Sometimes Dawson casting really works. 22-year-old Ralph Macchio when he was hoping to land high school student “Daniel LaRusso”:
I haven’t seen the show, but I heard an NPR interview with the stars, who are the creators, and it’s my understanding that they aren’t supposed to be literal teens. The whole point, the way they discussed it, is about seeing your tween/teen years through then lens of your later life. Maybe it’s not coming off well, but no one is supposed to believe them as literal teens.
Its felt uncomfortable to me. But then there is so much media that if I don’t enjoy your premise - or get your point - in fifteen minutes, I can always watch something else.
The pilot episode of Blossom was shown on July 5, 1990 when Mayim Bialik was 14. The last episode was shown on May 22, 1995 when Mayim Bialik was 19. The first episode of The Big Bang Theory on which Amy Farah Fowler appeared was shown on May 24, 2010 when Mayim Bialik was 34. The last episode on which Amy Farah Fowler appeared was shown on May 16, 2019 when Mayim Bialik was 43. I think Mayim Bialik was closer to the age that her character was supposed to be in Blossom, where she was a teenager, than she was in The Big Bang Theory, where her character was an adult.
“Sleepaway Camp” (just the first film, haven’t seen the whole series) struck me as odd at the time, and I think it’s because the actors playing teens were actually teens.
Related to both these …
Kiernan Shipka was 17 when filming the first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She was, of course, younger than that in Mad Men - but ended the series as a teen playing a teen.
I think Lachlan Watson is the only other member of the main “teen” cast of tCAoS who is a teen, the others are all older.
Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner were about 14 and 15 when Game of Thrones started. I’m sure some of the other kids were teens, but those two appeared in most episodes over the years.
That is not hard to see at all. They look exactly like 30-year-olds pretending to be teenagers.
Another in the opposite direction; Netflix has a couple of series that are a sequel or prequel to the film Wet Hot American Summer. I saw the prequel series, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp and it seems a deliberate joke that the camp counselors, supposedly in their late teens, are played by actors who are obviously at least ten or twenty years too old. (Meanwhile, they had the youthful-looking Michael Cera playing a lawyer.)
This show is different from most (all?) others though, in that they are not playing literal 13 year olds. They are playing themselves at that age but they are not trying to actually make the audience think they are passing as 13. (Also a lot of the things we see them doing would be reeeeeally skeevy if the actors were actually 13.)
Didn’t see it mentioned, but according to my sloppy calculations, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was 16 or 17 when he started playing 14-year-old Tommy in 3rd Rock From the Sun.
On the extreme other hand, Melody Patterson was only 15 when she got the role of Wrangler Jane on F Troop. (Like Mila Kunis, she lied about her age.) The producers were unnerved when they found out her real age, since she was to be the love interest for Captain Parmenter (Ken Berry, who was exactly twice her age when the show started.) Fortunately, Parmenter was supposed to be shy around Wrangler, but they really slowed the courtship down.
I remember reading a blind item from two or three years ago that an actress really pitched a fit when a director offered them a role in a film as a mother of a teenager and the actress thought she should be considered for the role of the teenager. The director turned her down.
Lindsey Lohan and Hilary Duff were popular guesses. They are both in their 30s now.
On 8 Simple Rules, two of the three kids were played by actual teenagers. When the show premiered, Martin Spanjers was 15 and Kaley Cuoco was 16 but Amy Davidson was 23.
Another “lied about her age” (and did a fantastic job, so it’s easy to see why they believed her) was Brigitte Helm, who was apparently only 17 when she starred as Maria in Metropolis. She lied and said she was 20.
You still get varying dates when you look her up, but it seems that there’s a pretty reliable story Fritz Lang told of finding out her real age after the fact.
The most infamous case of a teen lying about being adult to get acting roles was Traci Lords in the 80s who lied about being an adult to make several pornographic films (which now of course are illegal to own).