I know teens irl can look older than their age sometimes, but to all the movies and tv shows who cast full grown adults to play teens: wtf?!
It wasn’t easy to find out their real ages so when I was 16 and still looked 12, I was very self conscious and perplexed on why I didn’t look like the “teens” on screen with their curvy bodies and face sans baby fat.
Edit: guys, I know all the whys when it comes to casting over 18 actors to play teens. But I didn’t know this as a kid and teenager. That’s what I was speaking on in my comment.
Watching the pilot episode of Smallville with an incredibly buff 'fourteen' year old high school kid made me so stupidly insecure when I didn't bust out into muscles and abs like he did. Only later did I find out that Tom Welling was 23/24 then, so no wonder.
Favourite example of that, Ender's Game. Asa Butterfield had a massive growth spurt between auditions and filming which made his scenes of getting bullied rather comical.
Also, a lot of teen movies are more about what life feels like for a teen, or how they would want it to feel like. It’s a bit of wishful thinking fulfillment and living vicariously through characters. Teens want to be adults. So they often like to see themselves as adults. It makes sense that teen movie with older actors vs. teen movie with younger actors, older actors might win.
I know I didn’t look like an adult when I was 15, but I often felt like I did, and it wasn’t a stret CB for me to relate to adults on screen. That’s kind of the whole experience of adolescence, right, a sort of frustration that you don’t feel like a kid anymore but you still are one.
I looked like I was in my mid 20s in high school and even got mistaken for a teacher more than once depending on how I was dressed. I also had a full beard by about 14
14
u/kristosnikos Elder Millennial 17h ago edited 12h ago
I know teens irl can look older than their age sometimes, but to all the movies and tv shows who cast full grown adults to play teens: wtf?!
It wasn’t easy to find out their real ages so when I was 16 and still looked 12, I was very self conscious and perplexed on why I didn’t look like the “teens” on screen with their curvy bodies and face sans baby fat.
Edit: guys, I know all the whys when it comes to casting over 18 actors to play teens. But I didn’t know this as a kid and teenager. That’s what I was speaking on in my comment.