Happy birthday, Andrew Garfield! The British actor turns 30 on Tuesday, but is still playing teenage Peter Parker on the big screen. From the men of Glee to a Grease actress, see more stars who don’t act their age.
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Slim as a beanpole and as baby-faced as a ... baby, Andrew Garfield plays Marvel superhero and geeky teen Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, out in May 2014. But on Tuesday, Garfield turns the big 3-0, with at least two more installments of Spidey yet to be released. Strangely, Garfield’s on- and off-screen love interest is played by Emma Stone, who is a more appropriate 24 years old, but looks years beyond her high school character.
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Spoiler alert! Bianca Lawson’s character on the ABC Family show Pretty Little Liars is dead. But before she kicked the can, 34-year-old Lawson played 17-year-old Maya St. Germain.
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Though they play juniors and seniors in high school on Glee, three of the leads on the song-and-dance show are over 30. Harry Shum Jr. and Mark Salling are 31, and Cory Monteith was 31 when he passed away last month.
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When Dawson’s Creek made its debut in 1998, it was considered scandalous teen television. Filled with talk of maturing body parts, excessive kissing, and inappropriate relationships (Pacey and his teacher, anyone?), the show featured a cast of young actors. However, twins Andie and Jack, played by Meredith Monroe and Kerr Smith, were almost twice their characters’ ages when they joined the cast. Kerr was 32 when the show wrapped, and Monroe was 36 when she appeared in the series finale.
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Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has said she modeled the character of Lane after her own best friend growing up. But Keiko Agena, who by the end of the series was 35, somehow stayed convincingly young with every utterance of “But mama!”
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One-third of The Vampire Diaries’ love triangle, Paul Wesley plays 17-year-old (that’s 164 in vampire years) Stefan Salvatore. Even pale-as-death Edward Cullen from the Twilight saga was younger than Wesley, who’s 31, while playing a teenage undead.
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Apparently high school students in Los Angeles age prematurely. The three sultry studs of the CW’s 90210 were all over 30 when the show wrapped earlier this year. With a chiseled jawline, mature voice, and massive muscles, Teddy Montgomery, played by Trevor Donovan, never quite looked as young as he was supposed to be. Michael Steger looked slightly younger, along with 30-year-old Matt Lanter, who had surprising boyish charm for the part. Lanter now stars on another CW show Star-Crossed, playing yet another high school student.
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If it’s possible, we might believe Stacey Dash is younger today than she was when she starred opposite Alicia Silverstone, 11 years her junior, in Clueless 18 years ago. While Dash was 29 when the film came out, she reprised her role as Cher’s BFF in the spinoff television series for years afterward.
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We aren’t sure exactly how old the title character in 1983’s Yentl is supposed to be, but at 41, Barbra Streisand was at least twice the age of her teen character in the cross-dressing musical.
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When John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out, Alan Ruck, who played Ferris’s paranoid and anxious teen sidekick, was already 30. But he played a high school senior obsessed with his dad’s approval to perfection.
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Olivia Newton-John was hardly a child when she played high school sweetheart Sandy Olsson at age 29, but Stockard Channing, Pink Lady supreme, was 34 when she portrayed Betty Rizzo.
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You remember Jason Earles—that comical looking blond kid who played Miley Cyrus’s older brother in Hannah Montana. But Earles, who joined the cast at 29 and continued for seasons to come, could just as easily have passed as Cyrus’s younger brother.
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