Do a film about the Holocaust or ‘play a mental’ and you’re guaranteed an Oscar – so the infamous Kate Winslet scene in Ricky Gervais’s Extras goes. “Schindler’s bloody List, The Pianist”, Winslet says, playing a Jew-concealing nun. “Oscars coming out of their arse.”

There is a truth in Gervais’s satirical script – Winslet later won her first Academy Award for playing at illiterate former Nazi in 2008’s The Reader – but omissions of physical disability, ethnicity and LGBT+ roles need acknowledging too. Citing authenticity as well as ‘revenge for 100+ years of straight-washing’, Russell T. Davies – the screenwriter behind It’s A Sin, Queer As Folk and Years And Years – recently got people talking when he said he will, from now on, only ‘cast gay as gay’. A genuine pioneer when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation on screen, Davies’s inclination towards queer casting shouldn’t surprise anyone – but it does beckon a question that’s haunted Hollywood for some time: why do we continue to cast famous caucasian, able-bodied and straight actors in marginalised roles? 

For those in the industry, casting controversies are all part of the process. But Davies’s take is one that has been met with two contrasting responses: admiration and dissent. While the ambition to cater to a group that has been traditionally disfavoured is all but universally applauded, many believe that this is a 2021 solution to a 2021 problem.

 Michael Cashman CBE is an actor, activist, former MEP and co-founder of LGBT+ lobby group Stonewall. At 70 years old, his legacy is boundless. He first stepped into public consciousness back in 1986, when he was cast as Colin Russell in Eastenders’ Colin. Colin was British soap’s first LGBT+ role.

“They originally wanted to cast a heterosexual actor for Colin as they thought they would get less guff,” Cashman tells The Currency. “Eastenders was considered a family show then and having a gay character on-screen might have lost viewers – but they eventually called me in as they said ‘everytime we think of this character, we think of you’.”

The decision to cast gay as gay, under a Thatcherite government, was closer to a political statement than a controversial hire at the time. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 was rigidly enforced, allowing only for the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales, meaning that job loss, evictions and, as “loss of liberty”, as Cashman declares, could happen at any moment.

“When I went into the show, I looked at it as a job,” he opines. “I had already been working as an actor for ten years, so I thought I would be well-equipped to handle media backlash, but I was in no way prepared for the savaging of me and my late husband Paul. He was even outed in The Sunday Mirror.”

When news broke that Colin Russell would share the first gay kiss on British television (a peck on the forehead), the backlash only intensified. Campaigners rallied against it, the BBC was besieged by complaints and, on more than one occasion, bricks smashed Cashman’s windows. 

“It was a different time then and I’m glad to say we have moved on,” he says. “I recently watched It’s A Sin and thought it was all played wonderfully. But I do disagree with Russell (T. Davies) on casting gay as gay – and I think I’m vindicated for doing so. To argue you have to have a gay actor denies some of the performances straght actors have given. 

“Furthermore, while all of the lead actors in It’s A Sin do bring their own sexuality to the role, none of them lived during that period, which is light years away from where we are now. So while they may bring authenticity in one form, they can’t in another. There is a subtle shift when we look at transgender and non-binary roles, as well as issues around disability and race, but bear in mind that conversations like these are simply distilling the arguments, not complicating them,” he concludes. “The more we celebrate the differences between us all, the more interesting the art, and indeed life, becomes, too.”

Cashman’s view speaks to the limitless possibilities of art itself. Moreover, if we reduce acting to ‘X person can only play X part because they have the same characteristics’, we are compromising the skill and basis of acting itself. So why weren’t these lines followed before?

“Systems have willfully excluded people historically, so we have to find a way to be more mindful and inclusive to combat this and platform those voices not heard in the past,” says LGBT activist, Tonie Walsh. “Hiring people should first and foremost be about ability, but discrimination and bigotry play out in the subtelest of ways.”

Known as Ireland’s ‘Godfather of Gay’, Walsh is the founding editor of Gay Community News and former president of the National LGBT Federation from 1984 to 1988.

