There are few things more reliable in this world than Hollywood’s enduring-yet-confusing commitment to casting full-blown adults as high school teenagers. Like, truly, no matter how many times Twitter tries to gently suggest that perhaps a 30-year-old man isn’t the best choice to play a 16-year-old in any given CW show, they just keep going. Bless!
And while some of the most notorious examples of actors being way the hell older than their on-screen counterparts are from shows that have long since been off the air (Glee, anyone?), the trend is still going strong. So clearly the time has come for an amateur investigation into this phenomenon. Just out here trying to make our assigned FBI agent proud, ya know?
We’re taking a look at cast members from some of the biggest shows on TV right now to see how they compare age-wise to their characters—including, but not limited to, Never Have I Ever,
Outer Banks, Bridgerton (you’re not going to be okay when you find out how old the actor who plays Eloise is), House of the Dragon, Wednesday, Yellowjackets, and Euphoria.
To be clear though, none of these can come close to the absolutely unhinged casting of 36-year-old Shirley Henderson as 14-year-old Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter. Like, whoever cast her and didn’t think a 20-year age discrepancy was weird, contact me. I just wanna talk.