This week, the trailer for a movie adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen was released, to much ire from viewers who rightly pointed out that Ben Platt, who is 27 and very much looks it in the trailer, will be playing the movie’s teenage lead character. While Platt is certainly on the older side to be playing a high-schooler, his casting is merely the latest installment in the grand and hallowed tradition of fully grown adults playing teenagers on-screen. Making a twenty-something actor look like he’s below the legal driving age has always involved a little audience participation by way of suspension of disbelief—but that only gets you so far. There are a few choice scenarios that make it a lot easier to buy an adult playing a teen, and a few fatal missteps that’ll really give it away. Here are all the tricks that will make or break an adult-as-teen performance.
Don’t: show your muscles.
The tight white tank, a bad-boy staple of the last few decades, is unfortunately a dead giveaway that an actor is most certainly not in high school. Any bicep-baring, torso-clinging garment only further accentuates a physique not biologically achievable by someone who’s only just finishing up with puberty. The most criminal offender here is Ben McKenzie, who was 25 when he played Ryan on The O.C. (whatever the hell he claims happens in Chino cannot account for how that guy looked), but this one dates all the way back to 26-year-old Kevin Bacon in 1984’s Footloose. Another victim of the white tank curse: Channing Tatum in She’s the Man. The same goes for any clingy, ultra-fitted piece of clothing: we’re looking at you, Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Do: play a nerd.
The problem with teenage love interests is that they have to be pretty universally attractive, something most actual teenage boys…aren’t. Playing a total dweeb who’s not meant to be traditionally hot is an easier sell. Baby Penn Badgley, who already had the advantage of being 20 when he played John Tucker’s little brother in John Tucker Must Die, can testify to this one. But the best success story is Tobey Maguire, who was a full decade older than 18-year-old Peter Parker when he first played him in the Spider-Man franchise. He looks especially guileless pre-bite, when he’s a nerdy social outcast secretly pining over the popular MJ. Maybe something about putting on those glasses helps activate some long-buried high school persona.
Don’t: play a child star before you play a teenager.
Cole Sprouse, who is currently 28, has been playing a high school student on Riverdale for four years now—an especially large mental leap considering most of us actually know what he looked like as an adolescent, having played one on Disney since he was 13. By the time Suite Life on Deck wrapped, he was 16—almost exactly the age of the Riverdale character he played five years later. Give this show the budget for de-aging tech!
Do: Team up with older (and younger) actors.
Ralph Macchio was 23 when he played Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid, but he spent most of the movie hanging out with a 51-year-old mentor, which made it a lot easier to pull off looking 17. The Stranger Things “teens” have it even better: sandwiched between over-30s like Wynona Ryder and David Harbour, and the actual teens that play the younger kids, the slightly older characters (Natasha Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery) look teenaged by nature of being older than the youngest but younger than the oldest. This is what the law of relativity means, right?
Don’t: rely on a wrinkle test
The cast of Grease, probably the most frequently roasted for being unbelievable as high school students, was assembled using a rather, uh, dubious process: director Randal Kleiser told Vanity Fair he administered a “crow’s-feet test” during auditions, examining the skin around the eyes of everyone who auditioned and eliminating anyone with a hint of wrinkle. The result? A lot of clearly fully grown crow-feet-less adults. Poor Stockard Channing, who was 33 when she played 16-year-old Rizzo (and absolutely nailed the role), was given freckles on her nose to look younger, which she said just made her look vaguely dirty.
Do: rely on sheer charisma.
Ultimately the best teen characters are the ones whose chemistry onscreen is so palpable, you’re not really thinking about how old they look. The Ferris Bueller’s Day Off trio—including Alan Ruck, who was thirty when he shot the movie—is just fun enough that you’re not really thinking about their age. On the opposite end of the charisma spectrum, the new Spider-Man crew, mainly Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon, are so clumsily charming with each other that they feel teenaged more than they look it.