Really Old Adults Who Played Teenage Character Roles

Have you ever noticed that teenagers in movies and TV are almost always played by adult actors? It's not at all unusual, and it's been happening for decades. It's such a common practice that the "actual teen vs adult teen" Tumblr tracks it. There are several reasons why this is done, and while a chosen actor's talent plays a large role in why they land a part, it's not the only one.

There are laws to protect working children, which can slow production. The many child actor labor laws allow for young children to work, but with conditions. These include limiting working hours based on age, additional permits in some states, on-set tutors and educators to ensure they don't fall behind in school, and a lot more. For teen characters, it's especially desirable to cast adults for various reasons, including maintaining continuity through puberty. 

Also, adult actors can perform in sexualized scenes, where children cannot, so they present a better option for some teen characters. Because of these reasons, casting agents have gotten away with throwing adults into teen roles to skirt the rules.  Each of these actors was way too old to play the characters they did, but ultimately, their performances proved that they were right for the part.

In George R.R. Martin's novel "A Game of Thrones," Daenerys Targaryen is 13 years old. When it came time to adapt the book for television, Dany's age was adjusted up to 17, which is still quite young. Increasing the character's age a bit helped with the sexually-charged narrative of Season 1, where Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) marries the fully mature Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), who is in his early 30s.

When Clarke won the role, she was 23, an age difference of six years, which isn't insignificant. Clarke's youthful appearance helped sell the fact that she was meant to play a teenager. Still, her age isn't spoken aloud by any of the characters, which was a wise choice, as Clarke is nude quite a bit in the beginning.

Since her age isn't mentioned, it's possible to infer Dany's age from context within the show. Daenerys was born during Robert's Rebellion, which occurred 17 years before the events of the pilot episode, so she's right around 17 years old in the beginning. Clarke was 24 when the series premiered in 2011, and she remained a main character to the end.

For much of its time on the air, "Happy Days" was an incredibly popular cultural phenomenon, spawning several successful sequels (and a few unsuccessful ones). One of the reasons people tuned in each week was to see what Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) would do. Fonzie had a massive impact on popular culture, giving birth to the concept of "jumping the shark," which he literally does in one episode.

The Fonz was a recurring character initially, but soon took much of the spotlight, becoming the show's star. Winkler was a bit older than Fonzie, beginning his time in the series at the age of 27, and as the show went on, it was hard not to see it. While some older actors can get away with playing teens, Winkler looked closer to his real age.

When Fonzie first appears in the pilot episode, the character's age isn't mentioned, but it's likely he's around two years older than Richie (Ron Howard) and the other high school students. That would make him somewhere between 17 and 20, though it's unclear. Regardless, Winkler was much older than his "Happy Days" character.

Director Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" was a groundbreaking film that helped usher in the 21st century's cinematic dominance of comic book movies. In the film, Peter Parker is a 17-year-old senior, while his comic book counterpart was 15 in his first appearance in 1962. Aging Peter closer to adulthood aligned with the graduation narrative in the second act.

Tobey Maguire won the coveted role in 2000 when he was 25, making him eight years older than Peter. Filming was delayed to 2001, but Maguire had about six months to go before he turned 26. Granted, most if not all of the teenagers seen in Peter's school are older than their characters. Kirsten Dunst, who plays Mary Jane, was 20, while James Franco was 24 playing Harry Osborn.

Despite the age difference, Maguire plays Parker's youthful innocence amazingly well, delivering his lines with hesitation, as you might expect from a meek teen. He doesn't look 18, but his portrayal overcomes his appearance despite his otherwise youthful look. The "Spider-Man" trilogy was a huge success for Maguire, who has seemingly disappeared from Hollywood in the years since.

Winona Ryder built a career appearing in numerous hit films, primarily in the 1980s and into the '90s. She plays the lead in "Girl, Interrupted," and was significantly older than she appears. Her character, Susanna Kaysen, is 18 in the film, as well as in Kaysen's memoir upon which it's based. But when Ryder starred in the movie, she was already 27 years old, and 28 by the premiere.

That made her nine years older than Kaysen during filming. Fortunately, Ryder's look was convincing enough to watch her play a teenager. Seeing as she'd portrayed plenty of teens as an adult in films like "Little Women" and "The Crucible," audiences likely accepted the 20-something actor as an 18-year-old.

Some of Ryder's co-stars were teenagers, including Elisabeth Moss, who plays Polly "Torch" Clark. At the time, she was 15, playing a 16-year-old character. Angelina Jolie, who won an Academy Award for her part, was 24, playing a young woman who is approximately the same age as Kaysen. The largest age gap comes from Cynthia Crowley, who is likely in her early twenties, while Jillian Armenante was 34 during filming.

