Children Voicing Children / Live-Action Films

• Jennifer Connelly was 14, the same age as her character Sarah, during her audition for and throughout the filming of Jim Henson's Labyrinth.
• Anna May Wong was only seventeen in her film debut The Toll of the Sea, based on Madame Butterflyーwhere the heroine is fifteen and ages eighteen by the end.
• Citizen Kane: Orson Welles was only 25 when he played the titular character, the newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane, from age 25 until his late 70s.
• The Dr Seuss Films (How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and The Cat in the Hat) both feature children playing child characters: Taylor Momsen in the former and Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin in the latter.
• Michelle Trachtenberg was in her late teens playing 18-year-old Jenny in Euro Trip.
  • She played the 11-year-old sixth-grader Harriet in Harriet the Spy, while the actress was 10 years old to the day when the shooting began on October 11th, 1995 (this may have been done for labor law reasons, or it may have been a coincidence).
  • She went on to play the 17-year-old lead in Ice Princess, filmed when she was 18. Her co-star Hayden Panettiere, whose character is around the same age as Michelle's (they're in the same grade at school), was 14 at the time.
• Harry Potter is a standout case. While a number of parodies of the movies (especially Epic Movie) would take jabs at the supposedly young children being played by adults, the lead child actors were in fact played by children roughly the same age as their characters and as each film takes place one year later, they generally stayed the same age as their older characters. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were all roughly the same age as their characters in when they began the film series. When the films' production schedules slowed down, all that ended up happening was the characters being 1-2 years younger than their actors, so the 17-18-year-old characters were played by 20-21-year-olds, which is less of a gap between character age and actor age than most straight examples of this trope.
  • Emma Watson actually started off younger than Hermione. In the first film, she was 10 years old playing 11-12.^note Hermione is roughly ten months older than Harry, making her 12 for most of the first book/film.
  • This was also made easier by the fact that none of the core actors ended up maturing substantially (physically) by the time the final film was made, making it more plausible for them to be playing teenagers. The worst that happened was Daniel Radcliffe having a noticeable 5 o'clock shadow in the later films.
• In contrast to the other American Girl actresses, Alyvia Alyn Lind was actually a year younger than her character Maryellen Larkin in Maryellen 1955: Extraordinary Christmas.
  • AnnaSophia Robb and Abigail Breslin were 10 for Samantha: An American Girl Holiday and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl respectively.
• The title role in Babe was played by 48 different piglets, because they grow so quickly. A makeup artist was employed to make the pigs look similar.
• All the lead actors of 10 Things I Hate About You were actual teenagers: 19-year-old Heath Ledger and 17-year-old Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik (though the latter two play fifteen-year-olds).
• Lindsay Lohan is the same age as her characters in her early films, particularly Freaky Friday (2003) and Mean Girls. Inverted in Herbie: Fully Loaded when she played a university graduate at the age of 19.
• Sue Lyon was 14, and playing 14, when she filmed Lolita. (In the original novel, Lolita was 12; the character's age was raised to comply with the censors. Nabokov himself had said, "to make a real 12-year-old girl play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral.") Many are under the mistaken impression that she was 16 because the film was released in 1962, and Lyon was born in 1946. The film was, however, filmed between November 1960-May 1961, and she was born July 10th, 1946, making her 14 for the duration of filming.
  • Similarly, Dominique Swain was 15 when she played the 14-year-old Lolita in The Remake (again, the character's age was raised to comply with the censors).
• The 10-year-old (at time of filming) Fairuza Balk plays the 11-year-old Dorothy Gale in Return to Oz. Ironically, she's playing an older version of Dorothy than the 16-year-old Judy Garland did in the original film.
• Michael Cera (Evan) was 18 and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Fogel/"McLovin") 17 when playing their graduating high-school characters in Superbad. Jonah Hill (Seth), by contrast, was 23 (due to legal regulations, Mintz-Plasse's mother actually had to be on the set of Superbad the day his character's sex scene was shot).
• The 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet featured one of the only examples of an actress playing Juliet being anywhere near her age. Juliet, who is supposed to be nearing 14, was played by 15-year-old Olivia Hussey (who turned sixteen during production). Seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting was impressively young for Romeo, as well. The actors playing Mercutio, Tybalt, and Benvolio however were all in their twenties.
