Dawson Casting: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

High school students in television look nothing like high school students in real life ([[Older Than They Look|well, not always]]), for one good reason: they're played by actors who are upwards of ten-to-fifteen years older. This dates back to the earliest days of Hollywood, if not further, making it [[Older Than Television]].

 

# Labor laws and regulations are probably the biggest reason. They apply to acting just as they do any other profession. There are a whole string of laws that child actors are subject to, including; (in the UK and the USA) education requirements and night shoot and work hours restrictions. These aren't the ideal condition when trying to meet the deadlines for finishing a film or a TV season.

# The vast majority of professional actors are twenty and up anyway, so if you hold an audition for a teen role, nine out of ten of the actors you see will be an inappropriate age, and they'll be the ones with good CVs.

# It's easier to see the difference between a teen and a young adult if you are a teen or young adult. Casting directors are often middle-aged or older; to them a 16-year-old ''doesn't'' look noticeably younger than a 21-year-old.

# Puberty tends to be extremely fickle; a cute 14-year-old can transform into a gawky, gangly 16-year-old with rather shocking celerity. [[Hollywood Nerd|Or vice]] [[She's All Grown Up|versa]]. Of course this won't happen if you've already been through puberty.

# Related to the above, this allows for [[Fan Service]], which is legal as long as it's non-nude.

# Most successful teen actors—i.e the ones with the most experience and impressive resumes -- [[Teens Are Short|tend to be physically smaller than other actors]], and look younger than their actual age, because they are the child-analogues of '''Dawson Casting''' (due to more experience, more able to remember lines, less likely to go completely [[Off the Rails]] [[Cloudcuckoolander|on some random whim]], etc.), better-suited to playing younger children than real children would be.

This trope is less noticeable with females as it is with males as females tend to fully mature physically at an earlier age by 14 or 15. Where as Males tend to not full mature until their late teens. Which makes a Male actor in his 20's playing a 15 year old less believable than it is with a female of the same age playing a 15 year old.

 

 

{{examples}}

== Straight ==

 

** A notable example would have to be ''[[The Girl Who Lived]]'', which references pictures of well-endowed porn actresses in their late 20s as pictures of the main cast all the way back when they were [[Squick|11]].

 

=== Film ===

* Inverted in ''[[Click]]'' where 19 year old Katie Cassidy plays the 27 year old version of Adam Sander's daughter

* Inverted in ''[[Crazy Stupid Love]]'' with 22 year old [[Emma Stone]] playing a character who is at least 25.

* ''[[The Roommate]]'' is pretty bad. Minka Kelly, born in 1980 and Leighton Meester, born in 1986, play college freshmen. Freshmen born during the setting of this film would have been born in 1992.

* Teen idol [[Elvis Presley]], in his 20s and beyond, would portray characters that were explicitly adolescent, such as in ''King Creole'' and ''Love Me Tender'', or age-unspecified young adults who live with their parents, aren't yet married, headed for college or the military, are newcomers on the entertainment scene, hold down jobs suitable for high school dropouts, and enjoy youthful beach parties.

* [[Howard Stern]] in his film ''[[Private Parts]]'' played an 18-year-old version of himself... He was 42 at the time. The incongruity is extremely obvious when we first see him walking around campus, and Stern (as a [[Narrator]]) comments that "for this movie you've got to suspend disbelief."

* Ralph Macchio was in his early twenties when he first played the 15-year-old Daniel La Russo in ''[[The Karate Kid]]''. By the time the third movie came out, Macchio was still playing teen-aged Daniel despite being in his ''late'' twenties. (His boyish good looks and the fact that his voice remained in a higher register after breaking helped.)

* In ''Rock 'n' Roll High School'', all the "teen" actors are, at the youngest, in their mid twenties. The main character, Riff, was played by 29-year-old P.J. Soles. The sequel ''Rock 'n' Roll High School Forever'' also features a teen cast of twenty somethings.

* In the 1954 ''[[White Christmas]]'', 32-year-old Vera Ellen plays Judy Haynes; Judy's age is never expressly given, but based on comments made by other characters (she is repeatedly called "kid" and "little Judy"), that she orders a malted when the others order alcohol, and that 25-year-old Rosemary Clooney plays her ''older'' sister Betty, it appears that she's supposed to be about 19.

