I never thought I would find another site that speaks to my soul as deeply as the Old Loves Tumblr, but now I’ve discovered Actual Teen Vs. Adult Teen, and I invite you to spend the rest of our lives there.
(Yes, Bianca Lawson is there, don’t worry.)
I feel like we need to have a ten hour discussion about the Rock’s teenage picture
he is triangular.
Of course my senior year boyfriend had the same build so I shouldnt talk but STILL.
BOYS.
How many people you think thought he was a 21 jump street style undercover cop?
I remember reading somewhere a while back that he transferred schools in high school and had trouble making friends precisely because they all thought he was an undercover cop.
Edit: Whoops, I posted this before looking at the tumblr post that explained that very thing. Sorry for my hastiness y’all!
Well, of course.
glad I’m not the only one who immediately saw this and came here to post it! long live dwayne
yes I start scrolling down this tumblr and before I even hit the bottom of the page is DWAYNE THE ROCK JOHNSON
and all of his classmates thought he was a narc!!!! yes to all of this!!
The best part about this is that people thought he was a narc in high school because it was right when 21 jump street premiered.
where was THIS 15 year old when i was dating boys in highscool? shoulders for daaaaaays, dwayne. *fans self*
Okay wait Magnitude in Community was supposed to be 16???
(Also you can see a younger version of Luke Youngblood on The Story of Tracy Beaker, which I grew up on and was AMAZING)
I totally believe Zac Efron as teen Matthew Perry. Some of the others though, DANG.
Ha, yes, I posted this site to Mefi a while back and some non-US commenters said they thought “High School” was much later in life in the US cause clearly these people are not teenagers.
My most recent birthday was 31 so I mentioned I’m finally old enough to play an American teenager.
I added this to my RSS feed IMMEDIATELY.
Jonny Lee Miller was on Keeping Up Appearances????
I know! I like to believe he played an inappropriately young crush of Rose’s
Saying this now: I want someone over 30 to play Current Daisy in my biopic because I look 12 in real life and want to compensate.
Make this so.
A lifetime of being ID’d for liqueur chocolates.
(Assuming you’ve ever bought liqueur chocolates.)
I’m only barely eighteen, but I know I have a lifetime of carding ahead of me.
I have come to terms with my fate.
As someone who is 27 and still gets asked if I like high school on the regular, I understand your pain.
The summer after I graduated from college I was at church with my parents and the priest was a priest who taught at my college. I knew of him but we had never met in person. As I was walking out I told him I had just graduated and said it was good to see him off campus! and he looked at me and said “I thought you were a sophomore in high school! HAHAHA!” What a dick.
I was at my brother’s law school graduation making small talk with the mom of one of his friends. I mentioned being excited to start a real job soon. She said, “oh, are you graduating high school?” I was 28, looking forward to being done with residency and starting my real doctor job. Sigh.
I just take solace in the fact that only 50-year-olds think I’m a teen and my teenage students would literally never make that mistake, what teen dresses like me, honestly.
GIRL I WAS CARDED AT THE MOVIES THIS PAST SUMMER
I WAS 31
I was carded buying cigarettes a few weeks ago. at 32.
however, not carded buying expensive whiskey at the liquor store 5 days later. sooo….ymmv.
A while ago I bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of gin in the same supermarket in two separate transactions. I got IDed for the wine and not the gin, even though the wine was bought at the same time as a weekly household shop and the gin was bought as a standalone purchase; what under-18-year-old buys vegetables and cleaning products just to disguise the fact that they’re illicitly buying alcohol?
I’m 37! I’ve been legal to drink for almost 20 years! Why do I still get carded?
When I was 33, I was celebrating a fairly big work achievement and went out to buy a bottle of Cristal as a gift to myself. I got carded. I couldn’t help myself and asked the cashier “So . . . how many 16-year-olds do you have in here buying Cristal?”
Right? I got carded when I was shopping for hosting Thanksgiving diner – multiple bottles of decent wine, dark rum, craft beer. They’re supposed to card anyone who looks like they might be 25 or under; even when I was 25 I was buying dollar-beers and cheap vodka.
I stopped being carded every time after i turned 35 and at all at 40. At one point i was spluttering to the cashier “my boobs are legal drinking age:-\”
Haha, I am 31, but according to local cashiers I look 23. My mom gets STILL gets carded occasionally and she’s fifty-*mumble*.
I would like to suggest here that the unrealistic teen standards in media is the beginning of imposter syndrome. Because I know I expected to look and act a lot older when I got to high school. Not to look like the baby dweeb I still was!!
Now that I write this I realize that I may actually be somewhat serious about this suggestion.
I’d agree, except that all of my unrealistic expectations started with The Baby-Sitters Club and middle school
Seriously, SO DISAPPOINTED that when I was 13, I had no way of earning money or getting to the mall by myself.
This,so much.
Actually now that you mention this I feel like I need to throw in The Boxcar Children. I’m a failed woman.
When watching some movie or TV portrayal of teens I am so relieved when I remember “These are actually adults. No teen had to simulate this kind of sexual situation, no teen had to pretend they were cool with this before they were ready.”
Poor body image too, I think. Puberty is awkward as hell, and if you see actors in teen movies all the time who aren’t dealing with that awkwardness, you can start to think your awkwardness isn’t normal.
Even worse, they aren’t dealing with that awkwardness but the story line is about how they are!! “Oh god her awkwardness is a problem when she’s like that?? How bad am I?!”
I definitely had this same thought and wrote my comment before I read yours. This is potentially seriously A Thing.
They don’t just look older though. There’s an episode of Vampire Diaries (from one of the early seasons) that made me laugh out loud cause 16-year old Elena goes off to her family’s vacation cabin with her boyfriend and a bunch of wine – and every adult in her life is like “yeah, you should do that it would be good for you!” Umm, that’s not what 16 year olds do (at least not with the enthusiastic support of adults).
Lol that’s probably my favorite part of watching these shows/movies now. “Where are all the adults?!?!”
At least they kind of explain it (or try to) in Vampire Diaries. Dead parents and suddenly young aunt who’s barely an adult herself is in charge. But still.
What shocks me more than the age difference for some of these people is how they have NOT AGED ONE BIT. When Reese Witherspoon is 80, she will look exactly the same as she does in these photos, mark my words.
Mind you, the picture in her attic looks awful.
Also I saw a picture of her daughter in some magazine or Internet and it’s like she cloned herself.
I am a big fan of this tumblr, but my all-time favorite post is Will Smith’s, because:
this was absolutely the correct Fresh Prince screenshot to use.
Oh Will Smith. So ashamed of your giant sunflower bonnet.
It’s fun when you’re just not around many teenagers, so all the ‘teenagers’ you see are actors in their mid-20s on TV or movies. Whenever I see an actual teenager I’m always like “What is this ten-year old doing here?”
Yes, this tumblr explains a LOT.
Watching We Are The Best was an interesting experience because you have 13 year olds actually played by 13 year olds and so they look REALLY YOUNG because we’re used to 16 year old 13 year olds. You think to yourself “wow, they’re just children!”
That was me watching Skins. (The original UK one, of course.)
The first series of Skins started when I was in sixth form, so the same age as the characters; I now see that Nicholas Hoult is almost exactly my age (about a week younger), so that is excellently realistic casting. (The rest was less realistic. I couldn’t bear to watch it because it bore so little resemblence to my own immensely boring teenage life. WHY ARE YOU ALL SO IRRESPONSIBLE, WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS?)
Yes! Freaks and Geeks, too.
Why is this college campus full of eleven year olds? WHERE ARE THEIR PARENTS
A few years ago, I was listening to an interview on television about how “teens” on television are played by actors in their mid-20s. Basically, no one wants to see ACTUAL 15 year olds make out because it’s just awkward and weird. The solution is to have 24 year olds make out and pretend they’re 15.
Having seen 15 year olds, I can see the sense in this.
I live with a 15 year old. And yep. They’re adorable little puppy-creatures when they hang and goof and chill with each other, but get them close to romance-type situations & the awkward physicality is yikes.
