This post is inspired by a recent cameo in X-Men: First Class that confirms for the film series what followers of the comic  have known for a while: Wolverine is older than Professor Xavier.  We thought it’d be fun to take a closer look at characters in movies that are much older than they actually look.

Wolverine (X-Men)- You wouldn’t think Hugh Jackman would be older than Patrick Stewart, but in the superhero universe anything is possible.  As Wolverine, he slices and dices through countless enemies (in a very PG-13 way, of course).  It’ll  come in handy when he needs to wait in line to sign up for Social Security.

Aragorn (Lord of the Rings)- Although it wasn’t revealed in the theatrical version of the films, the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers lets the audience who missed the books know that this limber Ranger From the North is actually over 80 years old.  Though Gandalf is several thousand years old, you can believe it when you see his beard.  The fact that a human made it to 80 and is just approaching his midlife crisis is pretty impressive.

Esther (The Orphan)– If you haven’t seen this movie and intend to, stop reading.  The Orphan‘s big reveal is that this isn’t a kid that’s terrorizing these poor, innocent parents, it’s a dwarf prostitute.  Yeah, a dwarf prostitute.  It’s campy, just like the movie and its entertainingly ghoulish thrills, which is why it (kind of) works.

John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich)–  Although this one is on a technicality, it’s still pretty amusing.  At the end of Charlie Kaufman and Spkie Jonze’s brilliant Being John Malkovich a group of elderly people need to enter the portal into John Malkovich’s mind in order to continue living.  If you’ve seen the movie, that probably makes sense to you.  This means that at the end of the movie, Malkovich has 500+ years under his belt.  Oddly enough, it makes him happier at the end of the movie, but only because it isn’t him inside his body anymore.

Vampires (Twilight, Let the Right One In)- Although it’s presented as a big reveal in movies like Twilight, we know vampires are old.  The attractive, Cullen-era vamp means that the protagonists will be more surprised than they were in the age of Nosferatu and Dracula, though.  If movies like Let the Right One In and its American remake weren’t marketed as vampire movies, this might come as more of a shock to the audience that that twelve-year-old has been twelve for a really long time.