‘Breaking Bad’s RJ Mitte reminds us of who’s missing in TV, movies

A feature by Josh Gajewski in the Los Angeles Times about TV heartthrob RJ Mitte manages to gently skewer the media’s fascination with outdated stereotypes about disability. The lead is both smart and wise. Here’s how it goes:

Maybe one day, RJ Mitte will just be RJ Mitte. Actor. Talented, funny and handsome.

Maybe one day, he’ll be many other things before he is RJ Mitte, the kid with cerebral palsy.
And maybe one day a story like this won’t have to concentrate so much on a person’s disability. But such is the world we live in, where RJ Mitte (pronounced MITT-ee) represents an anomaly that underscores a glaring Hollywood flaw: Although nearly 20% of Americans from the ages of 5 to 64 have some kind of disability, less than 2% of the characters on TV display one, and only one-half of 1% actually have speaking parts — this according to a study commissioned by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) that was published in 2005.

Gajewski transforms the usual gee-whiz-overcoming-adversity paradigm into something altogether new, injecting data about the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in Hollywood. Among the data he mines from the SAG report:

• Only a third of a a third of SAG members with disabilities worked in a theatrical or TV production during the year studied (2003);
• Working SAG members with disabilities only worked an average of 4.1 days that year; and
• SAG members with disabilities complained that they were considered only for disability-related roles, and then often saw those roles given to able-bodied actors.

The character that Mitte plays on “Breaking Bad” has cerebral palsy, as Mitte does in real life, but the show’s creator says his condition is never mentioned in the scripts because it’s not relevant.

Robert David Hall praises that creative decision as a brilliant touch, and he should know. He’s one of the few working actors in Hollywood with a recognizable disability (he has two prosthetic legs) and he plays the coroner on the original “CSI” series.

“There’s a discomfort level with showing people with disabilities as regular people,” he says. “I play a coroner now but most of the roles in my first 15 years were the bitter war veteran or the disability rights guy, never the father, the cop, the teacher.

“That’s my point — people with disabilities go on trips, they go out to the movies, they buy cars, they have good and bad relationships. We do all the same stuff that everyone does, but rarely do we see that played on films or on TV. We need this to change.”

See earlier post.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, cerebral palsy, disabilities, entertainment, movies, public attitudes, television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post