“You can’t have hearing actors play deaf characters,” she says.
Matlin was one of the first actors cast for the movie, and when Heder faced pressure from some of her producers to cast a hearing actor in the role of Frank, Matlin put her foot down.
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“I think deaf characters don’t fit into that, and I think it needs to stop.” She notes, too, that even if television has been more generally inclusive, we haven’t seen an ensemble of deaf characters carry a television show or a movie as they do in CODA-and even that presented something of a battle. “With theatrical releases, they’re thinking about box office, and about reaching the largest audience possible, the biggest common denominator,” Matlin says. Matlin concedes that there’s more openness to the portrayal of deaf characters on television than in the movies, probably at least in part because taking chances on television involves less financial risk. And from 2000 to 2006, she played no-baloney pollster Joey Lucas on The West Wing-a character who’s great at her job and who also happens to be deaf. Kelley, creators of, respectively, The L Word and Picket Fences, two shows on which she’s had recurring roles. She’s been lucky enough to work with producers, directors and writers who have felt that way, people like Ilene Chaiken and David E. The point, Matlin says, is that you can get good stories no matter what kind of character you put onscreen. It just takes one person to make a change, and suddenly the whole family dynamic changes. “One thing I love about this film, and that I hope most people will see, is that deaf families are just like any other families out there. It just so happens that they depend on their hearing daughter because of where they live,” Matlin says. “They’re hardworking people, they’re very close knit, they depend on each other. And because she can hear, she can pick up instances in which her father, Frank, and older brother, Leo (played by Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant, respectively, both of whom are deaf) aren’t getting fair prices for what they catch. They have limited contact with the hearing world partly because they know they can rely on Ruby to interpret for them, using ASL. The family in CODA, as part of a small-town fishing community, have made choices that other families might not. This is just one type of deaf family,” Matlin says. “There are a lot of people who think deaf people are all the same. To call CODA-its title an acronym for “child of deaf adults”-a story about a deaf family is to miss the point: it’s about a family, period, albeit one facing specific challenges. Matlin’s early fame came with an unspoken hope: once audiences had seen, and responded to, a deaf character played by a deaf actor, surely a floodgate would break, and stories about-and featuring-people who happen to be deaf or disabled would no longer be a rarity. But if Matlin is hardly the only deaf actor working in movies, television or theater, how many of the others can most of us name? It’s only very recently that deaf actors like Millicent Simmonds (from the hugely successful Quiet Place franchise) or The Walking Dead‘s Laura Ridloff (who will play a superhero in Marvel’s upcoming Eternals movie) have become familiar to mainstream audiences, and even they aren’t yet big stars. The word first implies the promise of a second. In 1987 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her unflinching turn in Children of a Lesser God, as a custodian at a school for the deaf who has a romance with a hearing teacher, a speech pathologist played by William Hurt, though their ideologies on speech and deafness clash.Īt 21 Matlin-who was born in born in Martin Grove, Ill., and who lost most of her hearing when she was 18 months old-was the youngest actor to have won the award, as well as the first deaf actor to do so.
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