* 16-year-old [[Judy Garland]] was cast as the 11-year-old Dorothy Gale in ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' (indeed, most people who haven't read the books don't realize Dorothy ''isn't'' supposed to be a teenager). Legend has it the studio forced her to [[Suppressed Mammaries|wear a tight band around her breasts to make them less noticeable]] during the filming, among the many other nasty things they did to her and other actors of the day.

* The movie version of ''[[The Wiz]]'' has 33-year-old Diana Ross managed to get herself cast as Dorothy, pushing out 20-year-old Stephanie Mills (who was the stage Dorothy) in the process.

* ''[[Porky's]]'', probably the prototypical teen sex farce, featured an entire cast over 20 playing high school students, so that it could actually show nudity.

* ''[[Cry Wolf]]'' features Lindy Booth (in her mid-20s at time) as an 18-year-old.

* In the 1974 Werner Herzog film ''Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle'' (also known as ''The enigma of Kaspar Hauser''), the lead role of about-16-year-old Kaspar Hauser was played by 41-year-old street musician Bruno S. Herzog has commented that he was chosen for the role because his life had parallels with that of the historical Kaspar Hauser, and also because he gave the impression of being outsider to society at large, one that was a stranger to his own body.

* ''[[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]]:'' Moaning Myrtle (a ghost who died in her teens) was played by then-''37-year-old'' [[Shirley Henderson]] in ''Chamber of Secrets'' (her being a ghost, her appearance thusly being quite worked-over already and somewhat obscured by the opticals involved, probably helped hide the fact).

* [[Michael J. Fox]] played the teen-aged Marty McFly of the ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to The Future]]'' films into his late twenties, having done the first film when he was twenty-three. The actors playing Marty's parents and Biff, appearing as teenagers in the 1955 scenes, had similar ages.

* Parodied in ''[[Scary Movie]]''. In a "If this were a movie" conversation, one character says "We'd be played by actors in their late 20s/early 30s". The characters then pause for a moment, letting the phrase sink in.

** Stacey Dash was 28 portraying a 16-year-old in the movie and then came back for the TV show where she played a 16-year-old until she was 31. (Dee, Stacey's character, [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] this in one episode when she mentioned when they were 27 they'd be "old enough to play teenagers on TV.")

** The rest of the teen cast had an average age of 21, but 19-year-old Alicia Silverstone and 18-year-old [[Brittany Murphy]] work fairly well as 16-year-olds.

* [[David Lynch]] loves this trope.

** In ''[[Wild at Heart]],'' 23-year-old [[Laura Dern]] plays her character as a 13-year-old in flashbacks, and [[Laura Dern]] had trouble passing as a teen when she was one, for instance when she was 19 in ''[[Blue Velvet]].''

** In ''[[Dune]]'': Sting (then 33) and Kyle MacLachlan (then 25), play Paul Atreides and Feyd Harkonnen, notwithstanding that both those characters are between the ages of 15 and 18 for the entirety of the original novel. To be fair, the makers of the TV miniseries of ''Dune'' also went for this trope as well, citing the availability of credible 15-year-old actors to play the lead part.

* In the 1962 film ''[[The Manchurian Candidate (novel)|The Manchurian Candidate]]'', [[Angela Lansbury]] plays the mother of Laurence Harvey's character, despite being only two years older than Harvey; both actors were in their mid-30s when the film was made.

* The satirical 1966 film ''Lord Love a Duck'' has high-schoolers played by 23-year-old Tuesday Weld and ''38-year-old'' Roddy McDowall.

** [[Andrew Garfield]], who portrays the character in [[The Amazing Spider-Man|the 2012]] [[Continuity Reboot|reboot film]], is 27 playing a high school student.

* ''[[Willow]]'' inverts the trope by featuring then-17-year-old [[Warwick Davis]] as a father of two who must be in his 30s at least.

* Richard Wilson was 21 when he played Mikey in ''[[The Proposition]]'', who is implied to be about 14.

