October 29, 2009 - 9:34am

Age ain't nothing but a blunder

It’s so hard to tell how old people are these days. I’ve easily confused a 19-year-old student for a 25-year-old co-worker or a 43-year-old mother of three for a 30-year-old party girl. And Hollywood ages are just as confusing – once we’re sucked into a plot we’ll willingly accept all sorts of make believe ages.

Stemming from movie roles such as Dustin Hoffman’s in The Graduate or Travolta’s teen role in Grease, we’re so used to seeing adults portraying sixteen year olds in high school dramas that it rarely makes us laugh anymore. Their characters may be starting to flirt with alcohol or losing their virginity at the prom but in real life, some of them haven’t been to the classroom for over a decade.

Take 90210. Back in the day Luke Perry was playing 16-year-old Dylan McKay even though he was in his mid-twenties and had crater-deep frown lines. Fortunately for him HD television wasn’t available back then. And Gabrielle Carteris (Andrea Zuckerman) was 29 at the time. Jump forward to the 2009 re-make and Michael Steger (Navid) is also 29 and humorously older then his 25-year-old co-star, Ryan Eggold, who plays his teacher.

Then consider Glee’s Finn who is 27 in real life and The Vampire Diaries’ Damon who is almost 31. I suppose 15-year-old actors wouldn’t make appropriate sex symbols, would they? High pitched voices, sulking fits and acne are not sexy. And 30 or 40something viewers don’t have to feel guilty about developing a crush on a kid. Where the girls are concerned, it’d be a little perverted to have underage actresses parading around in their bikinis and talking about sex. Plus the child labour laws in California restrict the amount of working hours for children under the age of majority.