When his brother was 17 he was in a play where he had to kiss a couple of girls, which remains the only time I’ve seen either of my kids kiss someone, I’m happy to report. (Possibly it would have been less awkward if it weren’t staged? I mean, impartially awkward, not ‘I’m his mom and I don’t need to see this’ awkward.)
if it makes everyone so uncomfortable to see 15 years olds making out, perhaps people need to stop writing scenes about 15 year olds making out? or deal with the fact that in the real world 15 year olds do make out and we need to stop being so puritanical.
to be the person to take this to a weird, dark place, I honestly think this is something that plays into people’s shitty feelings towards age of consent rape? Like, on TV you see a bunch of 25-year old actress playing a 15 year old, and then you hear on the news about a coach having sex with a 15 year old, and the last time you actually saw a teenager up close in real life was 10 years ago, and so your image of a teenager is a bunch of 25 year olds playing them on TV and you’re like, oh, okay. Whenever I see people commenting “15 year olds are basically adults already” I’m like uhhhh I am under 25 and the last time I saw someone who was 15 I legitimately thought they were in middle school and like 11. Teenagers look like CHILDREN to pretty much everyone who isn’t a teenager. I think you’re thinking of the adults who play them on TV.
I was thinking this too so you’re not the only one.
I’m not sure. When I was in my 30’s I had little sisters who were 13-14 who easily passed for 18 unless you talked to them. Part of it was their getting womanly curves early, but part of it was them losing the baby fat in their face. The illusion vanished instantly as soon as they started speaking, so no excuses at all for the creepers who kept hitting on them.
Boys on the other hand, oof. I’m constantly mistaking them for being years younger than they are because a substantial number of them are still skinny and awkward until about age 25. (with exceptions, of course) I had a crew working here on my drainage systems; when their company admin called me, I had to ask her when they started sending teenagers to work sites. She laughed and said “I know exactly who you mean, and no, they are not teens”.
I’m still young enough to plan a teenager in a movie!
And I’m in my mid-40s, so I can play your grandma!
Your grandpa costar will be a man in his 80s.
Sexy silver fox, ummmmmm.
Mom-aged TV Grandmas unite!
This is hilarious. I remember being a teenager and being painfully aware that no one around me even faintly resembled the supposed teens on 90210. It’s kind of a dilemma, because it seems like the choices are to either have teens watch shows where their supposed peers are portrayed only by people completely past the awkward stage (unfortunate) or have teens working full time in entertainment careers (also usually unfortunate).
The original Degrassi High used teenagers. It was as awkward as you’d imagine.
Thank god they cast adults as teenagers on TV or I would feel like a creep watching all my favorite shows like Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries.
I had this issue with Skins. Good show, but I felt too old to watch it and I’m not that much older than the first 2 seasons cast.
ETA: I’m actually very close in age to Nicholas Holt, so must have been later seasons I had an issue with.
Ah, Nicholas Hoult, now there’s a fake teen I was very glad to learn was actually my age.
Word.
The first gen is a decade older than I but I didn’t feel very creepy. I mean, it’s not like they were having good sex. (Although – a teacher sleeping with a student is always creepy.)
When I started watching Freaks and Geeks, I was shocked that John Francis Daley was actually 14, like his character. He looked like a baby! It’s part of what makes that show such a realistic depiction of teenagerdom.
I don’t know how he looks now, but when he was first in Bones, he still looked like a baby, and could have convinced anyone he was still a teen.
Harry Shum was plain adorable as a teenager
Harry Shum is just plain adorable in general!
Its sister Tumblr, Very Young TV Parents, is good too: http://veryyoungtvparents.tumblr.com/ The doctor on “Home Fires” apparently became a dad at sixteen, going by actor age!
(I started looking about thirty when I was thirteen and was never able to play a realistic teenager. It’s a pity I was such a goody-goody- I could have bought so many illegal cigarettes and drinks! At least I wasn’t that one kid who carried a briefcase to every class.)
Home Fires confused the heck out of my for that very reason! I was like wait, what???? This guy is the parent of these two GROWN ASS WOMEN? It took me two episodes to figure out that family.
Here’s a third person who wondered how that young’un fathered young adult women. He could as easily have been cast as their big brother.
Aah, beat me to it!
Oh good lord the ‘actual teenage’ pic of Charming Tater.
no offense to Floridians, but you can really tell he grew up in Florida.
