Draft:Cripping-up

Cripping-up is the act of casting an actor without a visible disability into a role which is scripted as having visible disability, or is about an historical figure who is know to have had a disability. The term is from the audience's perspective where the visibly apparent disability is mimicked by an actor who who does not have physical, sensory or communication disability. This does not include disabled actors being cast in roles with different conditions to their own, or the practice of transposing their condition in to a role because they have a "lived experience" of visible disability and ableism.

The term "cripping-up" began to appear in mainstream media around 2010. It is a derivative of the word "crip" and is used to call out certain casting practices in stage, TV drama and film production. There is an academic discussion, focusing on the extent of the practice and the nuances in its interpretation, which extends to exploring the difference in acting between embodiment and impersonation, and how without the lived experience of disability most portrayals of disability by non-disabled actors do not get under the skin of what it is to be disabled. This issue was mapped out in the MacTaggart lecture delivered by screenwriter Jack Thorne at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2021.

A call against cripping-up has become part of the disability rights movement, and a vocal lobby of acting and creative professions are actively engaged with the industry for more authentically and creatively when it comes to disability portrayal. This includes industry professionals such as the director of My Left Foot, Jim Sheridan and others within the industry have joined this call for change. This has led to instances such as disabled actors and writers calling on the UK TV and film industry at BAFTA to be more proactive.

As a result, there are more TV, Film and stage productions are casting authentically or incidentally, with organisations like Netflix and BBC Studios forming a disabled writers partnership, The Profile was launched in 2021 which is casting resource created by the Royal National Theatre giving the industry access to professional disabled actor showcases. Channel 4 (UK) created new guidance for portrayal, and the Creative Diversity Network (CDN) has developed the data platform Diamond, which is used by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Paramount, S4C, Warner Bros. Discovery, UKTV and Sky TV to obtain consistent diversity data on programmes they commission which includes disability representation onscreen.

There are parallels with movement for better representation for Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities which have led the way with colour-blind casting, that covers incidental portrayal. The emotion felt by disabled communities was summed up by Frances Ryan in The Guardian 2015.

"...disabled characters create powerful images and sentiments for audiences. They can symbolise the triumph of the human spirit over so-called “adversity”. They can represent what it is to be “different” in some way, an outsider or an underdog who ultimately becomes inspirational. These are universal feelings every audience member can identify with. And there is something a little comforting in knowing, as we watch the star jump around the red carpet, that none of it – the pain or negativity we still associate with disability – was real. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps as a society we see disability as a painful external extra rather than a proud, integral part of a person, and so it doesn’t seem quite as insulting to have non-disabled actors don prosthetics or get up from a wheelchair when the director yells “cut”. But for many disabled people in the audience, this is watching another person fake their identity. When it comes to race, we believe it is wrong for the story of someone from a minority to be depicted by a member of the dominant group for mass entertainment. But we don’t grant disabled people the same right to self-representation."

The call for change in industry practices has come from organisations such as 1in4 Coalition, Equity UK, TripleC, UK Disability Arts Alliance as well as disabled actors such as Kurt Yeager, Amy Trigg and Liz Carr.

Visible disability characteristics

Disability portrayal, whether it is authentic or incidental, focuses on cultural markers that show the audience a character has trait, need or condition without having to state what the condition is. Traits or needs are aspects of a character a writer or director may identify without stating what the cause is, because the cause my not be central to the story. When stories are about historical figures such as Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Merrick, Lord Byron, King Richard III or Lord Nelson, their conditions are well documented.

Fictional characters can be less obvious and often disability characteristics are described rather than the writer medically naming specific conditions. This can be seen in plays like The Metamorphosis where the changing into a bug, the main character has difficulty interfacing with a world that is neither designed for him or accepting of him, which are core to understanding what is referred to as the disability lived experience.

The works of Samuel Beckett use literal disability as a metaphor to explore ideas of hopelessness, dependency and autonomy, but the characters such as Winnie and Willie in Happy Days, Pozzo and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell in Endgame, all have physical disability characteristics. In her book, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, author Hannah Simpson reveals how Beckett's theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.

