Yep, but only just. But between her very young looks and the makeup/effects it sorta works.
I just find it amusing that now that I’m almost 32, I finally look like a college student. Thank you, Hollywood. 
That’s exactly it. Former professional father here. SAG has very strict rules on this, and the company has to hire tutors also. The general rule is, unless you are in a continuing series or really, really well known, you might as well forget working between 14 and 18. 18 year ols and above who look young, on the other hand, do very well.
Lizard, I know that’s a joke but you couldn’t be more wrong. Child actors who aren’t totally professional don’t work. No one is going to waste money holding up a production for some difficult kid.
Let’s see. Kunis was born August 14, 1983. That’s 70s Show hit the air in September 1998. So the first episodes were shot when she was 14, but she was 15 when the show hit the air. And she was supposed to be a year younger than everybody else. So she was playing a 15-year-old to their 16-year-olds.
That makes up for wolf_meister’s nitpick. I worked to correct IMDb’s listing of Steve Franken to the correct Stephen and missed entirely that I wrote Franklin for his last name. :smack:
Since Beverly Hills, 90210 started in 1990, that would have made him 24.
That’s why the Good Lord invented Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High.
With the “only on the SDMB” nitpick that Charisma was 26 when BtVS was first shot, what I really meant about “cheating” was that I’m not sure the characters were put through seven years of show time during the seven years of the actual time of the series. If they had, it would have been about or even past time for some of them to graduate from college, as they had to be at least sophomores at Sunnydale HS when the series started.
The chance to dress up twenty and thirty year old hotties in teeny bopper gear certainly never crosses the minds of casting directors, and producers.
Tris
Buffy spoilers ahead:
Well, Xander never attended college. Buffy dropped out (to take a job when her mother died), and Willow went to England after she went all veiny and evil, and I don’t think the Watcher’s Council had an exchange student program…
Seriously? I think they just realized that the college wasn’t that interesting, so they stopped writing about it. But they did all age. Buffy had a birthday episode (nearly?) every January around the 20th.
They were indeed sophomores in high school (except for Oz, who was a year ahead of them) when the show started, so IF they had stayed in school, they might have been graduating at the end of season seven. If Sunnydale U had still been standing, of course.
I know it was not a TV show, but the 33 year old Stockard Channing playing a high schooler in Grease was funny, especially because she looked like she was in her early 40’s.
Then of course, we have Dawn who, as of the beginning of Season 7, was played by a 16 or 17 year old and was supposed to only be a year and a half. :dubious:
Yes, but still open is the question of whether the Buffyverse went through 7 years of show time during the series.
I don’t understand. Every season started in the fall, and ended with the beginning of summer break (just like kids’ “years” really do). Buffy has a birthday every year, and ages accordingly - 7 years older at the end than when we started. There’re Halloween and Thanksgiving episodes that aired right around our holidays. When Buffy dies, her headstone reads the current year, and the year of her birth, and the math works out. They move up grades, graduate high school, start college or get jobs, rent apartments and pay mortgages, even become surrogate parents…how is time not passing or the characters not aging realistically?
They certainly wouldn’t have been “past time for some of them to graduate”, unless we’re talking an AA, AS or accelerated BS.
First season - sophomore in high school
Second season - junior in high school
Third season - graduation from high school in the season finale
Fourth season - admission to college - in “Fear Itself”, Xander refers to himself as “‘didn’t go to college’ boy”.
Fifth season - sophomore year of college - Buffy drops out, in the episode “Tough Love”
Sixth season - junior year of college - whether Willow attends is never really addressed. But at the end of the season, she’s packed off to England for the summer. We don’t see Sunnydale U again.
Seventh season - first possible graduation year. But no one was attending anymore!
Allen Ruck was 30 when he played high school senior Cameron Frye in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. I’ll throw that one out there as the presumed record.
Co-star Matthew Broderick was 24, and Jennifer Grey, who played his younger sister, was 26. No wonder they wanted to skip school.
I do see the point but I wouldn’t exactly agree with the premise of the question. There are too many examples of teenagers being played by teens.* Diff’rent Strokes*, Facts Of Life, Donna Reed, Brady Bunch, to name a few.
Perhaps the comedies were different from the dramas
Though I could be mistaken, I recall Dobbie Gillis alays being set in High School or beyond.
Some of it may be relative. In Grease for example once John Travolta signed on for the lead it made sense to cast 30 something Olivia Newton-John and Stockard Channing so the age difference would be less apparent than if Travolta was playing opposite a real 17 year old
Plus children aren’t the only ones. On I Love Lucy, Lucy was playing 10 years younger than she actually was. Vivian Vance, only 2 years older than Lucy was playing MUCH older. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were both playing character 10 years younger then themselves.
Sometimes it is painful to watch. On the Lucy Show, Danny Thomas is the guest. And Lucy tries out for the part of a chorus girl. It is ludicrous for Lucy to be competing against girls in their early 20s for a chorus girl and WINNING. And when Danny says “young lady” to Lucy you want to cringe.
Same as on Laverne and Shirely, when 38 year old Penny Marshall, playing Laverne is talking about going to a 10 year reunion. It’s laughable.
So while there are examples of older people playing kids, there more examples of kids playing roughly their own age, and lots of other actors that are older and don’t play their age. (Think Golden Girls)
Nope. See post#10.
My bad. I guess I didn’t watch enough of that show to realize she was playing a high school student. The few episodes I saw showed her as married (with a baby) and her husband was in law school. Guess that was later in the series.
This is exactly what I was asking. This is exactly the information no one had even come close to mentioning yet, but was the answer (if you’re right). It’s not a dumb question if you don’t have the answer.
Well, someone did mention her birthday being celebrated just about every season around January 20th, but I think this is the first time most of the rest was mentioned.
Also, Willow was the only one attending college in Season 7, though she apparantly dropped out in the 6th season (presumably around when she hit her rock-bottom about a third of the way into the season), she is talking to one of her professors about re-enrolling after she returns to Sunnydale in S7.
It amuses me though, to find that of the original Scoobs, only Xander seems to have become consistently sucessful, working as a construction foreman in Season 6 and 7. (It IS worth mentioning that most of his business apparantly comes from repairing Buffy’s house or the high school).