I Just Found out That Alexa Demie is *Probably* 30 and now I'm Even More Creeped out by 'That Scene'

If you follow me on social media, then you know I’m pretty whipped for just about anything the Illegal Civ boys do. So naturally, Mid90s was added to the list of “movies I’ll watch when I finally feel like it” and when I saw it was leaving Amazon Prime, I jumped on the chance. Skate Kitchen is one of my favorite movies and I was excited to see a similar plot from a teenage boy’s perspective. For the most part, I really liked the film and thought the storyline had a lot of untapped potential, but there was one scene that took away from everything and overall just ruined my impression of the movie. If you’ve seen it, then you know exactly what scene I’m talking about.

The party scene.

For those of you who haven’t seen it (consider yourselves lucky) let me set the story. 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) meets Ruben, Ray, Fuckshit, and Fourth Grade, a group of older skaters played by Gio Galicia, Na-Kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, and Ryder McLaughlin respectively. Although he initially has no skateboarding experience, Stevie quickly charms his way into the group. Which leads to teenage boys doing teenage boy things like smoking and drinking. As someone who was once 13, I find that to be totally reasonable behavior and it served as a great plot point in this coming of age film, but it didn’t end there.

While at a house party Stevie is approached by walking Wet Seal billboard Estee (Euphoria’s Alexa Demie) and immediately the alarm bells go off because I KNOW where this is going. Estee goes on praising Stevie for being “at that age before guys become dicks,” and the next thing you know they are hand-in-hand walking into a random bedroom. While the scene doesn’t show much, just a little pg-13 makeout action, it’s later confirmed by Stevie that more happened.

While Estee’s age is never confirmed it’s safe to assume she’s close in age to Fuckshit, a high school junior with his driver’s license. While it’s creepy, some may argue that a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old hooking up isn’t *that weird* in the grand scheme of things, even if the scene did make me super uncomfy. And if the genders were swapped and a 13-year-old girl was hooking up with the 16-year-old boy I don’t think anyone would really care, unfortunately. It’s just acting, right? Plus Demie was only like 22 when the movie was shot anyway.

Except she wasn’t… we think.

Demie has never outright confirmed her age, but the more fans started to dig into her past the less the timeline added up. Most notably, a photo of her and the Kardashians in 2007, which if she was born in 1995 would make her 12 years old, but she looks like she’s at least in her mid-teens, especially compared to Kendall Jenner who would have actually been 12 at the time the photo was taken. Classmates of Demie claim they graduated high school together in 2008, which would make her about 30 today. A solid five years older than what the media originally believed.

Hollywood is terribly ageist and oftentimes once women reach their late 20s they are considered old. In a lot of situations, exact age doesn’t really matter in acting, what matters is what age you look. But sometimes that can get a little tricky when it comes to adults portraying teenagers. Especially if they have to makeout with an 11-year-old. While I totally respect Demie for keeping her age on the DL, if I was in her situation I would have passed on kissing a child. Demie on the other hand, wasn’t bothered by the age difference and in fact was very proud of that scene and her involvement in the film…. ick.

While the age gap between characters was enough to ruin the movie for me, once I found out that there is a 15 year age difference between the two actors I hated it even more. While I believe that art is a reflection of reality and reality is uncomfortable, I’ve noticed that there is a good uncomfortable and a bad uncomfortable. Mid90s is the bad type.

In the film, there is already enough going on with Stevie’s behavior to show him growing up and losing his innocence without needing to add in that hookup scene. There are also no negative repercussions that come from their hookup, so I truly don’t see the purpose of it, other than to enforce hypermasculinity and patriarchal ideals, which the film never lacked in the first place. So if you’re looking for a great coming of age film about skateboarding, spare yourself the heebie-jeebies and watch Skate Kitchen instead.