• The Hole did feature twentysomethings Desmond Harrington and Laurence Fox as the sixteen-eighteen Mike and Geoff. However, Thora Birch as Liz was only nineteen (depending on what year they're in and when her birthday is, she could plausibly be that age while still at school) and Keira Knightley was only fifteen as Frankie (and had a topless scene!). Meaning that if Liz is the same age as Thora, Keira was playing two years older than she was - or vice versa if they're only sixteen.
• Keira Knightley also played teenagers her own age in Bend It Like Beckham, Princess of Thieves and Coming Home (as the young version of Emily Mortimer). Elizabeth's age isn't stated in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, but Keira was sixteen at the time. The character is an 18th-century Proper Lady who is expected to get married soon, so she could be that age too.
• Gogo Yubari, the psychotic 17-year-old killer from Kill Bill was played by the 18-year-old Chiaki Kuriyama (the film was released on her 19th birthday).
• Leonardo DiCaprio was twenty-two when he played twenty-year-old Jack Dawson in Titanic (1997).
• In Mysterious Skin, Brady Corbet Corbet was 15 and playing a 17- to 18-year-old, while Michelle Trachtenberg was 18, the same age as her character.
• In Star Trek (2009), Anton Yelchin was 19 when he played the 17-year-old Chekov.
• Star Wars:
  • Carrie Fisher was 19 when playing 19-year-old Princess Leia (and then 2 when playing 22-year-old Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, and 25 when playing 23-year-old Leia in Return of the Jedi).
  • 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker was played by 10-year-old Jake Lloyd. Actually started off as an inversion, as Lloyd was only six when he was first cast, but the film was held up in pre-production for a few years.
  • 19-year-old Anakin Skywalker was played by 19-year-old Hayden Christensen at the time of filming Attack of the Clones; when Anakin was 22, in Revenge of the Sith, Christensen was 22.
  • Natalie Portman was 16 when playing Amidala at 14; she also played her at 24 when she was 19, and at 27 when she was 22.
• Pan's Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro changed the screenplay when he was impressed by an actress a few years older than the part asked for initially.
• Kirsten Dunst was eleven years old in Interview with the Vampire, where she played a vampire who was infected at eleven years old and was never able to grow up. Her kiss with the adult Brad Pitt led to a fair amount of controversy. Her character was aged up from about six for practical reasons.
• The Virgin Suicides: The actresses playing the younger Lisbon sisters were close in age to their characters, from Kirsten Dunst (16) as 14- to 15-year-old Lux, to Hanna R. Hall (14) who played 13-year-old Cecilia, to Chelse Swain (15) as 15-16-year-old Bonnie.
• Lost in Translation: Scarlett Johansson was not yet 18 when she played Charlotte, who is in her early-to-mid twenties (going by her reference to having graduated from college a little while previously). Johansson had just graduated from high school when she got the part.
• In Somewhere, 11-year-old Cleo is played by 11-year-old Elle Fanning (she was 12 by the time of its release).
• Yet another Sofia Coppola film, Marie Antoinette (2006) starts off playing Dawson Casting by having 23-year-old Kirsten Dunst portray the future queen of France at age 14, but Dunst continues to play her all the way into her thirties.
• The Film of the Book Twilight: Kristen Stewart (Bella) was actually seventeen and Taylor Lautner (Jacob) was fifteen during filming. Robert Pattinson is twenty-two, in contrast to the eternally 17-year-old Edward. The rest of the actors playing the Cullens are mostly in their early twenties, but it's justified as their characters aren't even really of high school attending age to begin with.
• Chloë Grace Moretz, at 11, plays 10-year-old Hit Girl in Kick-Ass. 17-year-old Kick-Ass himself is played by 19-year-old Aaron Taylor-Johnson. At 15, she stars in the 2013 remake of Carrie as the titular 16-year-old character.
• Matchstick Men is an unusual case in that an actress in her twenties plays a 14-year-old girl with surprising believability, yet in the end it's revealed that her character really is in her twenties.
• In Apocalypse Now, Laurence Fishburne played a 17-year-old soldier, but he was only 14 years old when filming started (due to the film's long period of production and post-production, Fishburne was 17 when the movie was released).