* [[Matthew Broderick]] gets mentioned further down in Theater, but ''[[Ferris Bueller's Day Off]]'' merits note. Matthew Broderick was 24 at the time, Jennifer Grey (Ferris' younger sister) was 26, but Alan Ruck (Cameron) topped them both by turning ''thirty'' a few weeks after the film was released.

* Another really bad example comes from the rather poor film adaptation of the novel ''[[Flowers in the Attic]]'' by [[V. C. Andrews]], in which actors that look like adults are cast as characters who, in the book, were 14 and 12. This even [[Plot Hole|breaks the plot]]; the male lead is large enough to simply physically overpower his abusive grandmother while the rest of his siblings simply walk out the front door of the mostly empty mansion.

* ''[[The Graduate]]'' paired 30-year-old [[Dustin Hoffman]] as a recent college graduate, and 36-year-old Anne Bancroft as the middle-aged wife of his father's business partner. Not to mention 27-year-old Katharine Ross as her daughter Elaine.

* The four actors who played the supposedly high-school aged Juan Rico, Dizzy Flores, Carmen Ibanez, and Carl Jenkins in ''[[Starship Troopers (film)|Starship Troopers]]'' were between 25 and 30 at the time.

* In the 2009 ''[[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]]'', most of the cast is semi-plausibly close to the ages of recent Starfleet Academy graduates. However, John Cho is 37 years old, playing the 21-year-old Sulu. Karl Urban is also 37, though he's closer to his character's official age of 30. And Zoe Saldana (Uhura) is 31.

* Audie Murphy played himself from his late teens to early twenties in ''To Hell and Back'', made ten years later. It wasn't too bad, as he remained quite young-looking as well as short.

* The first film in the ''[[Scream (film)|Scream]]'' series stars an entire cast of mid-20's actors playing 17-year-old students. Neve Campbell and [[Rose McGowan]] at 23, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy and Matthew Lillard at 26 (older than David Arquette, who plays the 25 year old Dewey) [[Drew Barrymore]] being closest to her characters age at 21 years old. Although considering the satiric nature of the film this was probably intentional.

** ''Girl (1998)'' - 26-year-old [[Selma Blair]] plays bookish high school senior Darcy.

** ''[[Cruel Intentions]]'' - All of the actors are well out of their teens, especially [[Selma Blair]] at age 27 who is supposedly younger than the other characters and has [[Never Been Kissed]].

** For more, see the Television section.

* ''Earth Angel (1991)'' was a movie about a prom queen who dies in the 1960s and then has to do a good deed 30 years later. It was seemingly influenced by movies such as ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to The Future]]'' and ''[[Peggy Sue Got Married]]'', and like those movies, needs actors that can pass as both teenagers and middle-aged people. Of course, no real teens were cast, and most of the actors were in their 30s and 40s, most notably 42-year-old Erik Estrada.

* In ''[[Bunraku]]'', teenage Momoko is portrayed by 25 year old Emily Kaiho, who sort of pulls it off by being fresh-faced and [[Teens Are Short|petite]].

** Much is made of how Yoshi is the youngest of the protagonists, and inexperienced and hot-headed as a result. [[Gackt]] meanwhile is pushing forty (but looks twenty years younger).

* Not sure if straight or inverted: In Oliver Stone's ''Alexander'', Colin Farrell plays Alexander, and Angelina Jolie plays his mother despite being nearly the same age. Diana Cook of ''[[Cracked.com]]'' calls out ''Alexander'' in #2 of "[http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-unwritten-rules-hollywood-needs-to-stop-following/ 5 Unwritten Rules Hollywood Needs to Stop Following]".

 

=== Live-Action TV ===

** 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 Creek was not the worst offender. That title might well go to ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', where the tenth-graders (16-year-olds) were played by Nicholas Brendon as Xander (25), [[Alyson Hannigan]] as Willow (22) and [[Charisma Carpenter]] (26, making Carpenter the same age as her teacher played by Robia LaMorte. Possibly [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] when Wesley first meets her and mistakes her for a teacher.). On the show's spinoff, ''[[Angel]]'', the role of Angel's 16-year-old son Connor was portrayed by then-22-year-old Vincent Kartheiser.

