The Actual Age of Imaginary People

Most people have probably never seen the 1988 film For Keeps?, starring Molly Ringwald and Randall Batinkoff. It wasn’t a big hit. The acting is pretty good throughout, and the subject matter was very daring for the late 1980s, but it comes off saccharine and rather moralizing.

However! Guys!

Molly Ringwald was 19-20 years old during the filming and release of For Keeps? Her character is pregnant. And her baby-daddy is played by an actor who was also19-20 years old!

Granted, this is 8 years too late, fashion-wise, because Harry was born in 1980. For actors the right age at exactly the right time, you could watch the original version of Fame.

For Keeps?is useful, though, because it’s interesting to see a redheaded actress who (at the time) had little-if-any cosmetic surgery at exactlythe same age as Lily Potter when Harry was born.

I often think HP creators–and I include JK Rowling in this–tend to picture Lily and James much more mature than they actually were. They were 19 when Lily got pregnant. This is what real (strikingly gorgeous) 19-year-olds look like:

It’s very different from what we’re used to in film, these days, when actors of all genders begin receiving cosmetic procedures before they turn 18. Modern film actors regularly play characters 5-10 years younger than they actually are, which skews our understanding of how these ages really appear.

20-year-olds definitely don’t look anything like the actors who played James and Lily in the films, who were 43 and 34, respectively, when the first movie was released:

My parents were 21 and 22 when I was born and let me tell you: It was a fucking mess. They loved me. They had jobs. They had living, supportive parents. They had no clue what they were doing, and they were terrified.

And they weren’t soldiers in the middle of a war. So.

Always interesting, I think, to put the actual age of characters into context!