• In Sixteen Candles the 16-year-old protagonist, a high school sophomore, is portrayed by a 15-year-old (at the time of filming) Molly Ringwald. A key supporting character is a 15-year-old high school freshman played by an actual 15-year-old, Anthony Michael Hall. In the same movie, the trope is delightfully lampshaded by Ringwald's comments on a classmate (played by then-23-year-old Haviland Morris): "I swear to God, Caroline Mulford had to flunk about nine grades."
• In Pretty in Pink, Molly Ringwald was 17 while playing a high school senior.
• Heathers stars 16-year-old Winona Ryder and 18-year-old Christian Slater whose characters are high school seniors.
• In Real Genius, Gabe Jarret played a 15-year-old, and was actually 15 at the time of the film's release.
• Slumdog Millionaire: eighteen-year-old Dev Patel plays eighteen-year-old Jamal Malik.
• In the film version of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, eighteen-year-old David Kross plays main character Michael Berg from the age of fifteen into his early twenties. Considering the fairly explicit sex scenes with co-star Kate Winslet, there was very little chance of Michael being cast any younger. It is also worth noting that, although this is not mentioned in the film, the book features a brief scene in which Kate Winslet's character Hanna Schmitz expresses the false understanding that Michael is at university already when she starts having sex with him, implying that he looks several years older than he actually is.
• In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life there is a scene in which an instructor (played by John Cleese) at what appears to be a religious institution of learning is teaching a class how to have intercourse with his good lady-wife. While in the church service, all the children are... well, children. When we get to the classroom and intercourse discussion, however, they are all played by the various Pythons.
  • When the instructor catches one of them playing with an ocarina, he punishes him by making him play on the rugby team later, which is made up of actual children again!
• Mia Sara was the only actual teenager in the main cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Her character Sloane was a junior in high school; she was 18 at the time.
• In To Have And Have Not, Lauren Bacall was 19 and playing a 22-year-old.
• Great Balls of Fire!: 18-year-old Winona Ryder as a 13-year-old. Given the subject matter (child marries adult cousin Jerry Lee Lewis and goes to bed with him) one can see why they went with an actress who was of age. Oh, and Dennis Quaid was 35 when he played the aforementioned 22-year-old Lewis.
• Evan Rachel Wood was fourteen when she was cast in Thirteen (2003), the title referring to her character's age (Wood turned fifteen during filming). Considering the sex-and-drugs subject matter of the movie, probably no one would have blamed them if they had cast a baby-faced adult, so it's a notable near-aversion. Her co-star, Nikki Reedーwho, quite impressively, also co-wrote the film's screenplayーwas the same age as Wood during filming.
• Tara Steele was about ten when she played teenaged Katie in Mockingbird Don't Sing, though the character was, "supposed", to look much younger than she really was.
• Anton Yelchin was eighteen when he played the titular Charlie Bartlett.
• In Rebel Without a Cause, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo were 16, portraying teens. James Dean, however, was 24.
• Victoire Thivisol was four years old when she played the main role in Ponette, a four-year-old who loses her mother. She even won a Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her heartbreaking performance.
• All of the teenagers in Casper were played by people between the ages of 13 and 15 (including the voice actor for the titular character). For somebody used to this in movies, the sight of an entire classroom of teenagers who actually look like teenagers is actually rather jarring. The trope is played straight however with the temporarily revived Casper, who is supposed to be 12 yet is played by a 17-year-old.
• In the live-action adaptation of The Last Airbender Noah Ringer (Aang) and Nicola Peltz (Katara) were the same age as their characters during filming (12 and 14 respectively).
• In Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster was 12 when she played the role of a 12-year-old prostitute (except for the nude scenes, which were performed by her older sister, who was of legal age). However, according to the screenplay by the movie's writer, Paul Schrader, Iris was originally envisioned as a 14- to a 15-year-old girl, played by someone older.
• The Sound of Music largely kept the actors relatively close to their ages — Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich) was fifteen playing fourteen, Heather Menzies (Louisa) fourteen playing thirteen, Duane Chase (Kurt) thirteen playing eleven, Angela Cartwright (Brigitta) eleven playing ten, Debbie Turner (Marta) eight playing seven, and Kym Karath (Gretl) six playing five. Played utterly straight, however, with Charmian Carr (Liesl), who was twenty-one playing sixteen-going-on-seventeen. Her sweetheart, Rolf, seventeen, is played by Daniel Truhitte, who was twenty.
