 17 years old Charles Evans is played by 26- year-old Robert Walker, Jr.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Nog was supposedly a young teenager as of the first season, but played by Aron Eisenberg, who was in his twenties when the series started. 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, rather than casting a child actor who might become too tall to be plausible as a Ferengi. It worked almost too well, since the actor playing his human buddy Jake quickly sprouted to 6'3 over the course of the first three seasons, towering over Nog.
    • 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.
    • Cecily April Adams portrayed the recurring character of Ishka, mother of Quark the Ferengi, despite being nine years younger than Armin Shimerman, who played Quark.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Alexander Rozhenko is portrayed first by four-year-old Jon Steuer when he's supposed to be not even two, then by 9–11-year-old Brian Bonsall when Alexander is 3-5, and finally by 21-year-old Marc Worden in Deep Space Nine when he should be about eight or nine. The in-universe explanation is that Klingons mature more quickly than humans, but this is the only case across the franchise where this is stated to be the case, and other references seem to indicate otherwise (not to mention that Alexander is one-fourth human).
  • Similarly, in Star Trek: Voyager, 3–5-year-old Naomi Wildman is played by 10–12-year-old Scarlett Pomers, who looks at least 7 at the onset of the role. As with Alexander, it's implied that her non-human ancestry causes her to age more quickly (which many fans found ironic since her mother's pregnancy was exceptionally long, a fact which was also explained by Naomi not being fully human).
  • Star Trek: Discovery:
    • As a fourth-year cadet (eventually comissioned and holding the rank of ensign in the Season 1 finale), Sylvia Tilly is supposed to be in her early twenties (most likely 22 or 23 by the end of the first season), whereas the actress who portrays her, Mary Wiseman, was actually 32 (the same age as Burnham's actress Sonequa Martin-Green) when the season was shot.
    • Adira is 16, played by Blu del Barrio, who's 23.
  • Star Trek: Picard: Season 3 has Ed Speelers, who was 34 during filming, playing Jack Crusher, the 21-year-old son of Beverly Crusher and Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.
• St. Elsewhere:
  • Tom Hulce was 29 when he played John Doe #12 (David Stewart), who is about 16 or 17, in "Graveyard", "Release" and "Family History". Dr. Philip Chandler repeatedly refers to David as a kid. He is played by Denzel Washington, who is one year younger than Hulce.
  • Eric Stoltz was 21 or 22 when he played the 15-year-old Eddie Carson in "Under Pressure", "Entrapment" and "All About Eve".
  • The 22-year-old Lycia Naff played the 14-year-old Maddy Holmes in the Season Three episodes "Saving Face", "Give the Boy a Hand" and "Any Portrait in a Storm".
  • Robert Romanus was 29 when he played the teenager Nick Meose in the Season Four episode "The Naked and the Dead".
• Strangers with Candy: 30-something Amy Sedaris plays 40-something Jerri Blank, who decides to go back to high school as a freshman. Jerri doesn't lie about her age, and this trope is mostly inverted by casting actual teens as the students to make the situation seem even more ridiculous. Until the last episode, when 30-year-old Winona Ryder played "Fran", the coolest girl at school.
• While averted for the younger cast, it's played barely straight for the teenage cast of Stranger Things. 24-year-old Joe Keery played 17-year-old Steve Harrington, 22-year-old Charlie Heaton played 16-year-old Jonathan Byers, 21-year-old Natalia Dyer played 16-year-old Nancy Wheeler, all in Season 1, whereas 22-year-old Dacre Montgomery played 17-year-old Billy Hargrove in Season 2 and 21-year-old Maya Hawke played 17-year-old Robin Buckley in Season 3. Probably the most extreme example would Marty Cardalope playing Keith despite being in his mid-30s at the time.
  • The age disparities become even more prominent as the series progresses due to the long gaps between seasons. Joe Keery was 29 in season 4 while his character is only 19. The party members are all 14, yet most of their actors have already reached their late teens or early twenties.
• In the Canadian series Student Bodies, all the actors playing teenagers were in their early 20s.
• The Summer I Turned Pretty: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their early to mid twenties.
• Super Sentai examples:
  • A 28-year-old Tarumi Touta played the 22/23-year-old Jin in Choushinsei Flashman.
  • Inverted in Samurai Sentai Shinkenger with 14-year-old Runa Natsui playing 17-year-old Kaoru Shiba
  • Inverted with Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger 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.
• In Superstore, Jonah is 26 at the time of the first episode, having recently dropped out of a Master's program. Ben Feldman was 35.
• Switched at Birth 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.
