Casting the right actor for a role often meant finding someone who matched the character description in a script, but Josh Sundquist didn’t know if that was the case for his series “Best Foot Forward”. possible.
“It sounds silly in retrospect, but that was four years ago,” Sundquist recalled recently. “At the time, it simply didn’t occur to me that it would even be possible to hire a handicapped actor.”
Sundquist was helping to land a fictionalized version of his younger self, the lead in “Best Foot Forward,” which debuts Friday on Apple TV+. Based on Sundquist’s memoir, “Just Don’t Fall”, the series centers on a 12-year-old boy who is the only child in his school with amputated limbs. Sunquist, who is the executive producer of the series, lost his left leg to bone cancer at the age of 10.
The character’s incompetence is at the core of “Best Foot Forward”, but Sundquist’s expectations were measured. “I thought like, ‘Oh, of course we’re going to have to cast a capable kid and do a body double,'” he said. “Because that’s all I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
To Sunquist’s delight, the production company behind the show, Museum Entertainment, intended to find an actor who shared the character’s disability. After newcomer Logan Marmino was cast as the fictional Josh, Sunquist’s outlook on what was possible evolved dramatically.
“By the time we got to where we were to greenlight and we started looking for the crew, I was completely converted to the importance of authentic representation in front of both And Behind the camera,” he said.
What happens in front of the camera often dominates the discourse surrounding representation in entertainment. While the news media has paid some attention in recent years to the lack of opportunity for actors with disabilities, there is still much room for progress.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 26 percent of American adults have a disability, but according to a GLAAD report released earlier this year, disabled characters, including children, make up only 2.8 percent of series regulars in all scripted broadcast TV shows. constituted. 2021-22 TV season. (The report did not take a comprehensive look at disability representation on cable and streaming services.) Earlier research from GLAAD from 2021 found that the majority of disabled TV characters are played by non-disabled actors.
Even when casting actors with disabilities, it often only solves half the problem, Sundquist noted. In many instances, if you rotated the camera, he said, “you would see that the handicap was shown in only one direction.”
In making “Best Foot Forward”, Sundquist was determined to hire people with disabilities during production, but finding disabled crew members was more challenging than he anticipated. When it comes to actors, “agents know that sometimes you want people with disabilities and they already have people on file,” he said. But when manufacturers contacted unions and unions that represent crew positions, he said, they found that most of them didn’t see which of their members were disabled.
So Sundquist resorted to putting out call-outs on social media and connecting with disability advocacy groups like Respectability. “We are not a staffing agency,” said Lauren Appelbaum, who runs Respectability’s Entertainment Lab, a workshop for disabled professionals working in TV and film. “We’ve just found ourselves in this situation where studios and individual productions are reaching out to us saying, ‘We need help with this,'” he said. The seven people who worked on “Best Foot Forward” were lab alumni, he said.
“Best Foot Forward” isn’t the first show to feature disabled people on either side of the camera. Several shows over the years, including Sundance Now’s “This Close”, two best friends who are deaf, and Netflix’s “Special”, a comedy about a gay man with cerebral palsy, have been created and starred by people with disabilities. Had gone. Appelbaum stated that “Best Foot Forward” is based on the groundwork set by those shows.
“What makes ‘Best Foot Forward’ really unique is the intention behind bringing in the disabled crew,” she explained. “Crews at all levels, from production assistants to directors.”
One of the show’s writers, Zach Ener, previously wrote for “Speechless,” an ABC series that ran from 2016–19 and was praised for its realistic portrayal of a teen who, like Ener, has cerebral palsy. Ener stated that there were only a few writers with disabilities for “Speechless” and that it was too novel at the time. On “Best Foot Forward,” he said, “It was half the writers’ room.”
“No one person felt responsible for representing the entire community,” Ener said. “It also freed us up to just be funny.”
Unlike many productions, the disabled writers and crew on “Best Foot Forward” were not even tasked with educating non-disabled colleagues and advocating for access. That was someone’s real job. Kia Amara served as Production Accessibility Coordinator, a relatively new role in Hollywood typically filled by disabled professionals who consult on onscreen authenticity and how to accommodate disabled members.
The first step on set, Amara said, is to survey the crew and make production as accessible as possible. “I would list things like: ‘Check the box: Do you want access to a sensory-friendly room?'” Amara said. “‘Do you need your script or document in dark mode? Do you need a dyslexia-accessible font?'” Then comes crew training that includes language related to disability and how to create an inclusive space.
“People with disabilities need not learn anything,” Amara said. “It’s all non-disabled people who need to be in this space to be like, ‘Here’s how to be afraid to think you’re going to mess up.'”
When consulting on past presentations, Amara found that reluctance to hire disabled crew often stems from the belief that doing so would cost an excessive amount of time and money. This widespread belief may lead some crew members to hide their inefficiencies. “They can choose not to reveal it to anyone – being incompetent is still very unsafe in the industry,” Amara said.
Sunquist was something that was conscious when trying to recruit crew members with disabilities. “We were able to call up and be like: ‘Hey, I hear you’ve had some bad experiences on set. Sorry about that. We’ll try to do better on our set. Can we get you on board? Can you celebrate?'”
In doing so, production often attracts “people whose resumes don’t yet reflect their talent level,” said Sunquist, who based those things on “Best Foot Forward” to his credit for bringing more of those things. were able to. He cited Ashley Eakin as an example, a varied director whose previous work was mostly limited to short films. Eakin directed two episodes of “Best Foot Forward”.
“By coming to her show, she then joins the Directors Guild, which makes it so much easier to find future directing work,” Sundquist said.
The production crew also included evidence of untapped skills that may lie within people that others may overlook. One example was Marisa Erickson, a production assistant tasked with escorting and transporting child actors from school to set. “In my hometown, Alameda, I usually work in a kindergarten as a teacher’s aide,” said Eriksson, who said she wanted to combine her previous production experience and her experience working with children. Was excited for
Erikson, who has Down syndrome, was one of the crew members recommended by Appelbaum at Respectability, who participated in the organization’s 2019 Entertainment Lab. Appelbaum recalled a workshop that Eriksson attended with executives from a major studio: “Marissa stood up and started talking about some of the work she had done, and I saw an execution, like, His mouth just fell.” Appelbaum said Erikson’s work ethic and experience met the executive’s expectations of someone with Down syndrome.
“I think, in their minds, they were thinking, ‘Yeah, of course we can hire someone who uses a wheelchair,’ but they weren’t thinking they were any intellectual or intellectual. can keep a person with a developmental disability,” Appelbaum said. “Marissa clearly proves it wrong.” Recently, Eriksson was offered three production assistant jobs at once. (He accepted a position on a Disney+ short film anthology series called “Launchpad.”)
Appelbaum and others said that in order to increase disability representation on film and television sets, it was important that guilds and unions survey their members for disabilities as well as demographic information such as race and gender. The Writers Guild of America does, and the Directors Guild of America began soliciting information about disability status in member surveys in 2021. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that represents crew members such as Grips, cinematographers, costumers and make-up. Artists voted last year to launch an annual census in an effort to promote diversity within their membership. But it is not clear whether it will include information about the disabled. (IATSE did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Without data, it’s hard to change things,” Appelbaum said. “When you have hard numbers, people want to change something.”
Until then, the author, Ener, is hopeful that “best foot forward” can serve as a significant step forward for hiring practices in Hollywood.
“To me, that ends the argument that you sometimes hear people say, ‘Oh, we looked for someone with a disability, we looked for a person of color, and we couldn’t find anyone, ” They said. “We can point to it and say, ‘No, there are too many.'”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)