There have been many actors to take on the role of Superman, some of whom were comic-book accurate. One who wasn't is Tom Welling, who plays Clark Kent throughout "Smallville's" 10 seasons. The series delved into Clark's life and upbringing before he donned the mantle of Superman. The show features many monsters of the week, other DC Comics characters, and plenty of action.

In the pilot episode, Clark is a freshman at Smallville High School, but he doesn't look like you might expect. Welling is 6 feet, 2.5 inches tall and has a solid, muscular build, so he looked a lot more like Superman than a regular kid. Clark's age can be determined based on his celebrated birthday of May 3, 1987, making him 14 in the pilot, based on its air date.

At the time, Welling was 24, but none of the actors looked anywhere close to their characters' ages in the show. When the series concluded in 2011 with its 217th episode, Welling was 34, while Clark was around 31 or 32, thanks to a time jump, so the age difference became negligible at the end.

Director Brian De Palma's "Carrie" was the first of many movie adaptations of novelist Stephen King's work, and it helped establish the author as a fantastic literary well Hollywood has dipped into for decades. Sissy Spacek plays the film's eponymous lead, Carrie White, a shy 16-year-old girl. Her peers routinely abuse her for her naiveté, and her mother terrorizes Carrie for her perceived indiscretions.

Spacek was 26 while filming "Carrie," a full 10 years older than her character. When she landed the role, Spacek was 25, so still much more mature than Carrie. Spacek won the role of Carrie by doing everything she could to appear as young as possible, so she wore a sailor dress her mom made during junior high.

Spacek also didn't brush her teeth or wash her face, and she put Vaseline in her hair so she'd look disheveled. Makeup artists at the screen test tried to help fix her look, but she ran away and cowered, which was accurate to the character. Clearly, her strategy worked because despite being much older than Carrie, she won the career-defining, Academy Award-nominated part.

In 1986, Alan Ruck played one of cinema's greatest hypochondriacs, Cameron Frye, in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." The high school senior drives much of the plot of the film, and while his age isn't stated in the movie or script, he was a graduating senior, suggesting he was about 18. Ruck, on the other hand, was significantly older, having been 29 throughout the shoot.

The actor turned 30 nearly a month after "Ferris Bueller's" premiere, and that presented him with something of a problem. While playing Cameron was Ruck's breakout role, he struggled to land more acting gigs and was forced to take a day job at Sears to make ends meet. Playing Cameron seemed as though it might both Ruck's breakthrough performance and his apparent swan song, but his career survived.

He went on to appear in various feature films, mostly playing side characters, but "Succession" lay on the horizon. Ruck played Connor Roy in the series, which earned him two Screen Actors Guild Awards as well as a Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe award nomination. During an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," he revealed, "I've been waiting for this for 30 years."

For much of his career, Leonardo DiCaprio maintained a youthful, boyish look, which allowed him to play younger characters for longer than most actors. This was certainly true in "Catch Me If You Can," where he plays Frank Abagnale Jr., the main character opposite Tom Hanks' Carl Hanratty. When the story begins, Frank is in high school and is only 15.

That doesn't stop him from pretending to be a substitute teacher to pull one over on some classmates, taking advantage of how he's dressed more than how he looks. When DiCaprio shot his scenes, he was 27, a full 12 years older than his character, who is 17 by the end of the movie. When the film came out in December 2002 for the Christmas season, DiCaprio was 28.

Casting DiCaprio in the role of a 15-year-old kid was partially about his youthful appearance, but more so about choosing the right actor for the part. He brought intense emotional sincerity to the role, grounding Frank as a child doing very grown-up things so well that you either don't notice or care that he's played by a man about to enter his 30s.

"Hannah Montana" was one of the biggest shows for tweens and teens in the early 2000s. Something most viewers didn't realize was that a teenage character was actually an adult. Jason Earles plays Jackson Stewart throughout the series run and in "Hannah Montana: The Movie." In the show, Jackson is 16, but it had been many moons since Earles celebrated that particular birthday.

When "Hannah Montana" launched in 2006, Earles was 30, playing a character almost half his age. Despite the wide gap, Earles pulled it off, thanks to looking young for much of his adult life. He was, at the time, 15 years older than Miley Cyrus, the series' star, and helped to foster a safe environment for the burgeoning singer.

When he took the role, Earles was 29, while Cyrus was 13, making him the adult in the room. In the years before taking the role, Earles played more mature, though still teen, characters in films like "American Pie Presents: Band Camp." In 2022, he played Dewey in "High School Musical: The Musical: The Series," embracing his then age of 45 by portraying an adult character.