• Tabitha, the Spin-Off to Bewitched, follows 20-something Lisa Hartman as the 20-something Tabitha Stephens. So far, so good. Except for the intro that shows a photo album filled with images of Tabitha, sequentially to show her growing up, and focuses on one photograph in particular with the caption, "Tabitha with Jerry Goldberg at 15." The photograph becomes animated, showing 20-something Lisa in the picture, (with youthful pigtails and freckles, as pointed out in simultaneous narration), sharing a milkshake with a young man. Just one of several flashbacks in the one and only season that it lasted, though possibly justified as witches in the Bewitched franchise can alter how old they look.
• In the FX drama A Teacher, 25-year-old Nick Robinson plays the 17-year-old (later 18) Eric, which is justified given the show's subject matter. Later inverted in the finale, with the 10-year Time Skip making Robinson be younger than his character.
• Teen Wolf:
  • Although not as egregious as the main cast of some other shows set in high school, the youngest of the main cast, Tyler Posey (Scott) and Dylan O'Brien (Stiles), were both 19 when the show started. Gage Golightly (Erica) was also 19 when she debuted in season 2.
  • This has gradually changed due to the show progressing only a few months over the length of four seasons. Colton Haynes (Jackson) was 22 during his first season, Holland Roden (Lydia), Keahu Kahuanui (Danny), and Charlie and Max Carver (Ethan and Aiden) were all 24, 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 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 26-year-old Summer Glau played Cameron Philips, who is able to pass as a high school student. Cameron's cyborg form is patterned after a teen named Alison. And one assumes that all teens from the future live a harsh life that causes crows feet and deep smile lines, as seen on 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.
• That '70s Show:
  • Danny Masterson (Hyde), Topher Grace (Eric) and Ashton Kutcher (Kelso) were respectively 22, 20 and 20 in 1998 when the show debuted. Mila Kunis was 14, younger than her character was meant to be. However, because the show ran for 8 years but was set between 1976 and 1979, she soon caught up with her character's age, then overtook it.
  • The show ran into the same problem as the Fresh Off the Boat example when Alice Cooper in his early 50s guest starred as himself in his late 20s, which is mitigated a bit by his theatrical makeup.
  • That 90s show takes it in an interesting direction. The teens are played by actual teenagers, however the adults are all played by actors older than their ages in real life.
• In That's So Raven, 16/17-year-old Raven-Symoné played 14-year-old Raven Baxter and 18-year-old Anneliese van der Pol played 15-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.
• Tinsel has a 27-year-old playing the character of 17-year-old Emil. Cue fans feeling the romance between him and the older Angela Dede as Too Sexy for This Timeslot. Same show has a woman who is obviously in her twenties playing teenager Shalewa.
• While Titans (2018) averted this by having 14-year-old Teagan Croft portray the teenage Rachel Roth, her love interest Gar Logan is played by 23-year-old Ryan Potter, even though the character is also supposed to be a teenager around Rachel's age. This was presumably due to Gar's frequent nude scenes, which would have been more difficult to film with an underage actor.
• The British Children's series Topsy And Tim featured Jocelyn Macnab (7-9 at the time of filming) and Joshua Lester (7-8 at the time of filming) as the 4–6-year-old titular characters.
• Touched by an Angel always employed this trope; for example, 21-year-old Alyson Hannigan in "Cassie's Choice", 21-year-old Melissa Joan Hart in "Angels on the Air", 23-year-old Lukas Behnken in "Minute by Minute", and 23-year-old Joey Lawrence and 26-year-old Paige Moss in "Fool for Love".
• Supposed teenagers in Tower Prep include Dyana Liu (29) as Suki and Ryan Pinkston (22) as Gabe.
• A weird example happened in Tru Calling: 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".
• True Blood: Obviously inverted with most of the vampires, who are centuries old but are mostly played by actors born no earlier than the 1950s. Played straight, though, for Jessica Hamby. She is said to be 17 years old when she gets turned by Bill Compton. Deborah Ann Woll was 23 years old when she debuted as Jessica late in season 1, and 29 by the show's final season in 2014.
• In the final season of The Twilight Zone (1959), two different episodes — "Spur of the Moment" and "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" — feature a young woman who is explicitly said to be 18. In each case, the character was played by a 28-year-old actress. In "Spur", it could be justified since the same character, played by the same actress, is also seen 25 years older; in "Number 12", it seriously weakens the point of the episode.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "A Message from Charity", Robert Duncan McNeill was 20 when he played the 16-year-old Peter Wood while Kerry Noonan was 25 when she played Charity Payne, who is much the same age.
  • In "The Toys of Caliban", David Greenlee was 26 when he played Toby Ross, who is supposed to be in his early teens at most.
  • In "Joy Ride", Robert Knepper was 27 and Brooke McCarter and Heidi Kozak were both 23 when they played the teenagers Alonzo, Greg and Adrienne.
