09/14/2026
Hollywood has a strange habit of asking viewers to accept that characters are teenagers while casting people who have clearly moved well beyond their teenage years. It can work if the story is set around college or early adulthood, but once a character is specifically written as 19, the disconnect becomes much harder to ignore.
There is a reason coming-of-age stories often feel more believable when the cast is actually close to the characters' ages. The performances, relationships and even the awkwardness of that stage of life land differently when the actors aren't decades removed from it. Sometimes the easiest solution really is to let the characters be college students and stop making everyone pretend they're fresh out of high school.