** Also Oz and Jonathan, played by 23-year-olds [[Seth Green]] and Danny Strong. Also appearing was 26-year-old Jason Hall as 18-year-old Devon. Though the show did feature 18-year-old Mercedes McNab as a teenaged Harmony later in its run.

** [[Sarah Michelle Gellar]], who was 19 when she began playing a 16-year-old Buffy, was the only one of the leads who was actually (just about) a teenager at the time of her casting.

** ''[[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, who was 18 at the time.

** Melanie Vallejo, who plays the 17/18-year-old Madison in ''[[Power Rangers Mystic Force|Mystic Force]]'', was 27 at the time of filming...

** Played straight and inverted in the case of Olivia Tennet (Dr. K) from ''[[Power Rangers RPM|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").

** In ''Terminator 2,'' Sarah Connor is called "29 years old" in an APB. Since her son (conceived in the first movie) is now 10 (played by 14 year old Edward Furlong). She would have been 19 at the most in the first movie. Linda Hamilton would have been 28 at the time.

*** [[All There in the Manual|According to the]] [[Novelization]], this is exactly right - the first section to focus on (the right) Sarah gives her age as 19.

* Actress Rachel True played teenagers when she was in her early 30s and young twenty-somethings when she was in her late 30s to early 40s.

** In ''[[Half Baked]]'', at 32, she's girlfriend to 25 year old Dave Chappelle. Of course, her character's age isn't given, and this editor doesn't see why he couldn't date a chick seven years older than him, especially as Hollywood does the inversion of that ''all the fucking time''.

** Donald Glover as well, who plays Troy, who start off as 20, while he's also in his mid-twenties. The real kicker is the fact that Gillian Jacobs, who's the same age as Brie and Glover, plays a character who's close to ten years old than Troy and Annie.

* ''[[The Beverly Hillbillies]]'': One early episode states that Elly May is "almost eighteen". Donna Douglas was 29 at the time. Even more egregiously, her love interest in the episode, college-age Sonny Drysdale, was played by 49-year-old (and looked it) Louis Nye.

* 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...

* ''[[Downton Abbey]]'' starts out by doing this; for example, Lady Sybil is 16 at the time the show begins, but played by the 21-year-old Jessica Brown Findlay. Since the show's time [[Dashed Plotline|progresses considerably faster than real time]], this doesn't last; by the end of season 2, Sybil has actually passed Findlay's real age.

* 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.

* In the [[Britcom]] ''[[On the Buses]]'', ''Reg Varney'' played the role of Stan Butler, a bus driver in his late 20s, he was '''53''' years old when the series started.

 

 

* Cyndi Lauper, another 30-something in the 1980s who got famous about singing about being a "girl" instead of a woman.

* Pete Burns was 26 when he released his album "Youthquake" and the other members of British New Wave band called "Dead or Alive" were in their late 20s and early 30s.

* The [[Beastie Boys]]

* [[The Beach Boys]] continued to sing love songs to teenage girls even after they became middle-aged, bearded, creepy men. Not counting the unreleased track "Lazy Lizzy", in which Brian sings about stalking an underage girl, the most pedo-worthy track to appear on a Beach Boys disc was undoubtedly "Hey Little Tomboy" - made even worse by a bootlegged outtake in which the Boys seem bent on gang-raping the title character.

* At the age of 26, [[Katy Perry]] played a 13-year-old high school student in the music video of her song "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)".

* Several of [[Taylor Swift]]'s videos, such as "Fifteen" and "The Story of Us", in which she plays high schoolers. Minor examples earlier, as she wasn't that much older than her characters, but it's started getting played more and more straight as she gets older ([[Older Than They Look|though to her credit, she doesn't look it]]).

 

=== Other ===

* In most productions of ''[[Rent]]'', the nineteen-year-old Mimi Marquez will be played by women in their 20s, most notably in [[The Movie]], where she was played by the then 26-year-old [[Rosario Dawson]].

** The movie in general is a good example of this trope, with most of the original cast reprising their roles eight years after they'd created them onstage.