“Personally, I would find it offensive that we couldn’t imagine a gay person playing straight or vice versa. It beggars belief that the real life sexuality of the actor in question should impinge on the character. It is also illegal to employ someone on the basis of their gender, nationality or orientation,” he posits. “Right now, we have an enormous lack of representation of minority voices in mainstream cinema, we have to address that, but also, positive representation is a short term corrective. We shouldn’t really have to go down that route. We should just advertise for the best.”

Casting actors on merit is a difficult argument to disagree with. Professional decisions should be fundamentally based on merit, but that doesn’t always happen. Nepotism, sexism and general prejudice tend to run true more often than we even realise, but when the differences in the character and the real life actor aren’t visually jarring, much gets left unsaid. 

Historically, the way we view difference has changed. Segregation policies reinforced the idea that people were meant to be categorised, mainly into two groups – those who we feel comfortable around, and those we were conditioned not to. Babies born with mental and physical disabilities were generally institutionalised – perpetuating an ‘us and them’ narrative from the start.

“You can understand their thinking,” Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, Brendan Kelly tells me. “Given the very restricted range of things to do for larger and poorer families at the time, sending your child to a place they would be accommodated for seemed like the only option. That is not a position any family should have been in, but no one had the capabilities or the knowledge to provide outpatient support at the time.”

The Dangerous Lunatic Act of 1838 also meant that someone could be committed to an asylum without medical opinion. And those who were thought to be homosexual (a ‘mental illness’ according to the World Health Organisation until 1990) were shamed, shelved and often ‘treated’ for their considered weakness. 

In early November, Australian singer-songwriter Sia communicated news of her directorial debut by way of sharing a trailer link to her yet-to-be-released film, Music. The clip follows the life of teenage girl, Music (Maddie Ziegler), a young adult with nonverbal, neurodivergent autism, who finds herself in the care of her older half-sister, the newly sober Zu (Kate Hudson). The plot centres around Music, whose main purpose it seems, is to absolve Zu from her freshly spiky past – so far, so relatively believable. However, Sia’s Music – which initially boasted an online petition committed to preventing its international release – was the latest in the Hollywood franchise to suffer at the hands of the Icarus effect. Casting able-bodied model and dancer Ziegler in the lead role, Sia not only alienated former fans who have grown up and become woke to the world’s discriminations, but flew too close to the sun by further cementing accusations of ableism, ‘cripping up’ and homogeneity in popular media.

Denoting when an able-bodied actor takes on the role of a disabled character, ‘cripping up’ is the mimicking of physical characteristics of a specific impairment or medical condition. Not a new phenomenon by any means, the practice – recently hailed ‘the whitewashing of the disabled’ in a Medium article –  is still a problem. Especially given the cartoonishness of Ziegler’s portrayal, which sees her gurning, grimacing and mumbling through her scenes. 

“I actually tried working with a beautiful young girl non-verbal on the spectrum and she found it unpleasant and stressful,” Sia responded to critics at the time. “So that’s why I cast Maddie.”

“Casting someone at (the character’s) level of functioning was cruel, not kind, so I made the executive decision that we would do our best to lovingly represent the community. I did try. It felt more compassionate to use Maddie. That was my call.”

“It’s all about intention sought,” believes Irish autistic advocate and founder of Autism charity AsIAm, Adam Harris. 

“From my understanding of Sia’s situation, I think this was quite an understanding story,” he says. “But I’ve also read that she’s referred to Music as a ‘love letter’ to the autism community – however surely a starting point of writing a love letter is finding out what the other person likes?

“Autism is a strength for most who have it – their ability to see things differently and empathise with others, all of these are benefits,” he continues. “Things are changing now but, say, ten years ago in films and soaps, there would be a gay character in the story solely because they are gay. That was their only role. Now, things are a little different and more nuanced. I want to get to a stage where a film comes out with a role where someone who is autistic and it’s not plot-based, or portrayed as their full character. 

“Portrayals of autism in pop culture – like when Anne Hegarty entered I’m A Celebrity or Greta Thunberg’s School Strikes – have provided meaningful conversations and I’m so grateful for that, however, it also causes further stigmatisation when the roles are reduced to one singular thing. As we see the first generation of autistic children diagnosed in childhood, we need more opportunities and access for employment as well as voices heard as many people with autism are talented in the arts.”

What’s interesting about Sia’s choices, however, is that all the right steps were made to prove good intent – but none of the follow up. 