  • In "Private Channel", Scott Coffey was 22 when he played the 16-year-old Keith Barnes.
  • In "Time and Teresa Golowitz", Wallace Langham was 22, Grant Heslov was 23 and Gina Gershon was 24 when they played Nelson Baxley, Bluestone and Laura Schuppe, all of whom are 16 or 17.
  • In "Song of the Younger World", Jennifer Rubin was 25 when she played the teenager Amy Hawkline.
• Widely employed in Twin Peaks. For example, Laura Palmer, seventeen, was played by Sheryl Lee, who was about twenty-three years old at the time
• In Underbelly: The Golden Mile the initially 17-year-old John Ibrahim is played by 25-year-old Firass Dirani, although the character was 28 by the end of the series. Ironically, the show still attracted controversy by depicting Ibrahim having sex onscreen.
• In United States of Tara, 15 year old Kate is played by 19 year old Brie Larson in the first season.
• Italia Ricci is ever so slightly too old to play a high-schooler in Unnatural History at 24.
• The Untamed:
  • When the series aired the actors for Lan Sizhui, Jin Ling, and Lan Jingyi were 20, 22, and 24 years old respectively, although their characters are only around 15 to 17 years old.
  • Inverted with Wang Yibo, who was in his early twenties while Lan Wangji is in his early-to-mid thirties. Although this is played straight in the flashbacks, where Lan Wangji is a few years younger than Wang Yibo's actual age during filming.
  • Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are supposed to be around 15 at the start of the series and Jiang Yanli is only a few years older. Xiao Zhan (Wei Wuxian) and Xuan Lu (Jiang Yanli) were 26-27 and Wang Zhuocheng (Jiang Cheng) was 22 or 23 during filming.
• An inversion seems to have been the original four series of Upstairs Downstairs, which covered thirty years of historical period but only four years of real time. The characters remained the same age throughout the series, frozen in time between 1903 and 1930. The only attention paid to the passage of time seemed to be James, who grew grey about the temples. In the modern remake, Jean Marsh, now forty years older, reprises her role as Rose Buck, meaning Rose ages forty years in only six between the end of the Bellamy era in 1930 and the beginning of the Holland residence at Eaton Place in 1936. It does help, however, that the cast changed periodically, with Hazel and then Virginia replacing Lady Marjorie as "her Ladyship" and the introduction of another young lady, Georgina, to take on Elizabeth Bellamy-Kirbridge's role in the story. In the servants' hall, the cast similarly gains and loses members (adding Frederick and Daisy in the 1920s), but as the series progresses we still never see Rose, Edward, Hudson, Mrs Bridges or Ruby age.
  • At the beginning of the series, Elizabeth Bellamy is 17, played by 26-year-old Nicola Pagett. But there are frequent Time Skips forward, making the character around 29 at her final episode.
  • Pauline Collins is several years older than the age of her character, Sarah, in the first few episodes, but like Elizabeth, they line up better by her last episode. It seems less egregious with an adult actor, because it's perfectly legitimate to cast someone according to the age she appears, rather than her actual age, and Collins did look younger than she was.
• Utopia Falls: The main cast are meant to be 16, but played by actors in their early 20s.
• V (1983): 24-year-old Blair Tefkin as 17-year-old Robin Maxwell.
• The teenage characters of The Vampire Diaries are played by 20-something actors. The ages of the actors at the very start of filming for the show are: Nina Dobrev (20), Steven R. McQueen (20), Kat Graham (19), Caroline Accola (21), Kayla Ewell and Zach Roerig (both 23), Michael Trevino (24). All of them play high school students. Stefan and Damon Salvatore, who got vamped at the ages of 17 and 24 respectively, are played by Paul Wesley (26) and Ian Somerhalder (30) (Though this can be excused due to people looking different in the 1860s). Overall, the youngest cast member of the entire series is Kat Graham, who at 19, was the only teenager on the show when it first began. 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.
• In their junior year (season one), when you would expect them all to be about 16 or 17, some of the main characters of Veronica Mars were: the titular heroine (24-year-old Kristen Bell), Wallace Finnel (22-year-old Percy Daggs III), Logan Echolls (22-year-old Jason Dohring), and Dick Casablancas Jr. (23-year-old Ryan Hansen).
  • Which worked fine, except for the episode in season two, in which then 24-year-old Kristen Bell and 25-year-old Aaron Ashmore (Troy), playing high school seniors (~18), interact with 18-year-old Michael Cera and 17-year-old Alia Shawkat... who were playing college students. One of them at least in his sophomore year, as he was acting as a tour guide to profros. That was sort of disorienting.
  • 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. It's later found out that Kendall had assumed the identity of a younger high school student, but even then, Kendall's 'real' is still about seven years younger than Charisma's.
