Middle-aged actors playing teens

Pretty sure they were in their 20s, and imo looked young enough to play those parts. That's really all that matters if you ask me, and especially to cast directors back then who wanted to pick experienced people rather than actual teens....No complaints from me.

Casting real teens would have made it feel like a Nickelodeon movie.

I can believe it and never questioned stuff. When I was in elementary school and junior high, the high school students looked like they were late 20's or somewhere in their 30's. Also, when I was in 11th and 12th grade, quite a few classmates looked like they were already in their 20's or early to mid 30's. Actually, some classmates were already looking 5 years older than me and everyone else in my grade in junior high. Probably the first 2-4 months of 7th grade, I was questioning if some classmates got held back a few times. And a lot of classmates I was meeting for the first time in 7th grade since in my town, we have (or had since a few closed throughout the years since I finished my K-12 days) a bunch of elementary schools and then once everyone reached 7th grade, then ALL kids/students merged into one junior high school. So that further explains why I was questioning some classmates for the first 2-4 months of 7th grade. And then there was some I never saw until high school (because of class schedules and the paths being taken to get from one class to the next) and I thought they were juniors or seniors. Actually, after looking at the yearbook of my senior year, there was some I still never saw at any point in high school. I don't even remember seeing them during graduation. But yeah. I never really questioned the whole thing of actors in their late 20's or somewhere in their 30's being cast as high school students. Back in the day, they looked no different than the current high school students that I saw whenever I took field trips to the high school or ones that visited my elementary school. Plus I had some living in the same neighborhood as me for a couple years. And even some classmates started to look old-er too when my graduation class reached junior and senior year.

"Middle aged" lol

Rachel Leigh Cook was actually around 19 or 20 when she was in this. That's actually closer in age to an older high schooler than the actors in most high school movies.

Freddie Prinze Jr. was three years older, but that's still not that much of a stretch.

I think the original Grease might have been the most ridiculous movie I've seen when it comes to passing off older actors as high schoolers. Many of them were in their late twenties, and Stockard Channing was 33!