Visible Disability Characteristics
Disability in writing does not always come with a diagnosis of a condition, as with identifying the ethnicity of a character, but the visible disability characteristics help the audience understanding a character's lived experience. In most story lines there are barriers that a character has to overcome and sometimes these are directly related to their disability. When a disabled actor is cast into a non-disabled role, known as "incidental disability", this can make the process of overcoming a barrier even more interesting to an audience.
Capability	Impairment of movment, capability and capacity due to a chronic health, pain, learning or cognitive challenges.
Communication	Communication can include sign languages, but it can also mean the character has difficulty with communicating or with comprehending others. They may need an communication aid or have to communicate in a style that makes their challenges more obvious to the audience.
Deaf	The character signs a culturally accurate or an equivalent sign language, so communicating with people who do not sign is a challenge.
Mobility	Ability to walk is impaired. They may use a walking aid, have involuntary movement, or difficulty walking because of anything from limb differences or spasticity, to pain.
Movement	All or any aspects of movement, not just walking, are impaired or obviously different to the audience. The character may find that the world they inhabit has not been designed to meet their needs, disabling them in the process
Non-Verbal	The character never speaks but may be able to communicate in otherv ways.
Physical Appearance	The condition of the character manifests in such a way that it is important that it stands out to the audience. This can include movement, unusual physicalities, limb differences or the use of aids such as sticks, a wheelchair, ear defenders, white cane, hearing aids, spasticity, physical ticks, stammer etc. This can also be highlighted in the way that other characters react to their appearance.
Vision Impaired	The character's vision is as such that outside of their reach is the unknown
Wheelchair User	The character spends some or all of the performance in one or more wheelchairs or a bath chair or is unable to move unless unaided.

On Screen

Disabled roles have been played by non-disabled actors going back to the silent era, with films like The Penalty in 1920, and City Lights 1931 an Frankenstein 1931, being early examples where non-disabled actors played disabled character on-screen.

There were few disabled actors before the 1990s available to play authentic or incidental roles, and the few examples were mostly covered by only 6 actors;

• Esmond Knight, was blinded during a sea battle in WW2 and went back to he pre-war profession of acting. He played bot sighted and vision impaired roles appearing in all three of Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare films, as well as appearing as the captain of HMS Prince of Wales in Sink the Bismark!, where he served in WW2 and lost his sight in the battle the film portrayed. Other notable appearances were in Elizabeth R, I, Claudius and Superman IV, The Quest for Peace.
• Lionel Barrymore contended with various disabling physical conditions throughout his life, but had a successful stage and screen career, appearing in films such as It's a Wonderful Life and Key Largo.
• Harold Russell, after losing his hands during his military service, Russell was cast in the epic drama film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1947
• Marlee Maitlin, was the first Deaf actress to feature in a mainstream movie and won the Academy Award for Best Actress in the process, Children of a Lesser God and CODA
• Donald Gray, starred in the lead role as the one armed detective Mark Saber in the 1950s TV drama The Vise
• Peter Falk who was vision impaired and had a glass eye, starred as the much loved detective Columbo

Historically the majority of disabled roles went to non-disabled actors but with more disabled actors available, the number of instances of cripping-up has decreased with the majority of disabled characters being authentically cast:

• Wicked (The movie) 2024. After 20 years of stage productions where Nessarose was played by non-disabled actors, the movie has tackled this by casting Marissa Bode and Cesily Collette Taylor (as a child) in the role, both of whom are wheelchair users.
• Echo 2023 to 2024 by Marvel, cast Alaqua Cox as the main role, who is also Deaf
• Shardlake 2024 by Disney cast Arthur Hughes, a physically disabled actor in the lead role. Arthur said in an interview about the series that Shardlake's disability was "the least interesting thing about him."
• The Hardacres 2024 on Paramount TV, cast Zak Ford-Williams as Harry Hardacre, the youngest son who has Little's Disease
• Bridgerton, Season 3 2024, introduced two new characters, Lady Stowell who is Deaf is played by Sophie Wooley, and Lord Remington who uses a bath chair played by Zak Ford-Williams who is a wheelchair user.
• The Fall of the House of Usher 2023 featured Ruth Codd who is an actor and amputee, as Juno
• All The Light We Cannot See 2023, authentically cast Aria Mia Loberti as blind teenager Marie-Laure
• Ralph and Katie 2022 was a spin-off series from The A-Word by Tiger Aspect and the main roles are played by Sarah Gordy and Leon Harrop who are actors with Downs Syndrome.

On Stage

Disabled characters in stage plays have a longer history stretching as far back as Tiresias in Oedipus, by Sophocles. There are many disabled historical disabled figures as well as disabled fictional characters such as Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Meshak Gardiner in Coram Boy, Colin in The Secret Garden, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, that whom, up until recently, have not been accessible to disabled actors. Like film and television, this has changed with mainstream theatre companies casting more disabled actors and enabling the disabled community to reclaim their stories.

Tiny Tim

It took until 2017 for the first disabled Tiny Tim to appear in a professional adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Lenny Rush was Tim at The Old Vic in London which opened-up the possibility to many young actors in productions around the world.