  • Kind of lampshaded in the mini-episode shot to promote a possible season 4. Veronica is supposed to be in her mid-twenties, having graduated both college and the FBI academy, yet as one of the younger new recruits, she gets picked to go undercover as a teenager.
• The Vicar of Dibley: James Fleet was in his 40s when he started playing Hugo and about nine years younger than Gary Waldhorn playing David, his father.
• Victoria: Jenna Coleman was 29 (and turned 30 during production) as she portrayed Queen Victoria starting from the age of 18 in this miniseries.
• In Victorious, Daniella Monet, who is 21 years old, is playing a 17-year-old character.
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • 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.
  • Likewise, her sister Maggie was implied to be fresh out of high school. However, Lauren Cohen was 28 when she first appeared and is now in her mid-30's.
  • Carl was 12 when the series began, and Chandler Riggs was 10; two years younger than his character. However, as of the end of Season 6, Riggs is now 17, even though only two years have passed in the timeline of the show.
  • Word of God has it that Daryl Dixon is "about 35". Norman Reedus was 40 when the show began filming, and is now pushing 50.
• We Are Who We Are: Fraser and Caitlin are two 14-year-olds. Both their actors were at least three or four years older than that when filming occurred.
• Webster: Teenaged Emmanuel Lewis plays a seven-year-old.
• Gabe Kaplan stated in interviews that he believed part of the reason the ratings for Welcome Back, Kotter began to decline in series three was that the Sweathogs, whose actors were now 24-29 years old, were simply too old to still be believable as high school students.
• A truly bizarre example from The West Wing. In a season four episode, Joe Quincy is being assisted by a White House Aide whom He thinks looks about fourteen and who claims to be twenty-two. She is played by Kiersten Warren who was in her late thirties and looked it. The character is never seen again aside from that scene, almost pushing it into Big-Lipped Alligator Moment 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 What I Like About You. Extremely averted with Holly (who's in-universe birthdays were near her actress, Amanda Bynes'); played straight with Henry, Vince, and Gary, all of whom were played by actors who were 24/25 at the time of their introductions, and Tina, whose actress was 28 at the time of her introduction.
• When They See Us: Yusef Salaam is about 23 years old when we first see him out of prison. He's played by Chris Chalk, who was 39 during filming.
• The main child characters in The Whispers were supposed to range from ages 5-7, maybe 8 at most. The character of Minx did seem to be one of the older ones...maybe it was because she was portrayed by 11-year-old Kylie Rogers.
• The Wilds: All of the teenage main cast are played by actresses in at least their twenties.
• Will & Grace jokes about this, with Jack saying:
  I want to live in Dawson's Creek, where the kids are in their 20s and their parents are in their 30s.
  • There's also the episode Queens for a Day, where 16-year-old Salvatore is played by 25-year-old Josh Keaton.
• J.D. Williams was 24 when he began playing then-16-year-old Bodie Broadus on The Wire. Julito McCullum was 17 when his character (Namond Brice) was 14, and Tristan Wilds was 18 when his (Michael Lee) was 14. Other characters were exceptions to this trope (see below).
  • Another 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.
  • D'Angelo Barksdale is another adult example. Prison records seen in season three indicate that he was approximately 23. Lawrence Gilliard Jr. was 31 during production of the first season, the same age as Idris Elba (Stringer Bell). What makes this more jarring is that he's supposed to be the nephew of Avon Barksdale, yet Wood Harris is only two years older than Gilliard.
• Without a Trace: 21-year-old Evan Peters plays a high school student in the episode "A Bend in the Road".
• In the 1941 opening scene of Women of the Movement, Adrienne Warren played Mamie Till at age 20 while being 34 at the time. The 14-year Time Skip to 1955 then brings the character much closer to her age.
• You Can't Do That on Television: 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.
• You Me Her:
  • Downplayed with Laine MacNeil, 19-20, portrayed Ava, who's a 16-year-old.
  • It's downplayed by Priscilla Faia and Melania Papalia, who were both 29-30 at the series' start. Izzy and Nina, their characters, start out as college students who are in their mid 20s, only turning 30 by the end when both actresses were around 35-36.
• Inverted with Maura West, who was born in 1972, playing Diane Jenkins in The Young and the Restless 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.
• Accidentally drawn attention to on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. 16-year-old Indy joins the army by claiming to be 22. He's eventually called out on this, when a character asks how old he really is and calls him a "very young" 22-year-old. The actor playing Indy was 26 and looked it.
• Young Sheldon: This applies to Sheldon's academic rival Paige Swanson. Paige is supposed to be a month younger than Sheldon, but Mckenna Grace is two years older than Iain Armitage, and as of season four, is at least three years older than her character.
  • Jim Parsons himself was the same age as the high school students Sheldon went with.

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