Besides, if you were a kid in the late '70s than Grease was about people your parents' age, so seeing older actors play teens from the far-off but already heavily mythical fifties did not seem so strange. Yeah, everyone makes fun of 90210 like the whole cast was way too old but Gabrielle Carteris (13 years older), Ian Ziering (10 years older), and Luke Perry (8 years older) were the only ones a lot older than their characters. All this is to say that high-school students don’t exactly do a lot of light reading. On Gossip Girl, the very adult sex life of 16-year-old Chuck Bass seems more plausible when portrayed by Ed Westwick, who was a very self-possessed 20 when the show debuted. Be friendly and say hello, but don’t get caught up in that energy. I mean in gto the students are supposed to be 14 years old, but to me they look like they are 18 or so. This spring, Broadly calculated the respective age differences between the characters and actors in 11 popular films and TV shows set during high school, including The Breakfast Club, Clueless, and this year’s Riverdale. Romantic affairs between high school girls and assistant district attorneys old enough be their fathers are not, and should not, be the norm. The rest were just 1-5 years older than their characters. Teen Vogue covers the latest in celebrity news, politics, fashion, beauty, wellness, lifestyle, and entertainment. Children’s learning in early childhood classrooms are being held to a higher standard. premiered — Mischa Barton was the sole teen at 17. Though, for both of those films, she clarifies that there was no mandate about what age the actors should be. It is based on the 1999 book The Freedom Writers Diary by teacher Erin Gruwell and Marcia Ross — who cast 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless — explains, in most cases, “actors under the age of 18 need to have guardians on set and work a limited set of hours because of schooling.” So, casting older actors becomes more of a financial and production decision. Several major casting directors from iconic teen films spanning the last few decades all point to the legal limitations around having a minor on set. (DiCaprio was 38, playing a 27 year old Jay Gatsby). (Moore claims that the several women who’ve said he sexually assaulted or dated them when they were teenagers and he was an adult are all lying.) Theater also connects to the importance of reading. That rivals Gabrielle Carteris’ 14 year age difference in Beverly Hills 90210, where the 18 year old high-school student was being played by a 32-year-old actress. This practice has been around since at least the 1920s (when Hollywood was new). High school students in live-action films and shows very often look a lot older than their real-life counterparts for a very good reason: they are often played by actors who are old enough to have finished high school. “Puberty is a time when things are not stable, so everything’s amorphous and it’s kind of hard to say what, precisely, it looks like,” she told me. A person in their 20s is more likely to have a consistent appearance, whereas an adolescent may change more frequently. Ad Choices, The Problem With Teen Characters Being Played by Adults. “So now the expectation, or the standard, is way out of line with actual teen bodies, and the possibility for body dissatisfaction jumps up.”, There are several reasons why casting directors tend to choose legal adults to play teenagers on screen. This then continues in the same way until you feel the group begin to tire. With a few exceptions like Saved by the Bell and Skins, which were deliberately cast with actors around the same ages as their characters, the best-known on-screen teenagers have been brought to life by far older bodies. In other cases, age gaps buttress a show’s believability. was populated by actors in their early and mid-20s. But this is nothing new. Minors are tricky. https://actinginlondon.co.uk/how-old-is-too-old-to-start-an-acting-career When a 12-year-old Brooke Shields played a sex-trafficked child in 1978’s Pretty Baby, child welfare organizations “threatened to take the child actress out of her mother’s custody,” writes Kristen Hatch, a University of California, Irvine, film and media studies professor, in her essay “Fille Fatale: Regulating Images of Adolescent Girls, 1962-1996.” It would make sense, then, for producers to cast adults in productions that depict young teens engaging in sexual activity, rather than navigate the complex moral and PR dilemmas that arise around child performers. They are writers (Lisa is a New York Times bestselling author), moms, wives and friends.They started the Grown and Flown Parents Facebook Group and are co-authors of Grown and … Here are three reasons why it is more convenient and commercially beneficial to hire people who are over 18 compared to people under 18. A play has the ability to jump a story off the page and bring it to life. Student A then unfreezes and creates a new pose that compliments Student B’s pose that they are still holding. So, it’s easy to