Richard III

Another role that has been at the forefront of the Theatre and disability movement is Duke of Gloucester/The King in Shakespeare's play Richard III. Arguably this is where change started, not just because the king himself had scoliosis, which is exaggerated in the play, but one of the key themes of the play is Ableism and the attitudes of his family and the court towards Richard, in part shaping whom he became and how he acted.

Since 2004, King Richard III has been played by the following disabled actors, not all have had the same condition, but they used their own one to explore the authenticity of the King's lived experience:

• Peter Dinklage, 2004 at The Public Theatre in New York
• Zak Ford-Williams (Alternate), 2024 at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast
• Mat Frazer, 2017 Northern Broadsides production at the Hull Truck Theatre in Kingston upon Hull, and Viaduct Theatre in Halifax
• Arthur Hughes, 2022 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon
• Tom Mothersdale, 2019 at the Bristol Old Vic in Bristol
• Kate Mulvany, 2022 at Bell Shakespeare in Melbourne
• Jan Potměšil, 2017 at Theater in Celetná & Klubovna, in Prague
• Katy Sullivan 2024 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in Chicago
• Michael Patrick, 2024 at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast
• Michael Patrick Thornton, 2016 at The Gift Theatre in Chicago

Example Plays with disabled characters

Other example plays that have characters with visible disability characteristics or historical figures with known disabilities.

Title	Character(s)	Writer(s)	Disability Characteristics
Arcadia	Lord Byron	Tom Stoppard	Movement and Physical Appearance
Coram Boy	Meshak Gardiner	Helen Edmundson	Movement and Communication
Cyrano de Bergerac	Cyrano de Bergerac	Edmond Rostand	Physical Appearance
Dr. Strangelove	Dr. Strangelove	Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George, adapted for the stage by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley	Wheelchair User and Movement
Frankenstein	The Monster, Igor and De Lacey	Mary Shelly, adaptations by Nick Dear, Barbara Field, Jonathan Christenson, Richard Brinsley Peake and Eric B. Sirota	Communication, Physical Appearance, Movement, Capability and Vision Impairment
I, Claudius	Claudius	John Mortimer and Michael White, based on the Robert Graves books I, Claudius and Claudius the God	Movement and Communication
Lady Chatterley's Lover	Clifford	John Harte based on the D.H. Lawrence novel	Communication, Movement and possible Physical Appearance
Moby Dick	Captain Ahab	Herman Melville. Adaptations for stage by Mark Rosenwinkel, Jim Burke, Julian Rad, Morris Panych and David Catlin	Physical Appearance, Mobility and Movement
Moulin Rouge!	Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec	Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce	Mobility, Movement and Physical Appearance
Nicholas Nickleby	Smike	Charles Dickens with theatrical adaptations by Edward Stirling and David Edgar	Movement and Communication
Oedipus	Tiresias	Sophocles. Adaptation by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee	Vision Impaired
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest	Billy Bibbit, Charlie Cheswick, Max Taber and Martini	Ken Kesey, adapted by Dale Wasserman	Communication, Physical Appearance, Movement and Capability
Rear Window	Hal Jeffries	Stage adaptation by Keith Reddin of the short story by Cornell Woolrich	Wheelchair User
The Cripple of Inishmaan	Billy Claven	Martin McDonagh	Movement and Communication
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time	Christopher	Simon Stephens based on the novel of the same name by Mark Haddon	Communication and Movement
The Glass Menagerie	Laura	Tennessee Williams	Mobility, Movement and Physical Appearance
The Hunchback of Notre Dame	Quasimodo	Victor Hugo with stage adaptations by Ken Hill, Robert Hossein, Nicholas DeBaubien, Pip Utton, James Villafuerte, Harold Hodge Jr and Benjamin Polya	Physical Appearance and Movement
The Secret Garden	Colin	Frances Hodgson Burnett with adaptations by Pamela Sterling, Thomas W. Olson, Lucy Simon, Jessica Swale, Rosalind Sydney, and Anna Himali Howard & Holly Robinson	Wheelchair User and Capability
Treasure Island	Long John Silver and Blind Pew	Robert Louis Stevenson, with stage adaptations by Jules Eckert Goodman, Jule Styne, Ken Ludwig, B.H. Barry & Vernon Morris, Mike Kenny, Bryony Lavery, Nicolas Billon and Sandi Toksvig	Mobility, Movement and Physical Appearance, Vision Impaired
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane	Blanche	Henry Farrell	Wheelchair User and Capability
Wicked	Nessarose	Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman	Wheelchair User

Incidental Portrayal

More than 7% of the general public in the UK and US have a visible disability, despite the efforts of the industry there is a currently a lack of data on whether films, stage productions and TV dramas reflect this. The Creative Diversity Network has started tracking some aspects of disability inclusion in the industry but incidental portrayal of disability in casting for drama is currently not in scope from the audience's perspective.

