21 of the Most Obvious Adults Playing Teenagers
We’ve all had to come to accept that some parts of movies and TV shows are just gonna look weird due to the logistics of how they’re made. Characters are going to drink brandless beverages, the whole world is going to look suspiciously like California and teenagers are going to look like twentysomethings. After all, real teenagers would require navigating schooling and labor laws and stuff. Who wants to deal with that?
Sometimes, though, it’s like they didn’t even try to convince us those jaded geezers are fresh-faced adolescents. For example, Redditor Fun_Protection_6939 pointed out to r/Movies that while Grease is an “excellent movie … literally none of them look and sell me as teenagers in high school, especially John Travolta.” They also cited Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird, who gave “a sublime performance, but I don’t think she really looked the part for a high-schooler.”
They then asked for the “most egregious cases where a clearly aged actor plays a teenager?” and their fellow Redditors presented a laundry list of classic old-timers trying (and failing) to recapture their youth.
James Spader in ‘Pretty in Pink’
Gabrielle Carteris in ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’
Tom Welling in ‘Smallville’
Florence Pugh in ‘Little Women’
Alec Guinness in ‘Great Expectations’
John Goodman in ‘The Babe’
Edward Norton in ‘American History X’
Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’
Kenneth Branagh in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’
Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’
Michael C. Hall in ‘Dexter’
Robert Carradine in ‘Revenge of the Nerds’
Selma Blair in ‘Cruel Intentions’
Robert Redford in ‘The Natural’
Amy Poehler in ‘Mean Girls’
Shirley Henderson in ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’
Maggie Grace in ‘Taken’
Ben Platt in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
Everyone in ‘Remember the Titans’
Tobin Bell in ‘Saw 3D’
Everyone Except for Bow Wow in ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’