In late December, Sia’s team contacted CommunicationFIRST, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights of those without speech in the US, to make an introductory short to Music. The intention was to humanise and spread awareness of people with nonverbal autism, who were left out of Music by way of casting Ziegler. In January 2021, CommunicationFIRST brought together a team of nonverbal and autistic people to preview the film and provide feedback and recommendations. As detailed in the group’s public statement, their feedback detailed how the film ‘reinforces dangerous stereotypes and practices’ such as prone restraint – a potentially fatal action – and the suggestion that people with autism are incapable of creating connection. 

“When I saw the film, I was deeply hurt by the stereotypes Music plays into, which do not only impact autistic people, but the disability community as a whole,” Jordyn Zimmerman, a nonverbal CommunicationFIRST Board member told me via email. “Since this role was ultimately played by a nondisabled person who exaggerated autistic movements based on stereotypes, it shows a really inhumane portrayal.

“Sia does not see autistic people as competent humans; which was made clear in the film and her handling of our criticism.”

The Music team never responded to CommunicationFIRST’s recommendations, except in several Tweets by Sia—that have since been deleted—promising to cut the restraint scenes. Undeterred by this, the organisation then decided to produce a self-funded short by and with non verbal autistic people, and to launch it on February 12, 2021, the Music US release date.

LISTEN was our “response” to Music, which we put together with no funding in less than two weeks after Sia’s team stopped communicating with us,” Tauna Szymanski, Executive Director of CommunicationFIRST tells me. “The point was to show that one can in fact involve non speaking autistic people, film them, represent them accurately, and do so even with zero budget and on an extremely short time frame.”

Along a similar vein, social impact filmmaker Doug Roland recently set out to prove that diverse casting works with his new film Feeling Through. The first film to cast a DeafBlind actor since records began, Feeling Through follows Tereek (Steven Prescod), a teenager wandering the streets of New York, desperate for a place to crash when he encounters Artie (Robert Tarango), a deaf-blind man in need of help getting home. 

First-time actor Tarango was discovered while working in the kitchen at Helen Keller National Center, a division of Helen Keller Services which enables individuals who are blind, deaf-blind, or have combined hearing and vision loss to live and work in the communities of their choice. The project picked up the jury award at the Ojai Film Festival, the Audience Award at San Diego International Film Festival, and is now in the running to pick up the Academy Award for best Live Action Short. 

Casting directors complain that it’s not that they don’t want to employ disabled actors but there is a lack of qualified and experienced actors out there that are able to take on disabled parts. However, disabled industry professionals argue that this misses the point. Casting non-disabled actors takes parts away from disabled actors from which they can gain vital experience and recognition as well as adding a nuance those in different walks of life mightn’t be able to. Many even liken casting an able-bodied actor in a disabled role as appropriation. 

Certain cases can come across especially insulting (like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, Bradley Cooper in The Elephant Man and Ziegler in Music) because what they have been lauded for – physical demeanour – is the very thing disabled people are ridiculed and marginalised for.  

“Disability is seen as a costume that able-bodied actors can put on and strut about in, and the result is the disabled experience being skewed by what able-bodied actors think in their heads it is – which has been going on for decades, centuries,” says Arthur Hughes, a Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama graduate who currently plays Ruairi Donovan in BBC’s The Archers

“It should be time for disabled people to tell their stories themselves on the biggest stages. Larry Olivier blacking up as Othello was wrong back in the 60s, and enough time has moved on that everyone agrees that now. The same needs to happen for disability, because otherwise people are reduced to just their costumes.”

Hughes has radial dysplasia, an extremely rare condition that affects around one in 30,000 people. His condition – which the actor has had since birth – means he has no thumb or radius bone on his right arm and that his right wrist is slightly disfigured.

“It’s tough, because I think anyone should be able to play anything, that’s the beautiful liberty of what we do, but the world is an unequal place and representation matters,” he continues. “When just one group is representing and controlling the narrative for others, their true experience and feeling is never fully represented.”

