While Rachel McAdams has played many young people throughout her career, the entertainment magazine Radar claimed that she supposedly lied about her age just to get those roles. At one point, IMDb.com said McAdams was 28, while a November 2005 Details magazine profile listed her age as 29. McAdams’s then-publicist, Ame Van Iden, denounced the latter, so a Details source said the publication would only run a correction after Van Iden clarified that “IMDb had been notified of its error.”
As of May 2007, when the Radar piece was published, IMDb still listed McAdams’ age at that point as 30. Elle magazine wrote about McAdams for its April cover of that year, saying, “IMDb states (her age) is 30, but is really, truly, ask her mother, 28.” The actress’ rep told Radar that she was indeed 28, but a source involved with one of her then-recent movies said that it was “no secret among the producers” that she cut off a couple of years in interviews but added them back when she was up for parts that called for a more “mature” actress. The point of all this? It may explain why McAdams played a high school student in Mean Girls when she was 24 years old.