Films and Series are Featuring More and More Handicapped Actors

NEWS | September 21, 2020

Visual from the Special series, broadcast on Netflix.

The silver screen is finally opening up to people living with physical and mental handicaps.

Special, a Netflix series released in 2019, brings us the story of a young gay man living with cerebral palsy, played by Ryan O'Connell in a re-telling of his own personal narrative. In Ramy, on Hulu, handicapped actor and muscular-dystrophy advocate Steve Way plays the protagonist's best friend. This year in Grey's Anatomy, Shoshannah Stern became the first deaf actress to play a doctor. Today, actors and actresses living with handicaps are better represented across all of our screens. Even in France, a country sometimes cited for its resistance to change, a shift is taking place. In its fifth season, Skam, a series on France.TV Slash, is also being praised by adolescents across the country — in part for starring two rising actresses, both of whom are deaf.

For activists in the US, who have long advocated for better representation in film and TV, the change is overdue. Over the past few years, movements like "Oscars So White", born in 2015 and criticizing the lack of diversity at the famous ceremony, have also encouraged better inclusion of minorities in the movies. Now, actors in wheelchairs, living with deafness or motor problems are also stepping into center stage.

The numbers demonstrate that the situation is improving. According to a study by the Ruderman Family Foundation, in 2015 the number of handicapped characters being played by handicapped actors accounted for only 5% of roles. By 2018, that figure had jumped to 12%. Another important shift has been in how we think about handicaps — the growing diversity of representations illustrate them as more than just limiting and unpleasant ways of living. For too long, handicapped people have been portrayed in pop culture as being "learning moments" for able-bodied people, rather than characters that are developed and fully three-dimensional in their own right. Ramy sends such conceptions packing. With his hilarious, poignant deadpan, Steve (actor Steve Way) regularly steals the scene from series lead Ramy Hassan.