Twentysomething teens: aging up characters in movies and television

July 2, 2010

This post has been edited to correct the ages of the characters in the first Harry Potter book. They were 11 when the books began, not 12.

A couple of weeks ago Miley Cyrus was named as the lead in the movie adaptation of Lisa McMann’s thriller WAKE. Discussion on the listservs was mixed: it sounds like there are plenty of people who aren’t Miley fans, but a few people pointed out that getting someone with that kind of star power would get more people to see the movie, which is great.

But what I really like about this casting decision is that Miley is 17, just like Janie, the protagonist of WAKE. It seems like a lot of the time teens in movies and television are played by twentysomethings, or 12-year-old characters become 16 year olds when a book gets adapted for television. Using movie release dates and actors’ birth years from IMDb to find some examples:

• In the first Percy Jackson book, Percy is 12. In the movie, he’s 15, and he’s played by an 18-year-old actor, Logan Lerman.
• In YOUTH IN REVOLT, Nick Twisp is 14. In the movie, he’s 16, and he’s played by 21-year-old Michael Cera.
• In Glee, the characters are in high school, but the actors playing those characters range in age from 19 (Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt) to 27 (Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, who play Finn and Puck respectively)–just four years younger than Matthew Morrison, who plays their teacher and coach.

And those are just a few examples. A movie adaptation of Ally Carter’s HEIST SOCIETY is in development now with a scheduled 2012 release date. In April, Carter wrote a blog post about the characters being aged up from their teens to their early twenties for the movie adaptation. Specifically, she wrote about why she was okay with that change. Her reasons ranged from simple ones (money, a bigger audience) to more complex ones (Kat will have been gone longer and will be rustier, an older character being seen as a little girl hurts her more), but Angie Manfredi disagreed on Twitter. In a short conversation (1 2 3 4 5) we touched on how this is disrespectful to teens because it tells them that they, as teens, aren’t interesting, and it means that movies teens watch that are supposedly directed at them don’t portray characters who are like them. Just as teens deserve literature that reflects their lives, the movie adaptations of that literature should reflect teens and their stories and abilities and fears and triumphs.

There are some movies that get it right. Weirdly enough, the Twilight actors are pretty close in age to their characters (Kristen Stewart was 18 when the first movie came out and Taylor Lautner was 17 when New Moon was released; Robert Pattinson was 22 in the first movie instead of 17, but I guess you can argue you want an older actor to play a character who’s actually a few hundred years old?).

But I think the Harry Potter franchise is the best example: Harry and Ron and Hermione were all 11 in the first book; Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were all 12 when the first movie was released (so they were probably 11 when the movie was filmed). They’ve gotten a little older now (Radcliffe will be 22 when the final movie with an 18-year-old Harry comes out), but that’s just because you can’t crank out eight movies of that magnitude in seven years. Through that series (both the seven books and the eight movies) we get to see Harry mature from a kid to an adult, something that we wouldn’t have seen in a movie that started out with an older character or an older actor. Teens deserve depictions of teen characters that show that kind of reflection of who they are and who they’re becoming–both in literature and movies based on that literature.

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Tags: authors and illustrators, commentary, movie adaptations, ya lit