#but he was really funny and he'd made the junior reserves for a major sports team

[pynkhues]

Jacob and Sam truly looked like zygotes as older teenagers/young adults. Those are just little babies. Adorable, but definitely examples of how some people reach peak hotness starting in their 30s.

Kind of interesting, for Sam in particular, it seems like he's played a lot of roles where being handsome is part of the character, and I'm now being a weirdo and wondering if he was considered handsome as he grew up or if he grew into that. He somehow doesn't always act, to me, like someone who's viscerally aware of being as handsome as he is. Not that I expect good-looking people to all be arrogant, the most beautiful people I've known have tended to be very nice, but there's just a quality...i don't know how to explain it.

(x)

They both definitely grew into their features, haha. It must be such a weird thing to age as an actor, and constantly have people discovering performances of yours from when you were younger. I think about that a lot with child stars, particularly child stars who are part of shows and films that become pop cultural juggernauts like The Goonies or Stranger Things. Like to grow up and have your (sometimes very!) younger face be a part of everyone's history instead of just your own must be a really weird feeling.

As for Sam - - I'd say yes and no? He's definitely done a few romances, which I think does usually mean being handsome is high on the casting agent's requirements list, haha, and I think having a certain look was a consideration for both Lambs of God and The Riot Club, but he's also played a lot of roles where I think he's cast as a bit of an Australian every-man, actually? I'm thinking of the roles that I've seen him in, and he plays a highschool teacher in The Hunting, a sergeant in The Drover's Wife, a country boy in Bloom, a soldier in The Railway Man, hell, even playing Dale in The Newsreader is I think is more about being photogenic than it is about necessarily being handsome. Even that clip of his first TV role, he was a plumber.

If he was considered handsome as he grew up - - who knows, haha. Probably. He's also well-documented as being a theatre kid / farm boy at a very prestigious all-boys private school in Sydney in the mid-00s though, so I imagine he was humbled pretty regularly to put it mildly.