Hollywood’s Diversity Blindspot: Disabled Mimicry

Golden Globe nominations have been sent out. We are officially entering another award season where actors pat themselves on the back for declaring that they love diversity and inclusion and to borrow a term from the alt-right, virtue signal about how “inclusive” they are.

It always rings hollow to me. After all, despite how much they claim to love diversity, there’s always a big thing disabled people like me notice: The few parts for disabled people are almost always going to able-bodied actors looking to get on stage that award season.

By the Numbers

Calling out Hollywood for the longstanding practice of disabled mimicry, or “cripping up,” isn’t new. What is relatively new is the fact that we have numbers to cite the problem. These numbers are obtained almost entirely by grassroots activists.

For the last few years, a disability rights activist and director (and wearer of a multitude of other hats) by the name of Dominick Evans has run a project called FilmDis, where he and other disabled people catalog the number of disabled characters on television and streaming services and sorts them into various categories. It’s a time-consuming and mentally exhausting effort for a small number of people to undertake. But the result is that we have numbers that we never had before.

And the numbers are worse than you think.

The most recent study, done in 2019–2020 has some interesting category breakdowns but for the sake of staying on topic, I’ll focus on mimicry.

“FilmDis found that only 128 disabled actors play disabled roles.” the study said. This is about 10% of disabled characters on television.”

Charitably, there can be some good explanations. Maybe an actor is playing someone with a rare disease that few people have. Maybe the character is written to have acquired a disability in the middle of the show’s run. Maybe the role in question requires a lot of stuntwork that insurance companies aren’t comfortable with.

But that doesn’t explain a 90% failure rate. A failure rate that high can only be explained as an institutional failure.

Familiar Excuses

People are understandably wary about comparing disabled mimicry to blackface and the like. While it’s true that they aren't the same, the excuses Hollywood and regular laypeople have used to justify blackface and disabled mimicry are the same word for word.

Defenders of disabled mimicry say that Hollywood simply can’t find actors with disabilities. They say that we should “just let actors act.” They say that minority actors can’t bring in the money and rave reviews that a white/able-bodied actor can.

All of which are categorically complete nonsense.

During the era when blackface and other forms of minority mimicry were in fashion, Hollywood said they just couldn’t find minority actors so they just had to slap makeup on the nearest white performer. But as minority mimicry is falling out of fashion, minority actors are coming out of the woodwork and delivering quality performances.

This suggests one of two things. First is that minority actors really didn’t exist like Hollywood said and are spontaneously generating into existence from the land of elves and fairies as minority mimicry gets seen as the trash it is. Or minority actors always existed but weren’t getting roles because slapping makeup on white people was seen as easier.

It’s probably option 2.

The same goes for disabled actors. They exist. If Hollywood stops the excuses and starts putting out casting calls for them, they will appear.

And weirdly, for all the people screaming “Just let actors act,” those white actors are still able to get roles even though slapping makeup to play minority actors is out of fashion. It seems the craft of acting hasn’t died.

And to get even weirder, productions where minority actors play minority roles are often successful. Black Panther, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, and Get Out, are just a few examples. Meanwhile, movies that run on mimicry like The Last Airbender, The Lone Ranger, and most recently, Music, keep bombing.

Two Solutions

Now there are a few thoughts on how to proceed. One idea, chiefly from able-bodied people, is pure equality. Let disabled people compete on the same level as able-bodied people for the role of disabled characters.

The other idea, the one I support, is to not let able-bodied audition for the roles of disabled characters in the first place unless absolutely positively necessary. Let disabled actors compete with other disabled actors for the roles.

Now I can taste the tears of ableds crying about disabled actors getting “special treatment.” They taste like candy, I assure you. They complain that people advocating this strategy are saying that we should just give disabled actors the roles of disabled characters on a platter without having to earn them. They say that I’m “insulting” disabled actors (always funny how the abled are quick to accuse disability rights activists of insulting disabled people) and say that I’m insinuating that they can’t compete with abled actors for disabled roles but let me explain: Disabled people shouldn’t have to compete with the able-bodied for disabled characters that are few and far between.

Pure equality makes sense for generic roles. If we’re talking about a generic role, let’s have pure equality, and whatever happens, happens. But if the character is intended to be disabled from the start then we should set that role aside for the disabled actors.

After all, it’s what we do with parts that are written for racial minorities and nobody, aside from the ones who are still mad that Samuel L Jackson was cast as Nick Fury, says anything. When someone wants to do a biopic on a black history figure, filmmakers aren’t sending the casting call to Tom Hanks. They explicitly say that they’re looking for black actors who then audition for the role and compete with each other for the role. No one who has ever contributed anything positive to humanity says that the black actors got “special treatment” because they didn’t have to compete with white actors for the role of a black character. Nobody who matters says that black actors are “given” black roles because they didn’t have to compete with white actors. No one would dare say that Chadwick Boseman didn’t truly earn his role as T’Challa because the producers of the MCU didn’t pit black actors against white actors for the role.

For the most part, we’re accepting the idea that ethnic minority actors shouldn’t have to compete with white people for minority roles. But we still have a long way to go when it comes to disabled mimicry. Heck, even people who are part of groups that have historically been mistreated still clutch their pearls and whine about “special treatment” if they see a disabled person getting a leg up as quickly as alt-right any white guy.

But What Can a Viewer Do?

Despite performative gestures, the only color Hollywood respects is green. Minority mimicry isn’t slowly ending because of outraged Twitter conversations. It’s ending because films and shows where white people play minority roles keep bombing because viewers don’t buy the “minority actors are too hard to find” excuse. Meanwhile, films and shows with authentic representation are succeeding. As a result, there’s more of the latter and less of the former.

Disabled mimicry will end much the same way. Viewers will have to stop accepting the excuses and start supporting films and TV shows that feature actual disabled actors. When films that rely on disabled mimicry start flopping the way minority mimicry films flop, magically, Hollywood will be able to find those disabled actors they claim don’t exist.