Re: Aidan Gallagher as Five

Gallagher was 15 when he started playing the role in 2019 (he's 20 now). Film and television have always been hungry for actors who can play younger than their actual age. Linked below is a photograph of Harry Eversfield, who in 1885 appeared in a British play called The Magistrate. You wouldn't guess that at the time he was 19. The Magistrate, a farce written by Arthur Wing Pinero, centers on a judge whose new wife has lied to him about her age. The pretense requires her son, played by Eversfield, to pass for 14, even though he is actually 19. (From the photo of Harry, one supposes he could manage that.) The play was a hit, giving rise to a 1917 musical version (called The Boy, also very successful, and a film version in 1934 with legendary comedian Will Hay as the husband. (Harry rates a mention in a book I have been, thanks to Manny's link, plowing through about Victorian pederasty: Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde by Michael Matthew Kaylor. Citing Denis Donoghue's 1995 book Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls, Kaylor reports the following comment by Uranian poet Marc-André Raffalovich: "I am pleased to remember that [Pater] several times met Harry Eversfield, so successful as the boy in Pinero’s play.") hugzu ;-p (https site) Photograph of Harry Eversfield (Victoria and Albert Museum) [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst]