Happy Birthday to Bianca Lawson, the Actress Who Played Teens on TV for 20 Years

Adults play teens on TV and in movies all the time. It’s such a trend that there’s even a Tumblr documenting it, the painstakingly thorough Actual Teen vs. Adult Teen. It’s obvious why this is a thing, why 22-year-old Tom Holland is still playing high school student Peter Parker. There are a whole lotta rules and regulations that limit how much minors can work! You cast an actual teen and they can legally only work half as long as an adult “teen.”

But while most actors quickly jump from teenage roles (Alyson Hannigan was 23 when she played a 10th grader on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to adult roles (Hannigan on How I Met Your Mother), there’s one actor that made a whole career out of carrying a backpack and walking by lockers: I’m talking about Bianca Lawson, the patron saint of adults playing teens.

You might know Lawson from her roles as a teen actor on ’90s sitcoms, or maybe you know her from playing teens on late ’90s teen dramas, or maybe you know her from playing teens in the prestige and YA dramas of the ’10s. Lawson, who turns 40 today, played high schoolers on TV for almost 20 years. There’s a reason why Lawson keeps getting cast in supernatural TV shows. Her eternal youth is itself supernatural!

Lawson’s career as a teen actor started out with a bang when she was cast as one of the original members of Saved by the Bell: The New Class in 1993. Lawson, then 14 years old, played brainy high school student Megan Jones. A 14-year-old playing a 14-year-old? Practically unheard of on TV! She followed up The New Class with a recurring role on Sister, Sister as Rhonda Coley from 1995 to 1996.

Lawson then co-starred with ’70s TV icon Sherman Hemsley on the UPN sitcom Goode Bheavior. Lawson was 17 at the time, playing Hemsley’s teenage granddaughter on the short-lived show. Lawson jumped from UPN to competitor The WB for her next two roles on two definitive teen dramas.

Lawson was 18 when she played a Jamaican vampire slayer named Kendra on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Equipped with Mr. Pointy and a dubious accent, Lawson’s brief tenure on the show made her a fan favorite character. Lawson had a slightly longer stint on Dawson’s Creek, recurring in Season 3 as Principal Green’s daughter Nikki. At the time she was 19 playing a high schooler, which is still way more accurate than Hollywood ever gets. Fact: James Van Der Beek and Sarah Michelle Gellar are two years older than Lawson!

It’s after this turn-of-the-century run on The WB where Lawson’s characters stop aging with her. She played a college student in 2006’s Pledge This! when she was 27, alongside Paris Hilton (b. 1981). She had a recurring role on The Secret Life of the American Teenager on 2009 as the 23-year-old Shawna (Lawson was 30). Then she took on the role of Emily Bennett in The Vampire Diaries, playing the 19th century witch in flashbacks spanning the first five seasons. They could pull off jumping back to roughly the same time period five years later because Lawson doesn’t age!

And then, at the age of 31, Lawson played 16-year-old Maya St. Germain on Pretty Little Liars!

On the exhaustive PLL wiki, Maya’s birthday is given as April 10, 1994. That makes Maya 5,500 days younger than Lawson (or 15 years and 21 days, but 5,500 sounds crazier). For comparison, the other PLL leads were born between 1985 and 1996.

While on Pretty Little Liars, Lawson also played a high school student in the pilot episode of American Horror Story in 2011.

Again for comparison, Christian Serratos (left) was born in 1990 and Shelby Young (right) was born in 1992. Reminder: Lawson (middle) was born in 1979.

After this resurgence in teen roles for Lawson, she actually made the jump to playing adults really quickly. In August 2012, you could actually watch her playing high school faculty member Marin Morrell on Teen Wolf and high school student Maya St. Germain on Pretty Little Liars.

The jump to playing adults in Teen Wolf stuck for Lawson, as she’s played adults in her recurring roles on Witches of East End in 2014 (below) and Rogue in 2015. It is, however, kinda wild that on Witches of East End, Lawson played a character who made a pact with a warlock to never age. We’re sure warlocks aren’t real, right?

All that leads us to Lawson’s current starring role on Queen Sugar. Lawson, who turns 40 today, is currently playing adult character Darla, a recovering drug addict and mother. It’s a grown-up role for a grown-up actor.

But if you think Lawson’s done playing younger, you don’t know Lawson. Maybe her days of playing a high schooler are over, but she could easily kickstart a new era of her career playing college students on YA dramas!

Stream Pretty Little Liars on Netflix