Ben Platt reportedly deleted a tweet calling out people 'being jerks' over his age in the 'Dear Evan Hansen' trailer

• Ben Platt played the lead role as a high schooler in the Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen."
• Now a movie-version of the story has been made, and 27-year-old Platt is reprising his role.
• Platt tweeted and then deleted a comment about "people being jerks" over his age.

Ben Platt received much acclaim for his starring role as a high school teen in the Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen." Now the play has been turned into a feature film, and 27-year-old Platt is reprising the part of Evan Hansen.

Though adults playing teenagers isn't anything new in Hollywood, Twitter criticisms of his older appearance among high-school students seems to have rankled the actor.

"Thank u from the bottom of my [heart] for the outpouring of trailer love yesterday," Platt wrote in a since-deleted tweet, which you can see in Variety's report here. "The film required me to revisit areas of personal pain, so seeing ppl excited & moved makes it so deeply worth it. PS to the randos being jerks about age, read this great article and/or watch grease."

Platt was around 21 years old when he first took on the role of Evan Hansen, an anxious teen who creates a mess for himself when he gets involved in the aftermath of a classmate's death by suicide.

People's reactions to the trailer on Twitter included plenty of jokes about his age and appearance seemingly standing out.

In the tweet Platt has since deleted, he was referring to a Vanity Fair article about the "Dear Evan Hansen" movie.

"I think everybody obviously had in their minds that I wasn't going to stay teen-adjacent forever," Platt said in an interview with Vanity Fair. "The need to get it done was a little urgent. Then of course the pandemic happened, and I kind of assumed that was that - it would be a no-go, and by the time the pandemic was over, I'd have outgrown it."

But Platt was able to film his part shortly before his 27th birthday last fall. He told Vanity Fair that he has lost "about 15 pounds" with a "very specific diet," plus grew his hair out and shaved his face frequently to make sure he didn't have five o'clock shadow.

"I was just stripping myself into being a teenager for the last time," Platt told Vanity Fair. "For what is hopefully the last time."

Platt is joining a long history of 20-something actors playing the role of high school students in TV shows and movies. He referenced "Grease" in his tweet, which famously posed adults in their 30s as 18 year olds. Even Netflix's kid-centric series "Stranger Things" stars 28-year-old Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, who is 18.

You can watch the trailer for "Dear Evan Hansen" below.