• In Another Cinderella Story, Selena Gomez was 15 and playing a 15-year-old high schooler. Critics were squicked that Drew Seeley, who played her love interest, was 24, but the movie makes it clear that his character really is that age. A Cinderella Story also does this with Hilary Duff (whose character is 17ー she was 16 when the film was released).
• The Diary of a Wimpy Kid film adaptation. The supplemental film diary mentioned that a lot of the child actors used were actual middle-schoolers and that the two boys playing Greg and Rowley actually missed their first days of sixth grade to film the movie. The third movie was rushed into production to make sure the actors could be used one last time before they officially got too old!
• Borderline case: Most of the actors playing students in Sky High (2005) were between 17 and 19 at the time of the film's release, although many of them played high school freshmen.
• Tomorrowland (2015) - 23-year-old Britt Robertson was cast as Casey Newton, an optimistic and tech-savvy teen, in July of 2013 and principal photography commenced the next month.
• In the 2010 version of True Grit, then 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld played 14-year-old Mattie Ross.
• Brooke Shields, in her movie appearances from age 14-17 (most famously The Blue Lagoon), appeared in a variety of adult-oriented films that involved frontal nudity. In each case, an over-20 body double covered those moments for her.
  • The shocking exception was, of course, her 1978 debut, Pretty Baby where she was the exact same age as her character, a 12-year old prostitute, AND did her own nude scenes. Unsurprisingly, it's one of the most controversial films of all time. The effects of this trope were felt in the auditions for the film. Debra Winger auditioned for Violet when she was twenty-one!
• Mandy Moore was 17 when she played high school student Jamie in A Walk to Remember, though her also high school aged love interest was played by Shane West, who was 21 at the time.
• Walking the line in Mystery Team; the actors are in their early twenties, and their characters are high school seniors.
• Ann Miller played a character several years older in You Can't Take It With You when she was fifteen.
• In Welcome to the Dollhouse, released in 1995, Heather Matarazzo, born in 1982, is the right age to play a seventh grader.
• While a number of the cast members who play tributes in The Hunger Games are Dawson Casting cases, it's definitely done by Isabelle Fuhrman (Clove), Jacqueline Emerson (Foxface) and Amandla Stenberg (Rue) — aged 15, 17 and 13 respectively at the time of release.
• Nikki Blonsky was 17, playing teenaged Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray. She had her 18th birthday on-set.
• The cast of Stand by Me were close in age to their characters, although still a straight version of the trope, with the exception of Jerry O'Connell, who was 11. Wil Wheaton was 13 (playing "12 going on 13"), Cory Feldman was 14 and River Phoenix almost 15.
• Mostly done with Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, rare for a slasher film. The film had 17-year-olds Michelle Williams and Joseph Gordon Levitt and 16-year-old Adam Hann-Byrd playing high school students. Played only slightly straight with 19-year-olds Josh Hartnett and Jodi-Lyn O'Keefe, and completely straight with 24-year-old Branden Williams.
• A bit of a twist: the actress who plays the antagonist in Orphan was 10 or 11, playing a 9-year-old who's actually in her 30s.
• Done to the point of lunacy in Aces: Iron Eagle III - Christopher Cazenove, Horst Buchholz and Sonny Chiba (born in 1943, 1933 and 1939 respectively) play World War II aces, while Paul Freeman (born 1943) plays an ex-Nazi bad guy. Run that by me again?
• Mostly done by Lords of Dogtown, in which Victor Rasuk (age 19), Emile Hirsch (age 18) and John Robinson (age 18) convincingly play teenage Tony Alva, Jay Adams, and Stacy Peralta, respectively. However, in real life Peralta and Alva were four years older than Adams, who is portrayed in the movie as being approximately the same age as them. Likely Hirsch was cast due to the difficulty of casting a real 13-year-old for the part.
• In If I Stay, Mia is stated to be 18, even though Chloë Grace Moretz herself is only 17.
