This is something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. Representation has been a major topic in Hollywood in recent years, and while there have been colossal missteps (yeesh, all the whitewashing, not to mention Jeffrey Tambour, a man accused of sexually harassing trans women, winning awards for playing a trans woman,) there have also been important steps forward. It’s been great to see more and more movies/TV shows that reflect people from different marginalized communities, telling a variety of stories in a wide range of genres.
But in all this conversation, actors/characters with disabilities often feel left out of consideration. Characters with disabilities are still vastly underrepresented across the pop-culture landscape, and when they are, more often than not, they’re played by able-bodied actors. Things like whitewashing still happen, but when they do, there’s generally a swift and vocal outcry that gets mainstream attention. When characters with disabilities are played by able-bodied actors, any backlash from particular disability communities is rarely picked up by major media outlets. For most people, it seems like it’s not even on their radar.
If Hollywood ever is in a position to face direct criticism for these casting decisions, the answer is usually that the film/show includes depictions of the character prior to whatever accident resulted in their disability, so the project needs to cast an able-bodied actor in order to film the opening scenes/the flashbacks/whatever. In the case of Kevin McHale as Artie on Glee, it was so they could film dream sequences where Artie was dreaming, of which they shot fewer than maybe five over six seasons of television (meanwhile, in the one episode where Artie was supposed to do wheelchair dancing, they very transparently used a double whenever Artie had to do anything even remotely complicated.) Throughout the years, there’s been a similar argument about why trans characters “have to” be cast with cisgender actors, so the characters can be portrayed pre-transition.
First of all, this is dumb, shady reasoning. Second, as I’ve said before, stories about a character becoming disabled through injury/illness/whatever frame the disability as an immediate crisis point. Rather than being a facet of the character’s identity, one of many, it becomes the driving conflict of their story, the adversity they need to struggle to overcome. It ignores the fact that people with disabilities have plenty going on in their lives that have little or nothing to do with the physical aspects of their disability. They fall in love, try for job promotions, go on vacations, raise their kids, get drunk on Friday nights, and more. Their disability might affect their experiences during these activities – whether through societal discrimination or inaccessible infrastructure – but “being disabled” is rarely the central narrative of someone’s life.
So absolutely, actors with disabilities should be cast in more roles, including characters who don’t “have to” be disabled/aren’t necessarily written as disabled. Actors with disabilities can easily populate meetcute rom-coms, workplace stories, group-of-friends sitcoms, coming-of-age teen stories, superhero origin stories, divorce dramas, parental comedies, wild-night-out adventures, and plenty of other films/shows that able-bodied actors are cast in, practically by default every single day.
That’s the goal, that’s what Hollywood should be. But the wild thing is, even if Hollywood only committed to casting authentically for characters specifically written as having a disability, even if they only scraped together that absolute bare minimum, representation for actors with disabilities would increase dramatically. Because probably at least nine out of ten disabled characters on TV or in movies right now are played by able-bodied actors, and there’s no reason for it. For an example, let’s just look at Marvel, where Lauren Ridloff is being touted as the franchise’s first Deaf superhero and is the first actor with a disability to be featured in a major role in the MCU. And yet, she’s far from the first disabled character to appear in a Marvel property. Nick Fury is partially-sighted and wears an eyepatch, Matt Murdock is blind, Sousa from Agent Carter/the last season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. walks with a crutch due to a war injury, and Razor Fist from Shang-Chi is an amputee who attaches blades to his prosthetic. When it comes to characters who become disabled over the course of their time in the franchise, we’ve got Bucky, Rhodey, Klaue from Black Panther, Agent Coulson and Yo-Yo from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Misty Knight from Luke Cage, not to mention I’m pretty sure I saw Clint wearing a hearing aid in the trailer that just dropped for Hawkeye. And that is just off the top of my head – I could very well be forgetting more.
How many of these characters could’ve been played by actors with disabilities? Concerns about portraying them pre-accident doesn’t make much difference when you’ve got that Marvel money – since Bucky’s vibranium arm is frequently CGI anyway, they could’ve easily dressed Bucky in long sleeves throughout the first Captain America film and CGI’d a hand over an actor’s prosthetic when necessary. Some might argue that an actor with a disability would be unable to meet the stunt demands of the character. After all, Matt’s powers essentially make up for his vision loss. Could a blind actor convincingly kick ass as Daredevil? To that, I say this: I stopped trying to guess what people with disabilities could or couldn’t do after Nyle DiMarco, a Deaf man, won Dancing with the Stars. No doubt training and teaching fight choreography to a blind actor would pose different challenges and require different techniques than doing the same with a sighted actor, but “different” isn’t “impossible.” If Marvel could’ve led the way with even a fraction of these characters, let alone all of them, think of the opportunities they could’ve provided to a host of undiscovered actors.
* * *
A nice long interview with Tony Leung Chiu-wai about Shang-Chi, life, acting, and water sports (so many water sports!) The interviewer is someone he worked with early in his career, so they know each other and get a good back-and-forth going. I really enjoy hearing Leung talk about the work he did creating Wenwu.
No comments:
Post a Comment