Teenagers Playing Teenagers

A fun game is to Google the ages of the actors who play teenagers on whatever television show you're watching. Teen Wolf, for instance, provides a pretty good case study: Tyler Posey and Dylan O'Brien, who play seventeen year olds, are twenty one, which is bad but not so bad. Crystal Reed, who plays Posey's seventeen year old girlfriend, is twenty eight years old, which makes her technically senior to Tyler Hoechlin, whose character, Derek, is somewhere in his early twenties. (Hoechlin is the only actor playing within two years of his actual age.) The show also features the queen of this phenomenon, Bianca Lawson, who first played a seventeen year old character in 1993 and is still doing it twenty years later– though her Teen Wolf role is as a guidance counselor and adult. Twisted does better, but not by too much: Jo, Lacey and Danny are supposed to be seventeen, and they're played by actors who are 18, 24 and 21, respectively. 

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