* Likewise, sixteen-year-old Johanna in ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (theatre)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street]]'' gets this frequently. In the 1982 stage recording she's played by 28-year-old Betsy Joslyn. Lisa Vroman, who played her in a 2001 concert production, refuses to give her age but it's definitely well past the teen years. 20-year-old Jayne Wisener, who plays the role in the movie, is pretty close by comparison.

** This happens with almost any teenage character in musical theatre, most notably:

* The three girls in ''[[Vanities]]'' are usually played by late 20- or 30-somethings. They start out as high school students at age 17, progressing through college and beyond, and by the end of [[The Musical]] they are about 40, inverting this trope to some extent. At the time of the 2009 off-Broadway run, Anneliese Van der Pol (Kathy) was 25, Lauren Kennedy (Mary) was 36, and Sarah Stiles (Joanne) was 30.

* In the world premiere of ''Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World'', Sheri, early 20's, was played by Carol Roscoe, age 39.

* The 2004 Off-Broadway version of ''[[Bare: A Pop Opera|bare: a pop opera]]'' had then-26-year-old John Hill, 22-year-old Michael Arden, 29-year-old Jenna Leigh Green, 26-year-old Natalie Joy Johnson and 27-year-old Aaron Lohr playing seventeen-year-old seniors.

* ''[[Next to Normal]]'' had 26-year-old Aaron Tveit in the role of 18-year-old Gabe Goodman. Natalie, however, was played by 17-year-old Jennifer Damiano.

* In ''[[Pokémon Live]]'' the preteen and teenaged protagonists are played by full-grown adults. It shows.

 

 

=== [[Web Comics]] ===

** Even if that's the case, he still said he was fourteen when he woke up to see [[Marz Gurl]] and [[The Nostalgia Chick]] [[Shotacon|in bed with him.]]

* ''[[Behind the Veil]]'' is an interesting case of this, with the "actors" being limited to celebrity representations of what the character's appearance would be. However several characters ages are either older or younger than the celebrities portraying them, for example the 32-year-old Jack Raven being represented by the 45-year-old Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

 

=== Real Life ===

* 31-year-old Patricia Dye posed as a teenage boy so that she could have sex with a teen girl.

* Adult police officers will often pose as teens to [[Dateline (TV series)|catch sexual predators]], or [[21 Jump Street (TV series)|to catch juvenile offenders]].

* A member of the Hong Kong police force successfully posed as a 15-year-old high school student to uncover Triad recruitment of high school students. [http://www.cracked.com/article_18562_the-6-most-hilarious-undercover-operations-ever-pulled-off_p2.html He got the idea from a movie.]

* There was an incident where a client of a prostitution ring requested an underage girl. [[Even Evil Has Standards|The owner of the ring contacted the police anonymously and agreed to help set up a sting against the client.]] The police sent a female officer to him claiming to be 15-years old. [[What an Idiot!|He believed it and discussed sexual activities with her]] leading to his arrest.

* Community colleges tend to have students that look well above the age of a typical college student

* Similar to the Shirley Temple example above, Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister June Havoc had years shaved off their ages when they performed as child stars. Their mother, the legendary [[Stage Mom]] Rose Hovick, reportedly had many fake birth certificates for them and they couldn't be sure of their real ages.

 

== Exceptions ==

* ''[[The Bill]]'' features a 19-year-old character, played by an actress who was 17 when she started filming.

* [[Sarah Michelle Gellar]] was 16 when she started playing Erica Kane's long lost daughter Kendall Hart on ''[[All My Children]]'', who was in her twenties. It should be said though that her character's age was a [[Retcon]] from 16 because of the continuity errors it created.

** Also, in ''[[Bones]]'', in which a now 24-year-old John Francis Daley plays 24-year-old [[Replacement Scrappy|wunderkind]] psychologist Lance Sweets.

* ''[[Firefly]]'' has twenty-year-old [[Jewel Staite]] playing Kaylee, who is implied to be older than 17-year-old River (played by [[Summer Glau]], who IRL was a year older than Jewel).

** There's also a 27-year-old [[Sean Maher]] playing Simon, who's around 25, going by the age of the child actor who portrayed a young Simon.