Sam

Sam is one of the seventh-graders orbiting Maya and Anna's world at Anna Kendall Middle School, a kid caught up in the same lunchroom politics, crushes, and shifting alliances that define year 2000 adolescence. He behaves the way middle schoolers do — testing status, chasing approval, half-performing a confidence he doesn't fully have.

PEN15's trick is casting real teenagers alongside adult leads playing thirteen-year-olds, and that collision is where Sam lives — a kid whose ordinary awkwardness suddenly reads as documentary next to the show's heightened comic exaggeration. Taj Cross plays him with unforced naturalism, letting small, believable middle-school cruelty and confusion land harder than any joke could.