Seriously, 29 years old as 18?
I so could not digest the story, watching a really, really old 18 years old acted by a 29 year old guy. Under budget to hire a real teen?
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to answer the question, yeah seriously.
Olivia Newton-John was 29 when she played an 18 year old in "Grease".
In the same film Stockard Channing also played an 18 year old when she was 33. that's right i said 33, i think she even turned 34 before they finished filming.
Judd Nelson was 25 when he played an 18 year old in "The Breakfast Club".
Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) is 18 now, and will be 19 (and maybe even 20 if they don't hurry up) before filming completes on "Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix" (due 2007). his character is supposed to be 16 or 17 at this point.
in the 1988 movie Beaches, Lainie Kazan (born 1940) played the mother of Bette Midler's character in the film. Bette Midler was born in 1945. so if we go by the actor's real ages in comparison with the characters then Lainie's character had C.C. Bloom when she was 5.
It doesn't matter the actor's real age, if he or she is a great actor then "suspension of disbelief" will take place. (we learned that one in "Basic Instinct".)
maybe you were too busy checking out all the cute guys in this film to pay enough attention to the movie to notice the great performance by Paul Anthony (and the rest of the cast).
i just finished watching this movie, and i had no idea that he was 29. i already expect in most films that high school kids will be played by people in their 20's. it is more efficient. especially for smaller budget pictures. it costs less for the insurance on the film if actors are over 18 AND they don't have to hire on-set tutors. so can you blame them? it's no different than a 50 year old actor playing a role where the character is supposed to be 35. a twentysomething can play a teen better than a teen. they have already been through all of the drama of being a teenager and can use that in their performance. while a 16 or 17 year old still has all of that to experience. Paul Anthony's performance did remind me a lot of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick, Mysterious Skin) who is 25 and still playing teen roles, and brilliantly i might add. one of the most underrated actors working now.
You paid a whole dollar for that?
Okay, fine, "suspension of belief" is all well and good, but we're not blind, and we're not going to completey ignore certain aspects of the movie for the sake of suspension of disbelief. If I see an actor who looks like as if they're 30 playing an 18 year old, it's going to be a bit harder to buy ito it, no matter how good of an actor he is.
Besides, all those actors you mentioned LOOKED the part of the characters they were playing. Stockard, Nelson, Newton-John and Radcliffe looked more believable as teens than Paul Anthony did. It's not so much the fact that it's a much older actor playing a much younger role, or that only teens or young adults should play the roles of teenages in movies, but that it didn't LOOK as if they're was such a big gap in the age difference between them and their characters, unlike Anthony here. Suppose Paul was an actual 18 year old, if he looked like a 30 year old and was playing a teen, it would still be a little hard to swallow. It really has nothing to do with the actors' "real" ages.
If there's no WILLING suspension of disbelief there's no theatre. Don't invest the time in the movie and you don't reap the benefits of the experience it encompasses. Nobody's fault but yours.
"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde
"Olivia Newton-John was 29 when she played an 18 year old in "Grease". "
Yeah, but she could actually pass for eighteen, the other guy definently could'nt .