Speaking as a former Floridian, you’re not wrong.
Anybody else here remember American High? It was a Fox reality show following a group of high-schoolers. I was a senior in 2001 when it came out, and it was absolutely riveting. Every character was interesting and relatable, especially the nerdy singer-songwriter girl and the kid with ADHD who liked to dress up as Tigger. One of the best-done reality shows I’ve ever seen, so of course it was canceled after four episodes (later aired on PBS in full), at the same time that Young Americans premiered, a Dawson’s Creek spinoff about teens that featured no one looking or sounding like a real teen. I was so pissed that adults somewhere decided that American teens wanted to watch adults fake being teens rather than their actual peers dealing with actual issues.
This makes me feel sad for real teenage boys everywhere who are competing with Fake Teenage Boy Attractiveness Scales. Girls faces don’t change all that much between the ages of 17 and 25 (based on about six pages of examples I just looked at), but dudes are TRANSFORMED. Suddenly they have JAWS. Do teenage boys look at themselves in the mirror and go, “If only I had a visible JAWLINE,” because if not, they probably should.
It will get better, teenage boys, if you turn into a hot 20-something celebrity.
Of course, the girls have already had the change (and it was doubtless more troublesome for them), but this means the boys are left thinking “All the girls have turned into goddesses and I’m still just me, but worse!”
This sent me down the Old Loves rabbit hole. OF COURSE Ethan Hawke’s response to being put on the public naughty step for cheating on Uma Thurman with the babysitter was
“People have such a childish view of monogamy and fidelity. ‘He’s cheated so he’s bad, she’s cheated so she’s bad,’ as opposed to a recognition that our species is not monogamous,” he continued. “To act all indignant, that your world has been rocked because your lover wasn’t faithful to you, is a little bit like acting rocked that your hair went grey.” He added “Human beings are sexual beings.”
YES GRAY HAIR AND MARITAL INFIDELITY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME THING BECAUSE BONERSCIENCE.
I loved him so much in fifth grade when I saw Dead Poets Society and now the sanctity of my many, many bad poems are sullied by that undeodorized toad.
So tiresome. If you believe our species isn’t monogamous, then you shouldn’t form or should extricate yourself from monogamous commitments. Though people who use the old line about the human species tend to cheat in poly relationships too.
I love Barbara Kingsolver’s (and I’d assume based on her graduate work in biology she knows a little bit more about this than most bonerscientists) response: an animal with a brain big enough to make a promise should be capable of keeping it.
IIRC, he had a thing with Angelina Jolie while he was still with Uma, too; and charmingly, complained about his and Uma’s post-childbirth sex life, apparently her vagina wasn’t ‘attractive’ anymore.
Ugh, what a pig. Actually, that’s an insult to pigs. I’ve always been vaguely repelled by his face, now I know why.
Huh. Years later and I still hate that guy.
This has given me a new understanding of why I always thought of teenagers as being tall and adult and oh god this is probably the root of my imposter syndrome oh god
ALSO that 17 year old pic of Leonardo Di Caprio!! He looks 12! It would be legal to have sex with him at that age in the UK, that is not right!
He took such a long time to look like an adult. I thought he still looked kind of 12 in Titanic.
Yeah, I was in fifth or sixth grade when Titanic came out, and I didn’t really *get* all the love for Leo. When the Great Gatsby movie came out a couple of years ago, my main takeaway was, “that is the best Leonardo DiCaprio has ever looked.”
In middle school everyone was IN LUUUUURVE with Leo in ‘Romeo + Juliet’, and I was completely baffled. Watching Gatsby I was like “Hmm, okay, now I kinda see the appeal. Kinda…”
Looking back I think I was really in love with Claire Danes in ‘Romeo + Juliet’. She was entirely too gorgeous for a guy who looked 12.
Leo aged incredibly slowly for a long time. I went to see Romeo + Juliet at the movies not long after it came out, and I could have sworn Leo wasn’t much older than I was at the time (16). Little did I know he was into his twenties, then.
No wonder he grew facial hair.
