Ginny and Georgia‘s Sarah Weisglass assessed surprising concerns about the review Diesel La Torracathe fan favorite Austin character.
“He’s doing a great job with it. He’s taking it all in stride,” Waisglass, 27, said exclusively. Us Weekly while talking about his new film How to lose a popularity contest. “And how lucky are we all to have a job we can grow with?”
Waisglass, who plays Max in the hit Netflix series, noted the growth momentum of La Torracaadding: “He’s taller than me and he’s always been my partner because he was a child actor. So I remember being too young to hang out with adults, but too old to hang out with people my own age. So I really got it.”
She continued: “It’s weird that I met him when I was 8 years old and now here’s this guy talking about his process and stuff. It’s wild. But the funniest thing was the first time we read each other. We’re always passing the table. We’re like, ‘Hey, I’m playing Max.’ And we get to Diesel and he’s got his deep voice. We had a lot of laughs.”
After Season 3 aired in 2025, viewers questioned whether 14-year-old La Torraca was already too old to play Ginny’s brother while pointing out how far the Netflix show went in Season 3 to hide the young actor’s growth spurt.
Creator Sarah Lampert chimed in at that point why wasn’t the show trying to be exact with Austin’s age.
“Anyone who works on the show will tell you that I’m picky about details. I’m specific about so many things. So things like Diesel growing up five (plus) years, I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ Because you can’t control that,” he exclusively told Us in June 2025. “We can’t recast. Diesel is Austin.”
Lampert made it clear there were no plans to bring someone younger to play in Austin.
“There are a few jokes that we are planning to make. We are aware that it is growing and that helps us,” he said before acknowledging that viewers will have to “suspend their disbelief” because La Torraca “grew up and is a television program.”
“You don’t want to do a big jump in time because that really misses the emotional storytelling. Because of that, the flashbacks no longer make sense in terms of the flashback timeline,” he added. “Time is nothing but a construct in Wellsbury.”
La Torraca, on the other hand, addressed concerns while sharing the creative ways the show disguised its obvious growth spurt.
“Well, honestly, we kind of ignore it!” she told Teen Vogue that same month. “It’s like… there’s a 14-year-old girl sitting at the table with Harry Potter glasses that are supposed to be 9. And that’s okay! In some shots, I had to bend my knees a little to look a little shorter than (Antonia), or they brought her a box of apples a few times, but for the most part we carried on.
La Torraca continued: “Being a 9-year-old for six years when you’re growing up… I’ve grown with him, but I’ve also grown away from him because he was 8 when we started, now I’m 14. There’s a lot of difference in the way he moves and acts and talks. I have to raise the voice register, really, to feel a little sunken, to feel a little quiet. 9-year-old girl.”
before Ginny and Georgia returns for season 4, Waisglass got a role at Tubi’s How to lose a popularity contestwhich allowed him to play someone other than Max Baker.
“One of my biggest fears is that I can only play Maxine Baker, because, like, my energy bleeds into my performances,” Waisglass said. we. “And one thing I was really worried about was, in this movie, is it just going to be Max in a different movie?”
Waisglass said she tried “very hard” to find aspects of the character that felt different.
“I was very intentional about silly things like posture and tone of voice,” he explained. “So it was the same energy, just different execution, I guess. And I hope it goes well.”
How to lose a popularity contest is playing on Tubi now.