Holly Taylor was 16 when she got the role of Paige on The Americans. Her character was supposed to be 14, but she was a teenager playing a teenager.
Good observation. It may also be easier to play by the rules for child actors with a half hour show as opposed to an hour-long drama. Or when something is filmed on a lot in Los Angeles versus something shot on location.
Dang it, I missed the edit window, but I was going to add that in the final season the show’s narrative skipped ahead in time three years, making her character 21 while she was actually 20 IIRC (but neither were teenagers anymore by that point, obviously).
But it’s not the type of show (e.g. drama vs sitcom, TV vs cinema) that matters in that case. It’s the ages of the characters.
Infants have to play infants and in turn be played by infants; a toddler can’t play that role. A 12 yo actor might pass for 10, but not for 8. A 19 yo actor can pass for precocious 16 or typical 17. But not for 13. etc.
So there’s a narrow age range where both the character and the actor fit the definition of “teen” = 13-19. And the closer to the young end of that scale we go, the closer the actor’s age has to match the character’s age to be plausible.
Possibly related idea:
ISTM that a lot more movies & shows are made featuring older teen characters, the 16-18 yos who are typically HS juniors through college freshmen. Characters that age are able to have more interesting stories from an adult audience’s POV as well as the POV of audiences the same age as the characters. They can drive, they can move out, they can go steady, get pregnant, have real arguments, real crises, real growth and change, etc.
And, frankly, characters that age are the ideal age to be illicit eye candy to the sex-sells crowd. Young enough to be casually hot without being so young as to be overtly skeevy.
Characters who’re young teens, tweens, and under-10s are more likely to be embedded in on-screen families where the intended audience is also families or at least kids. As such the stories are generally simpler as befits kids’ tastes in drama. Overall there’s just not as much of that entertainment being made.
And then at the very bottom of the audience (and hence character) age range animation can be a much larger part of the total output of content. At which point actor age pretty well disappears. Witness Bart Simpson’s voice. She’s older than I am and I’m a fogey.
Mila Kunis purposely mislead the producers of That Seventies Show about her age in order to play an older character. She told them “I’m going to be 18” but didn’t say when that would happen. She was 14 at the time.
Kristy McNichol was 14 when she started playing Buddy in Family.
Melissa Gilbert was 10 when started playing Laura in Little House on the Prairie.
Melissa Joan Hart was 15 when she starred in Clarissa Explains It All.
However, she was 20 when she started on Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
One thing that can be a problem is the child actor growing faster than the character. If there is a year or more between seasons, the actor may be too big for the role. (I think this was a problem for the character of Walter, the son of Harold Perrineau’s character in the ABC series Lost.) On The Middle, the actor who played the younger son had a bone disorder that meant he was small for his age, which allowed him to play younger.
surprised nobody mentioned the Brady bunch yet
Especially for characters who aren’t supposed to grow at all. Robots, for example.
Another potential problem is really little kids are primarily cast for cuteness and temperament. They may grow up to be not very good actors.
It might also be easier to work with child actors when it’s 2 of them and 2 adults on camera instead of entire lunchroom/classroom/hallway with 30 more in the background.
And is freakin’ awesome in that show! We were “that kid is obviously being played by someone who is in their mid-20s and looks young” - nope, the actor is actually a kid capable of acting old.
And in the opposite directions, I started watching PEN15 a week or two ago. Even knowing it’s the case, it’s still hard to see how these two 13 year old kids are actually 32 IRL.
FWIW, I know it’s the haircuts and the braces and the slumped forward shoulders, but even with that, most people wouldn’t even think that they’re that much older than their characters.
Most of the Stranger Things kids are playing kids approximately their age. The high schoolers tended to be cast a little older.
Looks like most of the cast of Freaks and Geeks were actually teenagers at the time, albeit most were in the 17-19 range. John Francis Daley was 14 when the show first aired.
It also depends on what the “kids” are going to be doing. If you want to show them drinking or smoking, or imply they are having sex, even though it may be technically legal to film around an underage actor if you are filming within the bounds of what is allowed on broadcast TV anyway-- still, people can relax a little more about how much they have to debrief a very young actor, or whether there are going to be complaint letters about allowing a young actor to do this or that if they don’t use someone under 18.
But I think the biggest factor is that kids in sitcoms are often just backdrop to what are really shows about the adults. Teens in dramas aimed at a teen audience actually carry the weight of the drama. There’s a lot of difference between what someone 15 and what someone 19 can handle.
Ha! I have to disagree with you; this is actually what got me thinking about this topic! I saw an ad for this show and thought to myself that they looked absurdly older than middle-school aged, which got me thinking about how often teenagers are played by people too old to look the part, which got me wondering about the exceptions to that general rule.
Agreed. I watched fifteen minutes or so, but couldn’t get over the “those are NOT teenagers” hurdle.
Lindsey Lohan was 17 or 18 years old when she played the lead role in Mean Girls, so she was the right age for that role (high school students.)