There is an anecdote about the making of Romeo + Juliet and Leo’s ability to sometimes (but not always) look younger than he was. From IMDB:
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Kate Winslet and Christina Ricci were considered for Juliet. Gellar’s commitment to All My Children (1970) interfered, and Hewitt was considered too youthful-looking. Natalie Portman was also considered and even flew to director Baz Luhrmann’s hometown, Sydney, to film scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio, when 20th Century Fox couldn’t quite visualize the director’s off-the-wall concept. Luhrmann says, “Although she’s a fantastic young actor, she’s a tiny little girl and Leonardo’s six feet tall. He’s 21, but can look 18. She made him look all of 21, and it just became obscene.” Portman’s version is this: “They said it looked like Leonardo was molesting me when we kissed. It was really disappointing, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the movie and have it look wrong. If I was in the film, I would have wanted it to be perfect.”
Forget 12! HE SERIOUSLY LOOKS SEVEN YEARS OLD
Emilio Estevez, on the other hand, looked like a 40-something salesman as a teenager.
Go and watch We Are The Best, everyone! Not only does it has teenagers who act like actual 13 year olds, they are also played by teenagers and they look so small, because we’re used to seeing 13 year olds played by 16 or 17 year olds. You think “Wow, they’re just children!” It’s weird to think that you’d forget what a teenager actually looks like, but there we are.
We Are The Best is literally the best. And they are all so 13 years old it’s insanely endearing
I would tell absolutely EVERYONE to watch We Are The Best, it’s great in so many ways, from the way the teenagers act, to the way that it’s a female-centred story, to their amazing song about hating sport. PERFECT IN EVERY WAY. http://letterboxd.com/infamoussphere/film/we-are-…
It’s so good! AND it’s on netflix!!
Paul Walker was in She’s All That??
Edit: Also Li’l Kim?!
HE WAS SUCH A DICK IN THAT MOVIE OMG
Yep! It’s kind of horrifying how the movie was like “Paul Walker attempted to rape Rachel Leigh Cook on prom night, and she had to set off a sport horn right next to his head to get him to stop. NOW HE’S DEAF ON GRADUATION DAY…isn’t that SO FUNNY?!?!?!?!”.
Like…that’s a legitimately horrifying thing that happened to her, and the film just glosses right over it. I only cottoned on to it when I watched the movie again as an adult.
I’ve started watching Veronica Mars with the lad and it’s striking how Not Actual Teens Pretending to be Teens they all are. Esp as we have an actual 12 yr old in the house to provide a point of contrast.
I have just finished watching VM (all but the film, which I plan to watch tonight) and yes, they all look so much older than teenagers. It makes all of Veronica’s PI work seem much less incongruous.
I grew up in the dark ages / 70s and 80s, when teens were more likely to be played by teens and they tended to look more normal and I’ve wondered about the impact of all these beautiful 20- somethings playing teenagers. I saw Little Darlings recently and I was really struck by how young and average looking the actors were by today’s standards. Same with Ordinary People – I don’t know if the teen actors were actually the same age as their characters, but they’re not in their 20s.
ETA – Just learned that Molly Ringwald was 15 while filming Sixteen Candles but one of her costars was like 23
I remember Luke Perry’s receding hairline when he was in 90210. Those guys must have snacked on Rogain.
I don’t even know who most of these people are, but I am HYPNOTISED.*
*Correct non-USA spelling of this word COME AT ME.
I support your correct spelling. Civilisation must be upheld.
This really changes Xanthippe on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for me! Makes her attitude/conniving a lot more understandable.
http://actualteenadultteen.tumblr.com/post/113117…
I always thought they had an obvious non teen playing her as a joke/nod to how that happens in TV in general
fyi: i have been at work for 45 minutes and gotten exactly zero work done. less to be done shortly…
oh hey co-nonworker!
“Chris Pratt, homeless, living in this van, holding the script to his first acting job.”
http://actualteenadultteen.tumblr.com/post/130314…
Amazing.
Also, because Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green are gifts to us from a benevolent creator, here. “In 1988, Seth Green played Alyson Hannigan’s date in My Stepmother Is An Alien. Nine years later, he played her boyfriend on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.” http://actualteenadultteen.tumblr.com/post/554642…