Dressed mutton…

There was an article on the BBC site about a new film of the programme ‘The Inbetweeners’ which is being released, despite the actors no longer being the teenagers they are supposed to be… In fact they have an average of twenty-eight! It is something which there is always a lot of controversy about, when older actors take the part of younger characters… I could just about accept twenty-nine year old Olivia Newton-John and twenty-four year old John Travolta were Sandy and Danny in ‘Grease’, but the other actors who were obviously in their thirties even though they were supposed to be teenagers, was just ludicrous, and really took he edge off the movie for me – OK, maybe I should just go with the flow and ignore it, but it just niggled.

The article also mentioned other actors who were older than their characters, “Stockard Channing played Rizzo despite being 33. Tobey Maguire, aka Peter Parker, was a mid-20s Spider-Man. Charisma Carpenter was 27 when she was Cordelia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In The Railway Children, Sally Thomsett, who was Phyllis was 20 when her character was only eleven years old… however, she actually did look like a young girl!

In my novels about the Radwinter family, the main character and narrator is Thomas, who is thirty-four years old, quite a bit younger than me. It is something I have to be aware of with every word I write… so I try to get round it by making him a slightly old-fashioned man, brought up by a much older parent. I dare say people might be able to pick holes in what I write, especially thirty-four year old men… However I hope my readers will just get carried along by the plot!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28687403