Actors with disabilities

The CBC, tonight, is conducting some hard-hitting journalism on yet another group of people angry at society for not meeting their demands - disabled actors.

I have nothing against disabled actors and anyone who is either disabled or knows someone who is will likely disagree with me here.

But it’s acting.

The logic goes that it’s insulting to have able-bodied actors playing the roles of disabled persons. One guy made some appeal to the fact that one doesn’t get black people to play a white person’s role, so we shouldn’t expect able persons to fill the roles of disabled people.

I guess this guy never saw the 1983 movie, Trading Places.

By that logic, Peter Sellers should never have played a “South Asian” or “Indian” man in his famous 1968 movie, The Party.

Dave Chapelle should never have played a blind and black KKK leader, too.

And who could ever forget Jamie Kennedy’s Malibu’s Most Wanted?

Geez. This segment is still on as I write this.

Last I recall, being disabled is rarely a choice. Ditto for being black, white, yellow or brown, male, female or hermaphrodite. The same is usually the case when it comes to being gay, or so the argument goes.

So if the ‘not a choice’ logic applied to disabled persons is to be extended further, we would have to only hire straight people to play straight people and gay people to play gay people. Only men can play men, women can play women and kids can play kids.

I guess I can see the argument from the other side - a disabled person can not act ‘able’, whereas an able person can act disabled. I can see this. A straight man can act gay, a woman can act as a man, etc.

I can see how only a person with Down’s Syndrome could effectively play one of my favourite TV characters of all time, Corky Thatcher.

Er, wait a minute . . .

But where does one draw the line when it comes to a disability? I mean, Tom Cruise supposedly has dyslexia, Danny Glover may have epilepsy and Lou Ferrigno may have been deaf, and I myself have got a case of mild colour-blindness. My only societal complaint that comes out of this mild disability is that old ladies wear loudly colored dresses on Sunday.

Granted, these are not as disabling as cerebral palsy or MS or a spinal injury, but geez, don’t expect to get hired to play an actor with a disability just because you have that disability. If we had such a policy, a person with a spinal injury who still has their gift of sight won’t be able to play a blind person who has a spinal injury.

Granted, one might have more depth as a character because they have the very disability they are portraying, but then it wouldn’t be acting now, would it?

The segment has a ‘main character’ , some actor chick who ‘used to get lots of disabled roles’ that are ‘now being filled by able actors’. Maybe they’re better actors. Maybe she’s aging past her prime and is looking to blame society for the fact that her casting agent hasn’t called. But the news segment also had a bit about disabled persons in movie production, and as actors age, many of them move into this end of movie making. She seems pretty intent on staying in front of the camera, so this is about jobs. Not justice.

Ah, the CBC. Thanks for informing me about the plight of disabled persons in the media industry. Seriously, it was a good segment, but some people out there just gotta suck it up, grab life by the balls and give ‘er rather than sitting around all poopy-pantsed about how things aren’t as good as they expect them to be.