The world is always looking for a new sexy teen melodrama to watch. The general public just can’t go long without one. There are just so many tropes to love. There’s the convoluted writing designed to generate maximum hook-ups. There are those killer soundtracks. And don’t forget the greatest trope of all: Hot 27 and 28-year-olds playing teenagers. For instance, Netflix’s Elite boasted a cast of mostly PhD-aged actors from its get-go: For the run of the series, the average age of the cast was eight years above typical high school age. Then, as with many teen dramas, the actors became even more obviously 35 when they continued to not graduate. There’s something unnerving about seeing someone complain about their science homework when they look old enough to have arthritis medication. 

With that in mind, this seems like an appropriate time to look back on history’s most flagrant instances of Fraudulent Teen Casting.

1. Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls (2004)

Whether it was the pitch-perfect way she proclaimed that she was getting cheese fries, or the believable fear she had of social suicide, Rachel McAdams was the most teenager-y teen of 2004. Was she impossibly hot for a sixteen-year-old? Yeah, but that was kind of the point. At the end of the day, no one noticed that this fully grown-ass 26-year-old was pretending to be a hormonal junior with a lip gloss addiction. The character just had a mythical physical maturity that could only be embodied by someone with a second mortgage and dental insurance. In fact, Rachel McAdams did such a great job playing a teenager that she starred in The Notebook that very same summer.

2. Nicola Coughlan in Bridgerton (2020 – present)

All of those references to Penelope being an old soul were kind of accurate. The Irish actress Nicola Coughlan was no less than 32 years old when she started to play Penelope Featherington on Bridgerton in 2020. That means that she was – wait for it – 35 when she filmed Season 3! You know, the season in which she played a virginal teenager with silky soft skin and butterfly hair clips? By the time Season 4 rolls around, she’ll be old enough to serve on the Supreme Court. Sigh, if only we could all pass as nineteen-year-olds once we’re well into middle age. 

3. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

Speaking of iconic teenagers, Audrey Hepburn was 32 when she inhabited the role of socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Must I remind you that Holly was supposed to be 19. Actually, I don’t know which of these facts is more surprising – that the actress playing the character wasn’t 19 or that the character was 19. How did she find time to hang out in front of Tiffany’s every morning? Didn’t she have to go to school? Was she failing all of her classes? In any case, Hepburn looked so angelic that viewers simply never considered that she was old enough to rent a car.

4. Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

The less said about this movie, the better. So let’s go ahead and dedicate an entire paragraph to it. This movie is bad. Like, “walk out of the movie” bad. Like, “sue the theater that played it” bad. Like, “take out a full page ad in the New York Times begging people not to watch this filth” bad. But the source material – the Tony-winning Broadway musical – is incredible! So what went wrong? Well, part of the problem is that the actor playing the seventeen-year-old eponymous character is Ben Platt, who was 27 years old at the time of filming. And he looks it! He literally looks like a lost grown man who just wandered into his local high school and started singing about loneliness. 

5. Stacey Dash in Clueless (1995)

Stacey Dash doesn’t sound like a real person when you list her career trajectory on paper. (Movie star → Fox political commentator → Opponent of Black History Month → Banned from Instagram.) That said, she was still a big deal when Clueless came out in 1995. Her portrayal of Dionne Marie Davenport was instantly iconic and branded her as a prototypical teen of the ages. However, she was 28 years old during filming. That’s a full eleven years more than her character. Still, she got away with it! Her worry lines didn’t start forming until she joined the Fox team and had to deal with blonde women asking to touch her hair all day.