19 Times TV Shows And Movies Decided Not To Cast Younger Actors For Flashbacks And It Was Just Straight-Up Weird
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Sometimes, TV shows cast the perfect younger version of a character.
But other times, they just...use the same actor. And most of the time, it's a little weird.
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1.Like when The Vampire Diaries flashed back to Stefan and Damon's childhood and had a little kid play Stefan, but had the 36-year-old Ian Somerhalder play teenage Damon.
The age difference between them isn't THAT big. It's around 7 years, right? Not 30?
2.Or similarly, when Once Upon a Time flashed back to Regina as a teenager (and had Snow played by a little kid), but they still used 35-year-old Lana Parilla as Regina.
3.Or when Brooklyn Nine-Nine flashed back to the '70s and Hitchcock and Scully didn't seem any younger.
I know this was for comedic effect, but then in a flashback to the '80s, they're hot young cops. What is the truth???
4.Remember the New Girl "Virgins" episode, which had a young teen version of Nick played by Jake Johnson?
5.And Winston was still played by Lamorne Morris?
6.At least New Girl did this for every character that episode.
7.Unlike the similar losing virginity stories episode of How I Met Your Mother — the teenage version of Robin was played by a younger actor, but teenage Ted was still played by Josh Radnor.
At least have some consistency!
8.Sorry to Florence Pugh, but there is absolutely no way she passes as the 12-year-old Amy in the earliest Little Women flashbacks.
Florence Pugh (who was almost 24 when the film was released) was fine to play the older version of Amy, but 12-year-old Amy? They should 100% have found another actor, no matter how great Florence is.
9.The actors of Glee already looked too old to be high schoolers when the show started. Six years later, when they did a flashback episode, they looked even older.
Artie legitimately looks like an old man here.
10.And ditto for having 23-year-old Blake Lively play 15-year-old Serena during a flashback episode of Gossip Girl, though that wasn't quite as bad.
11.No amount of prosthetics could make Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox look like high schoolers in the Friends prom video episode, even in the '90s.
12.Again, I know this was probably for comedy's sake, but did they really have to use 37-year-old Ali Wong as Sasha's teenage self in Always Be My Maybe?
They literally had a teenage actress for Sasha already???
13.And, even worse, 45-year-old Randall Park as Marcus's teen self?
14.I appreciate the new 'do they gave Jessica Walters here, but I don't really buy that this was Lucille 30 years prior to the events of Arrested Development.
I kind of loved when they had Kristen Wiig play her in that one flashback instead.
15.I always found it strange that they had Emily VanCamp play her young teen self in juvie flashbacks on Revenge.
Emily goes to juvie at 13, and it's implied she meets Amanda pretty quickly (possibly even as her first cellmate), which are when the flashbacks take place. So...is the above supposed to be 13-year-old Emily??
16.And that they had Caity Loitz play her teen self in that Legends of Tomorrow episode when everyone meets their younger self, especially because younger actors were used for the other characters.
It just seems unnecessarily difficult to then have to film scenes with Caity Loitz playing both parts, instead of just casting an age-appropriate lookalike?
17.I just personally think it would've been cuter to have a young Channing Tatum lookalike play the younger version of Jenko in the beginning of 21 Jump Street.
Tatum was 31 when the film came out.
18.Ditto to Jonah Hill's Schmidt.
I feel like all the jokes about how Jenko and Schmidt look way too old to be in high school would be funnier/more effective if in their actual high school scene, they were played by younger actors.
19.And finally, maybe there was some freaky witch magic going on here, but did anyone notice that in the flashback to Myrtle and Fiona being teenagers in American Horror Story: Coven, Spalding was played by the same guy??
He looked basically the same!
