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One of the more striking aspects of Blue Is the Warmest Color, which I caught up with only recently, is that for the movie’s second half, lead actress Adèle Exarchopoulos is playing a character notably older than herself. Exarchopoulos, who’s still in her teens and looks it, is called upon to play at such adult experiences as cohabitation and starting a career. Her forward-looking performance brings to mind similar challenges faced by Sandrine Bonnaire (then 15) in A Nos Amours, Lola Créton (then 17) in Goodbye First Love, and the entire cast of Bugsy Malone. It’s common to see actors pretending to be younger than they are—it happens all the time in Hollywood biopics, when middle-aged performers incarnate their subjects from young adulthood and on. We accept this convention because we know the performers used to be young and have memories they can draw from to create their characters. Teenage actors, on the other hand, have no first-hand experience of being older and have to work much harder to suspend our disbelief.
