The Baby-Sitters Club Star Larisa Oleynik Says Underage Dating Plotline Is a ‘Huge Hole’ in the Film

Larisa Oleynik knows there’s a major flaw in The Baby-Sitters Club movie.

The movie, which turns 30 this year, is beloved among a generation of millennials, but on the June 23 episode of Pod Meets World, Oleynik, 44, broke down the movie’s plots with hosts Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle. Oleynik — best known for her titular role in The Secret World of Alex Mack — played Dawn in the movie.

But the movie’s most questionable plot involved Bre Blair’s Stacey and Christian Oliver’s Luca. Stacey meets Luca when she babysits for his cousins, and immediately becomes smitten. Luca feels the same, but Stacey is harboring a secret — he’s 17, but she just 13.

Fishel, 44, noted that in the movie, Stacey wonders if she should tell Luca about her diabetes. “Forget the diabetes,” Friedle, 48, joked, “How about the fact that it’s [statutory]?”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, to any of you listening, you do not need to tell a boy you just met about your diabetes. You should, however, tell him that you’re 13,” Fishel said. 

Later in the episode, the hosts asked Oleynik about if there was any dating on set, and Friedle joked that somebody was dating Oliver, who died in a 2024 plane crash at age 51. But Oleynik said the actor definitely wasn’t interested in his costars because he was so much older.

“He was like 19,” Oleynik said. “He and I had worked on something together recently and he was like, ‘I was so uncomfortable. Being like a 19-year-old man amidst all of these 13-year-old girls.’ ” Blair was actually 14 at the time, too, and Oliver felt bad about “having to kiss” her for their scene. 

In the movie, the drama comes to a head when Stacey and Tricia Joe’s Claudia try to get into a nightclub with fake IDs and get found out. Luca is “furious,” Fishel said in her recap, but noted it was his “responsibility” to ask about Stacey’s age. Oleynik noted, also, that when he’s upset, Luca says “dammit” twice because the movie’s creators wanted a PG-13 rating so that it would appeal to tweens, not kids, which maybe helps explain the plotline, too. 

At the end of the movie, Luca apologizes to Stacey and tells her he’ll be back next summer, when she’ll be 14. But Oleynik and the hosts noted this solved nothing, since he would be 18 

“The way they said that, too, was like, well, that answers all the problems,” Friedle said. “What?”

“That’s the one huge hole. It really is,” Oleynik said of the plotline. “I’m like, wow. I don’t think we can dig ourselves out of that one.”

Fishel noted that they could have made Luca 16, which is “still not great” but would have been better. “You are completely different human beings, though, at 13 and 17,” Friedle added. “You might as well be 20 and 80. You’re just two different people.”

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Strong, 45, noted he felt that way just watching the film, because he dated Rachael Leigh Cook, who played Mary Anne, two years after the movie, but in the movie, she “looked like a child.” “Watching this was creepy,” he joked. 

Oleynik said she had the opposite experience, because Cook, now 45, was 15 when they made the movie and she was 13. “She felt like a teenager to me,” she said, calling Cook “the coolest.” 

The Baby-Sitters Club also starred Schuyler Fisk, Zelda Harris, Stacy Linn Ramsower and Ellen Burstyn. Netflix also adapted the series of beloved novels, written by Ann M. Martin, into a 2020 series.