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It's not just about young people - there are films being made that deal with women getting older. That's a huge bonus, and here in America, that's a huge step forward.

Most child actors, once they hit 18, once they hit 21, that's it. Even teenage kids often don't make the transition.

There is this thing in America where actresses reach 40 and go mad. The film industry wants all these young people.

It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.

We teenage girls are faced with a quandary: we know what we want but are forced to wait for our male counterparts to grow up. We are ready for intense and meaningful relationships, but research indicates that males will not reach maturity until their mid-20s.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

You know what makes me feel old? When I see girls who are 20-something, or the new crop of actresses, and think, Aren't we kind of the same age?

It took me a long time to make that leap to being a grown-up and responsible adult because I carried on being a child actor into my late twenties. It's OK to be precocious when you're young, but when you're a man of about 27 or 28 and playing a 17-year-old in a TV show, it kind of prolongs your childhood.

Young actors are pretty fantastic. I can't even imagine doing stuff like that when I was a kid.