When the beloved time-bending rom-com 13 Happening 30 hit theaters in 2004, younger actor Christa B. Allen was precisely the identical age as her character, Jenna Rink. After all, Allen shared that character with the movie’s star, Jennifer Garner, who performs the 30-year-old journal editor the impatient 13-year-old needs herself into. 13 Happening 30 was Allen’s first main film function, although she’s gone on to behave in dozens extra films and TV reveals, even taking part in the youthful model of one other Garner character. She’s additionally big on TikTok and has a particular fondness for the comedy that kicked off her profession. Learn on to study extra about Allen’s life as we speak.
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Allen was such a professional at being a younger Garner, she was invited to strive her hand at it once more a couple of years after 13 Happening 30. In 2009, she performed Garner’s character Jenny as a teen within the rom-com Ghosts of Girlfriends Previous, co-starring Matthew McConaughey. She advised Leisure Tonight final yr that the older star really helpful her for the function.
“I’ll simply say that me taking part in her in Ghosts of Girlfriends Previous was a perform of Jennifer talking up. They had been seeking to forged the function they usually had been like, ‘We do not know what to do. We’re looking for a youthful you,’ and Jen was like, ‘Name up Christa. She’s carried out this earlier than and he or she’s good at it,'” Allen advised the outlet. “So I actually owe that function to her as properly. And that is once more, simply chatting with her kindness.”
Clearly, no actor could make an entire profession out of being one other star’s youthful doppelgänger. Since 13 Happening 30, Allen has appeared in TV reveals together with Gray’s Anatomy, ER, Wizards of Waverly Place, Child Daddy, and Code Black. She was one of many stars of the drama collection Revenge, taking part in Charlotte Grayson from 2011 to 2015. She’s performed elements in function movies together with Youth in Revolt and The Valley, in addition to a number of TV films, the newest of which was 2021’s Christmas for Retains.
Between roles, Allen is conquering social media. The actor has practically 2 million followers on the video app TikTok, the place she posts the whole lot from preparing movies to suit checks to comedy sketches. In a single 2020 video, which went viral past customers of the app, Allen celebrated Halloween by donning her costume—grownup Jenna’s multicolored costume that she wears to {a magazine} social gathering—to a soundtrack of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Anyone,” the identical tune the montage is about to in 13 Happening 30. She’s additionally recreated different well-known ensembles from the film on TikTok, beautiful followers with how a lot she appears like Garner now that she’s all grown up.
Because it was for lots of entertainers and common folks alike, it was the pandemic that attracted Allen to TikTok. “As a result of the business was mainly shut down, particularly at first, we simply did not know what was going to occur,” she advised Attract final yr. “I used to be like, this TikTok factor has some momentum. If I do TikTok prefer it’s my job, it is going to develop into my job, and it has.”
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Final yr, looking forward to her thirtieth birthday, Allen wrote an essay for Attract about lastly reaching that milestone her teenage character was so trying ahead to. The actor says within the piece that she’s at all times felt a connection to “folks turning 13, 30, and everybody in between,” including, “I’ve develop into a mirror of kinds, reflecting again to them the extreme emotions they’ve about reaching these ages.”
However, Allen additionally writes that she was “conflicted” about acknowledging her birthday, as a result of she would not suppose that an individual’s age is all that necessary.
“The world is so desirous to outline us by age, and I do know that one other particular person’s try and outline me or put me in a field based mostly on my age or some other quantity related to me is a mirrored image of them, not of me,” Allen says within the essay. “However what’s age however vitality? I like to consider my vitality as ageless.”
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