Casting the right actor for a role often means finding someone who matches the character description in a script, but Josh Sundquist wasn’t sure if that was possible for his “Best Foot Forward” series.
“It sounds crazy in hindsight, but this was four years ago,” Sundquist recently recalled. “At the time, it just didn’t occur to me that it would even be possible to hire an amputee actor.”
Sundquist helped cast a fictionalized version of his younger self, the lead role in “Best Foot Forward,” which debuts Friday on Apple TV+. Loosely based on Sundquist’s memoir, “Just Don’t Fall,” the series is about a 12-year-old boy who is the only child in his school with a limb difference. Sundquist, executive producer of the series, lost his left leg to bone cancer when he was 10.
The character’s handicap is at the heart of “Best Foot Forward,” but Sundquist’s expectations were measured. “I just thought, ‘Oh, of course we should cast a healthy kid and have a body double,'” he said. “Because that was all I’d ever seen in my entire life.”
Much to Sundquist’s delight, the production company behind the show, Muse Entertainment, set out to find an actor who shared the character’s handicap. After casting newcomer Logan Marmino as the fictional Josh, Sundquist’s perspective on what was possible evolved dramatically.
“By the time we got to where we were given the go-ahead and we started looking for crew, I was completely converted to the importance of authentic representation, both for and behind the camera,” he says.
What happens in front of the camera often dominates the discourse surrounding representation in entertainment. While the news media has paid some attention to the lack of opportunities for actors with disabilities in recent years, there is still a lot of room for progress.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 26 percent of American adults have disabilities, but according to a GLAAD report released earlier this year, characters with disabilities, including children, made up just 2.8 percent of regular shows. in all TV shows with scripts in the 2021-2022 TV season. (The report did not look extensively at the portrayal of disabilities on cable and streaming services.) Earlier research by GLAAD, from 2021, found that the majority of TV characters with disabilities are played by non-disabled actors.
Even when disabled actors are cast, it often only solves half the problem, Sundquist noted. In many cases, if you flipped the camera, he said, “you’d see disability only appearing in one direction.”
In making “Best Foot Forward,” Sundquist was determined to hire people with disabilities for the entire production, but finding crew members with disabilities was more challenging than he anticipated. When it comes to actors, “agents know that sometimes you want people with disabilities and they already have those people on their file,” he said. But when the producers reached out to unions and guilds representing crew positions, he said, they found most of them didn’t keep track of which of their members had disabilities.
So Sundquist resorted to posting appeals on social media and engaging with disability advocacy groups such as RespectAbility. “We’re not a staffing agency,” says Lauren Appelbaum, who runs RespectAbility’s Entertainment Lab, a workshop for professionals with disabilities working in TV and film. “We were just in this position where studios and individual productions reach out to us and say, ‘We want help with this’.” Seven people who worked on “Best Foot Forward” were alumni of the Lab, she added.
“Best Foot Forward” isn’t the first show to feature disabled people on both sides of the camera. Several shows in recent years, including Sundance Now’s “This Close,” about two best friends who are deaf, and Netflix’s “Special,” a comedy about a gay man with cerebral palsy, were created by and starred people with disabilities. . Appelbaum said “Best Foot Forward” builds on the foundation laid by those shows.
“What makes ‘Best Foot Forward’ truly unique is the intent behind bringing in disabled crew members,” she explained. “Crew at all levels, from production assistants to directors.”
One of the show’s writers, Zach Anner, previously wrote for “Speechless,” an ABC series that ran from 2016-19 and was praised for its realistic portrayal of a teenager who, like Anner, has cerebral palsy. Anner said there were only a few writers with disabilities for “Speechless,” “and that was very new at the time.” On “Best Foot Forward,” he said, “it was half the writer’s room.”
“No one felt responsible for representing an entire community,” Anner added. “It also freed us up to just be funny.”