It has to be said that some roles may require a physicality not all of us can afford – meaning that situations do exist where an actor with disabilities would struggle: e.g. a theatre part with quick costume changes or complicated dance numbers, but these are demands not every role has. Disabled actors know they have limitations. But the existence of those sort of roles shouldn’t be an excuse not to broaden access where it is reasonable. Why should able-bodied actors have the privilege to move between worlds, when that same allowance is never extended to disabled actors? More succinctly put by actress and comedian Maysoon Zayid: “If a person in a wheelchair can’t play Beyoncé, Beyoncé can’t play a person in a wheelchair.”

When the disability is invisible to the naked eye, things are more complicated again. When Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for Children Of A Lesser God in 1986, she became the only deaf performer to have ever won an Oscar. “There have been 59 actors who’ve received Oscar nominations for playing characters with disabilities,” English screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne recently tweeted. “Only one was disabled. Imagine how much better those stories would have been if authored by disabled performers. Personally I think it’d have been revolutionary.”

When #OscarsSoWhite trended in 2015, the greater Western world became aware of the blatant tendency to favour those with lighter skin in a way they could no longer avoid. Created by diversity advocate April Reign, the hashtag spoke to a number of things – including Academy membership at the time, which was 92% white and 75% male. That same year, Scarlett Johansson was made a target of diversity activists following the news that she would be playing Motoko Kusanagi in Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell. Set in Japan, with a predominantly Japanese cast, ScarJo’s casting choice was immediately met with criticisms of whitewashing, only for things to come to a head when it was discovered that her features were shifted towards a more Asian ethnicity in post-production to make the Caucasian actress fit the part. 

As per The Marginalization and Stereotyping of Asians in American Film, Isabel Paner’s honours thesis from the Dominican University of California, America’s take on Asian representation – even if Asian actors are considered for certain roles – has traditionally been coloured by historical snark. ‘If Asians were not played as villains, then they were played for laughs, such as a yellow faced Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Furthermore, the role of a “good Asian” was meant to serve the white man, often betraying their own people to do so.’ What’s encouraging, however, is that things are changing. Series of nuanced performances by actors of Asian heritage are making it to the big screen – Mulan’s Liu Yifei or The Edge of Seventeen’s Hailee Steinfeld – meaning Hollywood A-listers are checking their privilege at the door.

Ghost In The Shell wasn’t, however, the first time ScarJo had to reverse course. Seen as the poster girl for modern-day casting controversies, the South African-native found herself in embroiled in a casting controversy for a second time in two years when she announced she was set to play Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man in Rupert Sanders’ Rub & Tug.

“You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job,” Johansson told As If magazine at the time. “I feel like [political correctness] is a trend in my business and it needs to happen for various social reasons, yet there are times it does get uncomfortable when it affects the art because I feel art should be free of restrictions.”

Backlash on social media was swift. 

“Yes, ScarJo, you should be able to play a tree. Because there aren’t countless sentient trees desiring to act yet struggling to get cast in roles,” tweeted Hope Springs Eternal screenwriter Stephanie Mickus. “But there ARE ton of LGBTQIA/non binary actors who have vocalized that they would love to represent those characters.”

The only problem with Johansson’s case was the insensitivity of her reaction, Charlotte Clymer, a transgender woman and former press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign explained. 

“To take on this role in the guise of wanting to amplify concerns for this community while not listening to this community upset me. I think it’s important to give people outside the community space to understand, but she seems hellbent on getting her way, especially for marginalised roles.

“I’m not saying that cisgender people are incapable of portraying the trans experience,” she continued, “but it just comes across that some actors use a trans role to expand their brand and then toss it aside. This takes away from trans workers and also often treats us as a one-dimensional caricature along the way.”

Johansson later told The Washington Post in a statement through her publicist that her comments were “edited for clickbait” and “widely taken out of context”. “I recognise that in reality, there is a wide spread discrepancy among my industry that favours Caucasian, cisgendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to. I continue to support, and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included.”

It seems to be that the only times the greater public find issue with casting decisions are when it’s visually jarring to the human eye. A casting director in 2021 would never cast a white person to portray Black struggle or vice versa, but gay and straight actors are easily interchangable within roles as neither groups boast defining features. Similarly, casting someone who uses a wheelchair as someone who is able-bodied never happens either. As Adam Harris rightly pointed out, if he were cast as someone with nonverbal autism, having never been nonverbal, he would be just as unsuitable for the role as anyone else – but would likely “get away with it” as his diagnosis with autism is often all people need to see. 

