One thing that never fails to delight me is when TV puts extra care into making sure that the actors they cast as relatives actually look alike. Once in a while you'll find a Little Fires Everywhere kind of casting with Megan Scott and Jade Pettyjohn who look just like Reese Witherspoon, or Haunting of Hill House featuring Kate Siegel as Carla Gugino's mom. Very rarely are you demanding a 23andMe test.
That's why, when I stumbled upon an older picture of Sarah Drew, who plays mom Cindy Turner on Cruel Summer, looking just like Chiara Aurelia's Jeanette, I was instantly filled with delight. The photos, posted by Twitter user @CandidCrandell, proves Drew and Aurelia are a perfect match for mother and daughter.
OK, so technically, this photo isn't just from Drew's life: It's from the show Everwood, in which Drew portrayed Hannah Rogers, who joined The WB show in its third and fourth season. Like Jeanette in the 1993 timeline, Hannah isn't exactly the coolest girl in school — but, like Jeanette, she does eventually blossom.
Still, it's a fun find: The teenage Cindy looks just like a teen Jeanette, before Jeanette discovered a hair straightener and contact lenses. And ironically, it was Cindy who pushed Jeanette into the whole makeover game in the first place.
As Drew told TVLine, "She wants her daughter to be happy, but for Cindy, happiness equals being popular, beautiful and successful. For Jeanette, in ’93, she couldn’t care less about that stuff. It didn’t matter to her, but it mattered to her mom. So you begin to wonder like, how much influence did Cindy have on Jeanette and kind of moving her into the ’94 version of who Jeanette became? She’s literally living on top of the world because her daughter has now become the beauty queen that Cindy was."