Incidental disability portrayal is different to authentic portrayal as it is about having the right to portray a role regardless of whether a character is scripted as having a disability or not. An example of this is Bridgerton series 3 on Netflix, 2024. Shondaland cast two visibly disabled actors, Sophie Woolley as Lady Stowell, and Zak Ford-Williams as Lord Remmington. Neither of the characters were scripted as having a disability and yet one is a Deaf sign user and the other a bath chair user. There is no mention of their conditions in the series and Lord Remmington is viewed first and fore-mostly as an eligible bachelor and potential suitor to Penelope Featherington.

Progressive Condition Portrayal

In 2014 despite his award-winning portrayal of Professor Stephen Hawking the film The Theory of Everything, the casting of Eddie Redmayne came under scrutiny as to whether portraying someone with a progressive condition constituted "cripping-up", as this raised questions and suggestions that included having two actors, or even using CGI. The practicalities where all theoretical until in contrast the BBC's 2022 drama production Better, cast the disabled actor Zak Ford-Williams in a role where at first he had to mask his cerebral palsy, and then unmask it after his character Owen survives meningitis. Ford-Williams used his experience as a physically disabled actor who has had to learn to walk again twice after medial procedures, which demonstrated the possibility of disabled actors playing progressive conditions.

Disability Transposition

Literal casting is rarely needed as disability is more about the portrayal of what it is to be a disabled person rather than what it is to be labelled as having a specific condition. In this way disability becomes a creative opportunity for Directors to explore what it is like to live in a world filled with physical and social barriers not experienced by mainstream audiences. A useful example of that is The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man, which toured Australia and the UK with Daniel Monks and Zak Ford-Williams in the lead role as Joseph Merrick. Neither actors share the same condition as Joseph, however they both brought their conditions and experiences as disabled people to the role.

Disability Dramaturgy

There is nuance, especially when a character has multiple conditions or where there is a mismatch between an actors condition and what is scripted, however the key element is that a visibly disabled actor knows what the lived experience is, and with the help of a Disability Dramaturg the creative process will find the truth in the performance.

Academy Awards

Over the history of the Academy Awards, there have been 22 Oscar nominations for portraying physical and visible disabilities, and 9 winners. Nearly all of these occurred before the movement for changes in casting practices had begun.

• 1952: Best Actor nominee Arthur Kennedy in Bright Victory. Playing someone who is blind.
• 1966: Best Actress nominee Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue. Playing someone who is blind.
• 1968: Best Actress nominee Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. Playing someone who is blind.
• 1969: Best Actor nominee Alan Arkin playing someone who is deaf and mute in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
• 1971: Best Supporting Actor Sir John Mills as a mute "village idiot” in Ryan's Daughter.
• 1979: Best Actor Jon Voight plays a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran in Coming Home.
• 1985: Best Supporting Actor nominee John Malkovich in Places in the Heart. Playing someone who is blind.
• 1989: Best Actor Dustin Hoffman is an autistic savant in Rain Man.
• 1990: Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis wins his first Oscar for portraying Irish artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot.
• 1990: Best Actor nominee Tom Cruise is paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.
• 1993: Best Actor Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Playing someone who is blind.
• 1994: Best Supporting Actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio plays developmentally disabled Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
• 1994: Best Supporting Actor nominee Gary Sinise is a CGI-enhanced double amputee in Forrest Gump.
• 1995: Best Actor Tom Hanks is Forrest Gump.
• 1997: Best Actor nominee Woody Harrelson is a wheelchair-user and pornographer in The People vs. Larry Flynt.
• 2002: Best Actor nominee Sean Penn is developmentally disabled in I Am Sam.
• 2005: Best Actress Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby is a boxer who winds up a quadriplegic.
• 2005: Best Actor Jamie Foxx in Ray. Playing blind musician Ray Charles.
• 2007: Best Supporting Actress nominee Rinko Kikuchi plays a deaf teenager in Babel.
• 2011: Best Actor Colin Firth stutters in The King's Speech as King George VI.
• 2012: Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva ends up a wheelchair user after a stroke in Amour.
• 2015: Best Actor Eddie Redmayne has ALS as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

References

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• Disability theatre
• Ableism in the United States
• Ableism in the United Kingdom
• Plays and musicals about disability
• Fictional characters with disabilities
• Disability in the arts
• Ableism
• Disability rights
• Films about people with paraplegia or tetraplegia
• Films about disability
• Disability in television
• Films about Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Television shows about disability
• Television episodes about disability