With trans roles, it’s different again. You would never cast a man to play a woman in a story – unless the plot intends to poke fun at gender roles – which casts a cold shadow on casting a cisgender actor in a trans role; it aligns itself with the dangerous thought process that a trans person is just a man in a dress. When little effort is made to feminise a character playing a trans woman (e.g Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club) a point-and-laugh aspect invalidates their identity and further marginalises the character rather than embracing them as normal.

“In this day and age, there’s really no excuse for casting a cisgender (a term for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth) actor over a transgender one, says trans activist and Transgender Equality Network Ireland member Aoife Martin. 

“Getting work is hard enough as is as a trans actor and to see a cis actor take one of the few roles you can do away is pretty galling. As far as possible we should give people from these minority groups a go. These actors are already famous – they’re not doing it to promote the trans experience.”

Film, theatre, and television need to move away from disability, LGBT+, ethnicity and general marginalisation as singular plot points – and this level of representation needs to happen both on and off screen. Only accurate portrayals in popular media will change the narrative of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in a way that is tangible. 

Accessibility, disappointingly, is also an issue. In a recent report, it was discovered that 62% of West End theatres only have one disabled toilet, with two theatres found to have none at all. To deny disabled patrons basic needs such as this is doing a disservice to all actors, not just those who make use of wheelchairs and zimmer frames. 

“The Academy has learned the hard way when it comes to the treatment and portrayal of women, race and ethnicity on screen,” Adam Harris concludes, “and it seems that they’re only learning retrospectively. “Autism, and disability, need to be shown as neither a tragedy nor a plot driver, but rather as something to which society needs to adapt.”

In the wake of the Rub and Tug debacle, a number of major Hollywood production companies backed a 2018 letter that called on the industry to “use its power to improve the lives of trans people” by telling trans stories “authentically” with trans actors and creatives. The accompanying TRANSform Hollywood guidebook for creatives cautions against casting major cisgender stars as trans people in projects. “The world is evolving, and today it is a mistake, especially if you are cross-sex casting (a cis man to play a trans woman, or a cis woman to play a trans man.)” it reads. “It simply isn’t cost effective to take this risk; recent projects which cast cis actors to play trans roles have felt the tide of public opinion turn against them and have taken a hit at the box office.”

Disability representation is happening too, as characters played by actors with disabilities on top shows rose from 5% in 2016 to 12% in 2018 with a 2020 open letter pressing the entertainment industry to become more inclusive of people with disabilities set to apply pressure to continue this trend. 

Abolishing the need for homogeneity in arguably the most creative industry on Earth seems like something that should have been done a long time ago. Championing diversity isn’t something that cinephiles should have to do, but every example listed above has been overturned by way of public sway. For smaller voices we need to keep shouting, lest we desire the same story retold to us again every time. Or, worse still, the narrative of conformity to colour everything we do. 

Inclusion riders, too, have garnered plenty of attention recently – especially since Frances McDormand’s speech at the 2018 Academy Awards – meaning A-list artists wield a certain negotiating power when it comes to diverse representation in films. But, the real change can only be consumer-driven. It is our power, our say and our money that bolsters Hollywood as a whole. 

Winslet satirised the truth in Extras and she recently told the Sunday Times of the reality when she said that she knows of at least four actors who are afraid of coming out because of the damage they feel it would do to their careers. “I cannot tell you the number of young actors I know — some well known, some starting out — who are terrified their sexuality will be revealed and that it will stand in the way of their being cast in straight roles,” she said.

The need to improve representation in Hollywood is a discussion that is as old as Hollywood itself. But the underestimated power of the public has never been stronger. The consumer has already forced gargantuan change in Hollywood of late, even in the allowance of Netflix to become a major power player when it comes to the big screen. Consumers can and will continue to reconstruct the traditional fiefdoms of Hollywood and force diversity and inclusion to take precedence above all else.

As Aoife Martin eloquently put it, “Casting directors should go out of their way to get an actor from that marginalised community for the role. Once you do your due diligence, I think it’s all right. If you’re in your community theatre hall and you’ve made a call out and no one bites, then what else can you do. But for Hollywood, there’s no excuse.”