Unlike many productions, the disabled writers and crew of “Best Foot Forward” were not tasked with educating non-disabled employees and advocating accessibility. That was someone’s real job. Kiah Amara was the coordinator for the production’s accessibility, a relatively new role in Hollywood generally filled by disabled professionals who consult about on-screen authenticity and how to accommodate crew members with disabilities.
The first step on set, Amara said, is to research the crew and gauge how to make production as accessible as possible. “I’ll list things like, ‘Check the box: Do you want access to a sensory-friendly room?'” Amara said. “Do you need your scripts or documents in dark mode? Do you need a font that is accessible to dyslexia?’” This is followed by crew training on language related to disabilities and how to create an inclusive space.
“It’s not the people with disabilities who need to learn something,” Amara said. “It’s all the non-disabled people who have to stay in this space of, like, ‘So you can’t be afraid to think you’re screwing it up.'”
Amara, in consulting previous productions, found that the reluctance to employ disabled crews often stems from the assumption that it will cost an inordinate amount of time and money. This widespread belief may lead some crew members to hide their disability. “They can choose not to disclose it to anyone — it’s still very unsafe in the industry to be disabled,” Amara said.
That was something Sundquist was aware of when he tried to recruit crew members with disabilities. “We were able to call and say, ‘Hey, I heard you had bad experiences on set. Sorry about that. We’re going to try to do better on our set. Can we persuade you to come on board?’”
In doing so, the production often “attracted people whose resumes didn’t yet reflect their talent level,” said Sundquist, who were then able to align those things more thanks to their credit on “Best Foot Forward.” As an example, he cited Ashley Eakin, a director who was different in the beginning and whose previous work was mainly limited to short films. Eakin directed two episodes of ‘Best Foot Forward’.
“When she gets on the show, she joins the Directors Guild, which makes it so much easier to find future directing work,” Sundquist said.
The production crew also added evidence of the untapped skills that may lie in humans and that others may overlook. One example was Marissa Erickson, a production assistant who was tasked with collecting and transporting the child actors from school to the set. “In my hometown, Alameda, I usually work in a kindergarten as a teacher’s assistant,” said Erickson, adding that she was excited to combine her previous production experience with her experience working with children.
Erickson, who has Down syndrome, was one of the crew members recommended by Appelbaum to RespectAbility after participating in the organization’s 2019 Entertainment Lab. Appelbaum recalled a workshop that Erickson attended with executives from a major studio: “Marissa got up and started talking about some of the work she’s done, and I saw an exec drop their jaws.” Appelbaum said Erickson’s work ethic and experience shakes the expectations of the supervisor of someone with Down syndrome.
“I think in their minds they thought, ‘Yeah, sure, we can hire someone who uses a wheelchair,’ but they didn’t think they could hire someone with an intellectual or developmental disability,” Appelbaum said. “Marissa clearly proves it wrong.” Recently, Erickson was offered three jobs as a production assistant at the same time. (She accepted a position in a Disney+ short film anthology series called “Launchpad.”)
Appelbaum and others said it was crucial for guilds and unions to screen their members for disabilities and for demographic information such as race and gender, to increase the representation of disabled people on film and television sets. The Writers Guild of America does, and the Director’s Guild of America began requesting disability status information in member surveys in 2021. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that represents crew members such as handlers, cinematographers, clients and make-up artists, voted last year to begin holding an annual census in an effort to increase diversity within its members. enlarge. But it’s unclear if it will include information about disabilities. (The IATSE did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Without the data, it’s hard to change things,” Appelbaum says. “If you have the hard numbers, it’s much more likely that people want to change something.”
Until then, Anner, the writer, hopes that “Best Foot Forward” can be a major step forward for hiring practices in Hollywood.
“For me, it put an end to that argument you sometimes hear from people saying, ‘Oh, we were looking for someone with a disability, we were looking for a person of color, and we couldn’t find anyone,'” he said. “We can point to this and say, ‘No, there are plenty.'”
