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Sometime the reverse is true.
Keira Knightley had just turned 18 when she filmed Love Actually (2003). She played a newlywed woman in her mid to late twenties. Her famous "floppy hat" was used because she had a giant teenager zit on her forehead.
Sometimes the casting is dead on.
Mariel Hemingway was 16 when she played the 17 year old love interest to Woody Allen's 44 year old man in Manhattan.
I think, in movies, a big driver in casting is trying to guide the audience. Had they cast actual teenagers in Grease, the audience would have been scandalized by the subject matter rather than focus on the comedy and music. That's why they cast a teen to play a teen in Manhattan. The entire thing is meant to feel off and uncomfortable, which would not have been apparent had they cast a woman in her mid twenties. They cast a teen Keira Knightley because they needed the audience to instantly understand why the character had a crush on her. Whether we like to admit it or not, our monkey brains register teen women simultaneously as angelic/pure and "peak breeding material" (yes, it's yuck when put that way).
Movie magic is built on multiple layers of subconscious manipulation.
Even with the casting choices, I'm flabbergasted that Grease became a cult classic. As far as I can tell the overall message of the film is: "if a woman wants to keep her man, she must act like a dirty slut."
Didn't Travolta's Greaser character turn clean-cut in order to be with her? I always thought the point was that they originally liked each other for who they were, without pretense but society was forcing them to conform to standards and pigeonhole them.
Or maybe it was all about the dancing and singing and we are trying to get too deep into it.
To be fair, people don't really watch musicals for their plots.
That's only true of badly (or barely) written musicals like Cats.
Great musicals like Les Miserables or Hedwig and the Angry Inch have plots as good as the songs or, in the latter case, even better!
Yea and that "Did she put up a fight?" line in Summer Nights always creeped me out.
very related: https://lemmy.ml/post/24852141/16134297
Odd question: there's an IT Crowd joke about Keira Knightly being in a movie where she was stabbed in the face, is that based off reality?