understand why a casting director would want to lean older to facilitate production. If you don’t spend a lot of time around young teenagers, you may not have an easily recallable image of what a 14-year-old looks like to remind you of how unadult ninth-graders are—and thus how unfathomable it would be for a man in his 30s to have anything approaching a consensual sexual relationship with one. If you need to find a place away from the crowds, do it. The answer isn’t as scandalous as you might think — at least not from an industry perspective. The young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world. In Grease, a timeless archetype of high school dramedy released in 1978, the lead roles were played by a 24-year-old John Travolta, a 29-year-old Olivia Newton-John, and a 34-year-old Stockard Channing. When Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, his probation officer submitted a report that said the survivor “was not only physically mature, but willing.” The judge in the case, Laurence J. Rittenband, qualified his admonishment of Polanski with the assertion that the girl “looks older than her years,” as if her body shape or proclivity for makeup made her a likelier target, as if poor Polanski simply could never have known she was way underage. Because Hollywood has a terrible misunderstanding of high school perspective. “And we know that social comparison can be a thief of joy.”. What’s interesting about the casting pattern in teen films is that it feels singular to the genre. Distribute a copy of the open scene. 1. Bald spots are not the issue for teenaged viewers, though. If teens are truly seeing the people on screen as romanticized physical versions of themselves, couldn’t they also aspire to the personality, confidence, and attitudes of these characters? Myrna Hant, a researcher at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, says that the inconsistency surrounding female age on film feeds a larger, systemic problem in our culture. Fast Times At Ridgemont High is definitely not the worst offender when it comes to casting super aged-up high school students, as most of the actors are at least close to the right age. Perhaps that’s why true-to-age casting in teen shows and films has such a different feel. “And we know that social comparison can be a thief of joy.”, Greenberg explains that teenagers specifically are observers because they subscribe to the spotlight effect -- the idea that everybody’s looking at them all the time, even though that’s not true. “Role modeling is the best form of learning,” she says. Alan Ruck somehow pulled off a high-schooler in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Cynthia Fuchs of Common Sense Media gave the film three out of five stars, writing in her review that "the plot is predictable, the But pretty much the entire cast was… Carrie starred 26-year-old Sissy Spacek as a high-schooler a decade younger. “Very little is lost on teenagers.”. only a few days away, Vanity Fair took an extensive look back at the unlikely success of the original film, touching on how the production handled its casting of 20- and 30-something stars to play high school students. Regardless of whether young viewers aspire to one day have the moral rectitude of a cheerleader in the second half of Bring It On, or pine after the glowing complexion of the 39-year-old Olivia Newton-John playing Grease’s Sandy, one thing’s for sure : Teens are paying attention. Rachel Bilson was 21, Adam Brody was 23, and Ben McKenzie was 24 when The O.C. Furthermore, she determined that a mascot is necessary as well - not even a host dressed in a sort of a cartoon character outfit would do. From 25-year-old Rachel McAdams in 'Mean Girls' to 31 year-old Ashleigh Murray in 'Riverdale,' these actors and actresses were way too old to play high schoolers. Ronan told Vanity Fair that her skin “wasn’t great” during production. The show’s casting director, Robin Lippin, says she and her producer intentionally sought out those ages in actors. “There is routinely a very small age gap between on-screen parents and their children which is biologically unrealistic and potentially implausible,” Rebecca Feasey said. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. When it first started, Pretty Little Liars had a core cast that ranged in age from 20-24, The Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev began starring in the show when she was 20. Photo illustration by Slate. All rights reserved. only a few days away, Vanity Fair took an extensive look back at the unlikely success of the original film, touching on how the production handled its casting of 20- and 30-something stars to play high school students. This trend continued on through subsequent decades, and even more recent productions are guilty of casting lead actors in their early 20s as high schoolers. There's no reason why they can't find talented 18- to 20-year-old actors to play these angst-ridden roles and, as the networks and studios often prefer to keep the high school experience going as long