Hollywood keeps on insisting that these actors grew up together, even while their hairlines tell a different story. (Dramas don’t usually have this problem, though I get a kick out of imagining a version of Mystic River that replaced Tim Robbins with Matthew McConaughey.) And second, because it seems incredibly easy to avoid - just say that the characters met at work, or at a bar, or while playing D&D, or at one of the many other places where you can meet and befriend people who are a different age from you. Why do I love it when this happens? First, because it’s silly. (It even extends outside comedies in the thriller The Gift, Bateman’s high-school classmate was played by the five-years-younger Joel Edgerton.) It’s like he’s been frozen in time as season-two Michael Bluth. ![]() Playing a character nearly a decade younger than he really is happens to Bateman a lot - This Is Where I Leave You also gave us Corey Stoll (March 14, 1976) as his older brother, and in The Change-Up, his best friend since elementary school was played by Ryan Reynolds (October 23, 1976). My favorite example is This Is Where I Leave You, which imagined a world where Jason Bateman (January 14, 1969) and Rose Byrne (July 24, 1979) were old school chums. And you especially see it in films about middle-aged men reconnecting with their high-school sweethearts, who thanks to the magic of the movies are often played by women nearly a decade their junior. You see it in Girls Trip, where Tiffany Haddish (December 3, 1979) was supposed to be college besties with three actresses born in the early ‘70s. You see it in minor examples like the recent Most Likely to Murder, where Adam Pally (March 18, 1982), Rachel Bloom (April 3, 1987), and Vincent Kartheiser (May 5, 1979) all play former high-school classmates. Once you start thinking about this thing, you notice it everywhere. The whole movie I kept waiting for someone to bring up the fact that one of the friends was six-to-eight years younger than the other two, but for some reason the filmmakers decided to address boring things like “plot” and “themes” instead.Īidy Bryant, Busy Phillips, and Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty. ![]() One of the friends is played by Busy Phillips (June 25, 1979), which checks out, but the other one is played by Aidy Bryant (May 7, 1987), who was all of eight years old when Gabrielle Carteris decided to leave 90210. Schumer’s character has two lifelong friends, and the three of them share the interests and cultural references of people born on the Gen-X/millennial border, which in this case means they all have matching tattoos of 90210’s Andrea Zuckerman. Take the recent I Feel Pretty, a star vehicle for Amy Schumer (June 1, 1981). Now, you might argue that Buress’s character could have been talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Wikipedia says is sometimes also called the Gulf War, to which I say (1) no one calls the Iraq War “the Gulf War,” and (2) that would ruin the point of this post, which is about my favorite weird movie trope: comedies that get actors of wildly different ages to play childhood friends. ![]() It’s a funny bit, but even in the moment, I couldn’t help but wonder, Wait, how old was Hannibal Buress during the Gulf War? So I Googled it: Hannibal Buress was born on February 4, 1983, which means in real life he was in somewhere near the second grade during Operation Desert Storm. For instance, at his own prom, he and his buddies convinced one guy to join the Army - and that friend was immediately killed in the Gulf War. Early in the movie, a character played by Hannibal Buress reassures his teenage step-daughter that prom is a night where friends deepen their bonds. ![]() But there’s also one quiet moment I can’t stop thinking about. Most of the memorable moments in the recent sex farce Blockers are the big cartoonish ones, which you might expect from a movie that gives us John Cena chugging beer through his anus. Annabelle Wallis, Jon Hamm, Jake Johnson, Ed Helms, Isla Fisher, and Hannibal Buress in Tag.
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