When Timothy Granaderos took the role of Montgomery "Monty" de la Cruz in "13 Reasons Why," he was 30 years old, although he didn't become a series regular until the third season. His character, on the other hand, was 16 or 17. That made him 14 to 15 years older than the villainous Monty, and by the time "13 Reasons Why" ended in 2020, Granaderos was 34.

Filming for the first season kicked off in 2016, just before Granaderos turned 31, and the show didn't premiere until March of the following year. When he was cast, Granaderos didn't initially know much about his character, so he invented a backstory to explain why he was such a bully.

It wasn't until filming began in Season 3 that he learned more about Monty and why he lashed out at everyone. He played the significantly younger character so well that it's hard to notice his age despite looking older and more mature than many of the actors in his scenes. He also played the teenage Alex in "Runaways" while shooting "13 Reasons Why," and pulled it off just as well.

While some actors score a teenage role in adulthood as a one-off, Bianca Lawson is the opposite, having done so for around 20 years. Lawson has been playing teenagers for so long, it's uncanny. She's pulled it off by looking young, though carrying backpacks by school lockers hasn't hurt. Her widest age gap came playing Maya St. Germain on "Pretty Little Liars."

The character was 16, but Lawson was 31 when she began playing the role, making her 15 years older than Maya. Lawson didn't stick to just that one role, and also played a different high school student in "American Horror Story." In a funny twist, the following year, Lawson played an adult faculty member, Ms. Morrell in "Teen Wolf," while simultaneously playing Maya in "Pretty Little Liars."

Teen roles have dominated Lawson's career, which has been problematic for the actor. She told Complex in 2019, "It was frustrating because there would be parts that I really wanted, and they would say, 'Oh, Bianca looks too young.' I'm like, 'Right, but I really am this age.' ... I want things to be meatier and challenging. I think this is kind of boring, you know?" Lawson was named the patron saint of "Actual teen vs adult teen," and it's easy to see why.

"Grease" is a beloved movie musical, and while it's set around high school students, there weren't any actual teens in the cast. While most of the film's actors were in their early or mid-20s, Stockard Channing, who plays Betty Rizzo, the leader of the Pink Ladies, was 33. Rizzo, on the other hand, was only 18, making Channing 15 years her senior.

That made Channing the oldest member of the film's principal cast. During casting, director Randal Kleiser administered a "crow's feet test" on his prospective actors. He'd lean in close, peering around their eyes, telling Vanity Fair in 2016 that kids in high school wouldn't have crow's feet. Channing made it past this casting close-up, though freckles were added to make her appear younger.

Channing's role in "Grease" was significant in her filmography, and she's been busy in the years since. Still, "Grease" initially hurt Channing's career more than it helped. In 2025, she told The Times, "I gave [Grease] my all. ... But at the time, it was not taken at all seriously. The money that it was making was resented. I was resented. It's a kid's movie — it was really pissed on."

There have been many television and film adaptations of Jane Austen's novel "Sense and Sensibility" since its publication in the early 19th century. While there are plenty of excellent examples, the 1995 film directed by Ang Lee is among the best. Emma Thompson takes the lead as Elinor Dashwood, who is 19 years old in the novel.

Thompson wasn't initially interested in playing Elinor, but the distributor and director were insistent. They suggested aging up the character to 27, but this isn't mentioned in the film or its screenplay, which was likely a purposeful decision. Thompson took the role, as she told Entertainment Weekly, she was "desperate to get into a corset and act in it and stop thinking about it as a script." 

When filming began, Thompson was 36, making her 17 years older than Elinor. Playing the character was a good move for Thompson, as she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. Instead of winning in that category, she took home the statue for best writing, having adapted the novel for the screen. When the film came out, Thompson took heat for being too old for her love interest, played by Hugh Grant — who was just a year younger than her.

Barbra Streisand is an Academy Award-winning actor, though she hasn't appeared in many films. She's one of many actors with long gaps between film appearances, with her longest being seven years. One of her best performances came in playing the eponymous lead in "Yentl" in 1983. The film is based on Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," 

Streisand plays a woman pretending to be a boy so she can study during a time when women weren't allowed to do so. It was a movie Streisand wanted to make for a decade, and had she succeeded earlier in her career, her age would have been closer to Yentl's. Instead, while playing the 17-year-old title character, Streisand was 39, making her 22 years older than Yentl.

While Streisand couldn't normally pass for 17 at the time, it's an easy issue to overlook. The first-time director's performance proved she had what it took to write, direct, produce, and star in a feature film, making her the first woman to do so. Famed film critic Roger Ebert described having to suspend disbelief a little while admitting that Streisand does look 17, thanks to trick lighting and camera filters, adding, "She sings like an angel." Streisand won the best director Golden Globe Award and many other accolades for the film.