as they can get away with, it would make the stories that much more credible as the actors age in the course of the series length. Older actors can also perform the kinds of sexual situations that provide much of the drama of contemporary teen narratives without raising ethical concerns. And yet, today, we see shows where it seems like the characters are not only sexually active, but having multiple partners, and that’s incredibly uncommon for teenagers.” Shannen Doherty was 19 when she played Brenda, a 16-year-old, in the first season of Beverly Hills 90210 in 1990. Of course, Stockard Channing is the all-time winner in this category. And just two years later, in 2005, she’s playing Rachel Dawes -- an assistant district attorney -- in Batman Begins. Fille Fatale: Regulating Images of Adolescent Girls, 1962-1996, casting young actresses as middle-aged moms. Mary Dell Harrington and Lisa (Endlich) Heffernan are the co-founders of Grown and Flown the #1 site for parents of teens, college students and young adults, reaching millions of parents every month. With Fox's production of "Grease: Live!" Early this year, BuzzFeed’s Erin Chack pointed out the ludicrousness wrought by this discrepancy, comically juxtaposing stills from TV shows and movies about teenagers with photos of her and her friends as actual teenagers. (Note: You may give the same open scene to every pair of actors or you may use several different scenes.) I am a high school English teacher. Notably, Kristen Hatch casts doubt on the idea that consuming portrayals of high-schoolers by adult actors could warp viewers’ understanding of teenage immaturity. 9. “So when they’re looking at models of teens on TV, they’re absolutely engaging in comparison,” Greenberg says. Student A then unfreezes and creates a new pose that compliments Student B’s pose that they are still holding. Their faces are framed by high-relief Adam’s apples and square, stubbly jaws; their smooth-skinned, un-stretchmarked bodies have no trouble filling out adult-size lingerie. “The irony, of course, is that while we are happy to accept twentysomething performers playing teenagers, we are keen for thirtysomething actors to take on the role of fortysomething parents.” For women in Hollywood, once adolescence is over, menopause is just spitting distance away. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, thenView saved stories. But when teen idols on screen don’t share in that anguish, it can make the teen viewer vulnerable to feeling self-conscious and depressed about it. In 1919’s Broken Blossoms, Lillian Gish, then in her mid-20s, played a 12-year-old girl who must decide how she will escape her physically abusive father: either by engaging in sex work or by attracting another man to protect her. the kinds of sexual situations that provide much of the drama of contemporary teen narratives without raising ethical concerns. Students at Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on Jan. 25, the day before they took the SAT or SAT math subject test. John Travolta was a 23-year-old actor playing a Brooklyn teen in the 1977 classic Saturday Night Fever — and 24 when he appeared as Danny Zuko in Grease just a year later. That’s right — the meanest teen in modern film was actually 25 years old. The #MeAt14 hashtag also encouraged survivors of sexual violence to tweet photos of themselves at the age their abuse began, reminding observers that the defenses Moore’s supporters offered—that his alleged relationships with teen girls were consensual, innocent, and appropriate—were absurd. However, the movie did make sure that most of the actors were over 18, even if they were playing younger teenagers. Barbara Greenberg, PhD, a clinical psychologist and teen and family expert, says casting actors in their 20s can complicate an already challenging time for teens. In 1978, “Grease” became an instant classic musical about 1950s high school life. And you better believe the juicy teen gossip in the eponymous Gossip Girl was spread by a 20-year-old Blake Lively and a 21-year-old Leighton Meester. Somewhere in translation, the lifestyles of modern day high school students has been observed, interpreted, and … The cast members of Glee (average age gap: 8 years) were almost all past college age when they started as high school sophomores on the show, prompting creator Ryan Murphy to graduate the characters in real time, after the third season. Full of young, nervous and excited actors, desperate to get a place in drama school. Yet, it’s where the warped idea of what a female body -- regardless of age -- looks like. “There’s nothing more depressing than a high schooler with a bald spot,” he said when he announced the plan. All rights reserved. But it’s also an inevitable upshot of an industry that routinely casts actors in their mid-20s or even their 30s as bumbling pubescents. “This precludes women from having any positive role models for aging.”, Greenberg, too, sees how this can be confusing for an adolescent audience. 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