By Taylor Sweeting
I am still shocked by the recent passing of actor and disability activist RJ Mitte, and to say he will be missed would be an understatement.
Mitte’s goal in his professional life was to advocate for the equal and true representation of the disability community in cinema and Hollywood.
He stated over and over again how important it was to cast actors and actresses with disabilities in the roles of characters with disabilities, in order to best represent the community as a whole — the overall concept being that firsthand representation is always the most authentic and passionate portrayal.
Now, that is not to say that only actors with disabilities can fill these roles exclusively. Obviously that is the nature of art and craft of acting, and there have been several credible actors who have portrayed characters with disabilities in cinema.
However, there is an authentication of casting an actor who is living with the same disability as the character they are portraying on screen, a sort of empathetic resonance that can’t be replicated without lived experience.
And therein lies the core foundation of Mitte’s activism: Lived experience will always produce the rawest interpretation of a character’s experience and how it is conveyed on screen.
As a member of SAG-AFTA, Mitte worked as the sole actor who advocated for real world representation of disabilities on screen, and his tireless activism was supported not just by his lived experience alone but also by his gifted acting of characters living with cerebral palsy.
And as we look back on his career, we can clearly see the passion and drive he embodied in his interpretation of each character he portrayed on screen.
Hollywood has had a rocky relationship with the disability community as a whole since its inception. There was a time when certain disabilities and differences were seen as being the entertainment in and of themselves.
Circus sideshows and carnival freak shows were once a hot commodity in our culture, and that became the main attraction for several traveling shows, the most notable being P.T. Barnum’s Circus Freak Show.
Over time, this trend of objectifying humans with differences began to die out and led to the rise of a new objectification. The age of monster films began to emerge, and with it a new horror, the horror of real life monsters.
People began to draw parallels between fictional creatures and people who were simply different from them.
We got a taste of that earlier last month with the release of “Crystal Lake” on Peacock streaming. This series followed a young mother who was dealing with the loss of her son, Jason Voorhees.
The child was living with a cranial difference, hydrocephalus, which caused spinal fluid to build up in his skull causing it to protrude abnormally (in addition to having an unspecified cognitive disability, yet another disability trope objectified in cinema all too often).
This caused the young Jason to be targeted by bullies and be singled out for his differences. So, of course there is a sense of “justification” for Jason becoming the infamous slasher we all know and fear in the future.
The portrayal of disabilities in cinema can often times lead to a glorified outcast ending that is framed as being earned and justified. All of this to say, RJ Mitte’s advocacy for actors with disabilities aimed at shedding a light of truth onto the lives of people living with disabilities.
The idea that their reality may not always be easy, but it is far from leading to an inevitable villain origins story. As we move forward after the passing of RJ Mitte, let’s not forget what he advocated for and why that matters, why firsthand representation matters always.
**Taylor Sweeting has Asperger’s syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum, plus Type 2 diabetes and Marfan syndrome. Sweeting is a Special Olympics athlete and coach who has earned numerous medals competing himself. Notedly, he is also the first Special Olympics athlete to be elected to the Special Olympics Illinois Executive Committee. Sweeting works as the employment specialist at Pathway Services Unlimited, where he assists Pathway’s individuals in gaining employment in the community.