• In Disney's Maleficent. As with Sleeping Beauty, Princess Aurora as a teen is meant to be fifteen/sixteen (the latter age being a plot point). While the animated film modeled Aurora's design after an actress in her twenties, the filmmakers for this live-action adaptation cast Elle Fanning, who at the time of filming was fourteen/fifteen. Cue Reality Is Unrealistic coming into play, with some viewers arguing Elle looked too young to play Aurora, while others defended the casting, pointing out that she actually is a teenager. Funnily enough, by the time the film was released, Elle had indeed turned sixteen.
• In Into the Woods, Red Riding Hood and Jack are portrayed by younger adults in the stage versions, but they're played by actual children in the movie.
• While the other main performers playing teens in The Duff play Dawson Casting, Children Voicing Children is done by Bella Thorne (16 during production). Interestingly, her character isn't in the book the movie's based on.
• In the movie Snow Day, Mark Webber was 19, Schuyler Fisk was 17, and J. Adam Brown was 16 when they played their characters. Also, Zena Grey was 11 and playing a 10-year-old. However, the movie plays this straight with Emanuelle Chriqui and David Paetkau, who were 24 and 27 years old and playing teenagers, and Josh Peck and Jade Yorker, who were 13 and 14 and playing elementary school-aged characters.
• Jacob Lofland and Katherine McNamara in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials were both roughly 18 at the time of filming.
• In Rambling Rose, Lukas Haas as Buddy - Buddy's 13, Haas was 13 at the time. (This got the film in trouble with the UK censors, due to the scene where Buddy sexually fondles Roseーit was trimmed for British release.)
• In The Film of the Book of the Dutch children's book series Alfie the Werewolf, the role of 7-year-old Alfie was played by the actually 7-year-old Ole Kroes. This was a deliberate choice from director Joram Lürsen since he feared the audience would notice the age difference if they were to cast an older child actor in the lead role.
• The film Kids was largely criticized for this, since it featured actual underage teens (all of which weren't even real actors at the time) engaging in acts of sex, drugs, and pure delinquency.
• In The Film of the Book of The Witches of Eastwick, Michelle Pfeiffer was 28 playing a woman in her mid-30s.
• Jake Gyllenhaal was 26 when he filmed Zodiac but his onscreen character Robert Graysmith is in his 30's for most of the story, and early 40s by the end. The trope is both played straight and inverted with Mike Mageau, who at age 19 is played by 25-year-old Lee Norris, and at age 41 is played by 31-year-old Jimmi Simpson. The two actors are only 6 years apart despite playing the character separated by 22 years.
• In Mrs. Doubtfire, Lydia Hillard was played by then 14-15-year-old Lisa Jakub.
• Goosebumps had 16-year-olds Zach, Hannah, and Champ, who were played by 17-18-year-olds Dylan Minnette, Odeya Rush, and Ryan Lee respectively. Halston Sage was 21-22 at the time she played Taylor.
  • In the sequel Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Caleel Harris, and Peyton Wich, who are 14-15, play the role of middle school students while Bryce Cass and Madison Iseman, who are both in their early 20s (both 20 and 21 respectively) play high school students.
• The Runaways:
  • The fifteen-year-old Cherie Curie was played by Dakota Fanning at sixteen. This veers into uncomfortable territory when Cherie is exploited and sexualized for her youthful looksーgiven the actress is the same age.
  • Joan Jett was seventeen played by nineteen-year-old Kristen Stewart. But the movie covers two years, matching Kristen's age with Joan's by the end.
• A Deleted Scene from the infamously Troubled Production The Professor & the Madman featured a flashback to Sean Penn's teenage years. While his girlfriend was played by an actress of 22, his younger self was played by Jordan Lennonーwho was only 16, and they had a kiss scene! Jordan joked in an interview he felt better about kissing an older actress because the age difference would prevent his girlfriend from getting jealous.
• Dead Poets Society: All the actors who played the students were between the ages of 18-20 when the movie was released, the exception being Gale Hansen (Charlie Dalton), who was 29.
• Liberal Arts: 35-year-old Jesse Fischer is played by 38-year-old Josh Radnor.
• Frances Ha: The 27-year-old titular protagonist is played by 30-year-old Greta Gerwig.
• In Scarface, 24-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer played 30-year-old Elvira Hancock.

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