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I have so many things to say about Sia’s new movie called Music, and I bet there are some thing no one has even thought of that are issues here.
Long thread ahead
Long thread ahead
First of all, I say what I say because not only have I written a book about an autistic character, but all my books have disabled MCs. I have done immense research that never stops. I have spoken to many disabled people, have followed them, listened to them,
learned from them and I have disabled friends and even someone more than a friend.
When it comes to casting for roles that portray any sort of disability, the industry has always been horrible at best. It’s due to discrimination, lack of willingness,
When it comes to casting for roles that portray any sort of disability, the industry has always been horrible at best. It’s due to discrimination, lack of willingness,
lack of understanding and most of all, wanting convenience over doing the right thing. There aren’t even enough movies portraying disabled people, and when they do make one, it tends to be about the disability not the person, glorifying the wrong message.
It’s often inspirational porn, or a sob story about how hard it is to be disabled and how much better it would be if they could all be fixed.
This is damaging to say the least, but this is not what I want to talk about in this thread. What I want to point out
This is damaging to say the least, but this is not what I want to talk about in this thread. What I want to point out
is that I believe people have a misconception, and based on what Sia has stated in some of her responses to people calling her out, it’s kind of confirmed if you ask me.
I think people believe that it only works if the actor has the exact level of disability
I think people believe that it only works if the actor has the exact level of disability
that the character has, otherwise it’s not authentic so they might as well just cast a non disabled actor. But this is not true. It doesn’t matter if the actor’s disability level is not the same as what they portray. They are actors, after all.
It’s okay to cast someone who is “less severely” autistic than the character to make production easier. Making movies costs money and it’s all about profit. Actors need to work a lot. Staff needs to he paid for every minute they work. Things can’t drag out.
But the solution is not to just cast a non disabled actor. The solution is to cast someone who has the same type of disability as the character but they are at a level where they can handle the workload and not extend production time by a lot. Accomodations
are easy to make on set, so that should never be an excuse. The only excuse is time, and what I said would take care of that. Any autistic person would have been fine to play the role in this movie. They didn’t have to be at the same level as the character.
But I’m convinced that people don’t realize this. The book I wrote has an autistic character that if he were played by an actor who has the same, it would be difficult to work with and might not be compatible with production timelines. But it would
not be an issue to hire someone who is autistic but not the same level. We can’t blast movie companies for wanting to stay within schedule and budget, but we CAN blast them for not finding a solution for it and not being more flexible and intelligent
about casting. There are so many verbal autistic actors who could have played the MC in Sia’s movie. It would have been perfectly fine. No one will complain that the disability level doesn’t match. Or at least no one should. But being ignorant and taking
the easy way out, then justifying it with horrifying excuses is not okay. To say that “casting someone at her level of functioning was cruel” is the most damaging thing I can imagine. A celebrity stating that hiring disabled people as actors is cruel is
a stab to the already profusely bleeding industry in this area. The opposite is true. Hiring non disabled actors to play disabled characters is what’s cruel, because yet again, disabled people are excluded from everything, just kicked to the sidelines. It’s
unacceptable, discriminating and disgusting to keep thinking disabled actors aren’t good enough. The same way no one would dare hiring a white actor to play a black character, no one should dare hiring a non disabled actor to play a disabled character.
To sum it up, acting is...acting. It’s about pretending. So just as a non disabled person can pretend to be disabled, a disabled person can pretend to be more disabled than they are, because....they are ACTORS. And even with pretending, they’ll be authentic.
