Recently, Reddit user Stocklit asked about the worst onscreen portrayals of characters with disabilities — and they’re really bad. Here are 18 times neurotypical actors played autistic or intellectually disabled characters…and did NOT do a good job.
1.
Freddie Highmore plays Dr. Shaun Murphy, a surgical resident with autism, on The Good Doctor. While the show was wildly popular, lasting seven seasons, many people felt the show fed into stereotypes about autism — especially autistic people being savants with special skills. Murphy also exhibits problematic behaviors and comments that are blamed on his autism, like the time he does not respect pronouns.
People with autism, in particular, found the portrayal problematic. As Sarah Kurchak writes for Time, the character “struck me as more of an amalgamation of non-autistic people’s misconceptions, fears, and fantasies about autism than a nuanced exploration of what it’s actually like to be someone like me.” Oh, and none of the writers or cast members on the show were autistic until the seventh season.
2.
Elizabeth Shue’s performance as the titular character in Molly is borderline unwatchable. In the film, she plays an autistic woman who acts like a child. She pees her pants, shouts “NO!” a lot, and gets naked randomly…before surgery to literally fix her autism, placing this movie in the “disabilities need to be fixed” trope. Oh, and she has super hearing, for some reason, in case you forgot the “autistic people=savants” trope. They threw in some incest vibes and the r–slur for good measure.
3.
Gigli was filled with problems — don’t get me started on Jennifer Lopez’s character asking for oral sex with “gobble gobble” — but one of the worst parts was Justin Bartha’s portrayal of a man with an unspecified disability. Bartha gave what was referred to as a “cringe-y” and “wildly offensive performance” of the character Brian, relying on an overly exaggerated, stereotypical portrayal. The Guardian wrote, “The character (and the performance) came off as a slapdash Rain Man riff when the film came out, and time has certainly not improved it.” The character was also little more than a plot device.
4.
The Blind Side doesn’t really assign a specific disability to Michael Oher, but it portrays him as having an extremely low IQ and apparent cognitive issues. Oher himself criticized this portrayal, saying, “I felt like it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it.” Portraying Oher as potentially having cognitive impairments just fed into the white savior narrative of the film. Oh, and there was the wildly dumb part about Oher scoring low on everything but “protective instinct.”
5.
John Travolta’s portrayal of an autistic man who is obsessed with an actor in The Fanatic was called “too scatter-shot and offensive to be funny” and a “woefully misguided, over-the-top, fence swinging performance delivered packed with equal parts actorly indulgence and ignorance.” Other critics called Travolta’s performance “cringe-worthy” and said Travolta “comes across like a grown man trying to imitate a first-grader.”
Another said the film was “a brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession.” The film also suggests autistic people are obsessive and dangerous, explaining Travolta’s messed-up behavior away with his autism.
6.
The very premise of The Lawnmower Man is offensive. In the film, a scientist experiments on a man with an intellectual disability to make him smarter (and, in the process, more aggressive). Not only does this perpetuate the idea that people with disabilities need to be “fixed,” it also makes use of the r–slur. Jeff Fahey, who played the main character, also played him as a “cringe-worthy” caricature, according to this review, “with his over‑the‑top mannerisms and wooden delivery robbing the character of any shred of credibility or humanity.”
7.
IMDB reviewers called Rosie O’Donnell’s portrayal of a woman named Beth with a disability in Riding the Bus With My Sister a “grotesque caricature” and “insulting.” This review from That Film Guy wrote, “O’Donnell’s performance is all comedic gurning, overly-affected gesturing and unintentionally silly voices. … Her entire performance is constantly one or two notches too high. It feels like an offensive impersonation of somebody with Beth’s condition, rather than a believable or moving representation.”
8.
Sia casting neurotypical dancer Maddie Ziegler as a nonverbal autistic girl in her film Music was…certainly a choice. The movie was panned and called ableist, with reviews noting Ziegler’s performance was like a caricature of an autistic person. It also faced criticism for its portrayal of the use of restraint on autistic people, which is not recommended and can be dangerous and even fatal.
This example is also especially bad due to the way Sia handled the criticism. Backlash to the film was strong even before it came out, and Sia only made things worse during the film’s promotion. At one point, when an autistic actor called her out for not casting someone like her, Sia replied, “Maybe you’re just a bad actor.” Sia also stated she “actually tried working with a beautiful young girl, nonverbal on the spectrum, and she found it unpleasant and stressful.”
9.
It wasn’t so much that Jacob Tremblay’s portrayal of an autistic child in Predator was problematic (though he is another example of a neurotypical actor being cast in a neurodivergent role), but the film did play into other problematic autism tropes. Namely, it reinforced the notion that autistic people are savants – but it did this to an extreme, suggesting they’re evolutionarily advanced. One writer called this depiction a “regressive, ill-conceived catastrophe.”
A Salon review more diplomatically called it “strange,” asking, “Does it really help members of the autistic community to be reduced to a broad stereotype — even a positive one — instead of depicted as individuals with their own unique quirks and foibles? If a movie perpetuates a stereotype with the best intentions, does that make it any less problematic? And if an autistic person is viewed as a prize to be won because of his or her autism, is that not still a form of objectification?”
10.
The Accountant also paints autistic people as savants, with an Inverse review stating it “quickly devolves into the kind of glib savant stereotype that has plagued the autism community since Rain Man.” The review also points out that at one point, “a neurologist running a school for kids with mental disorders that Wolff attended as a child tells a new couple that their son could grow up to be special as well, positing some kind of X-Men-like academy that preps new generations of autistic super-agents.”
“Anything truly progressive the movie tried to convey about the disorder is meaningless, because the conclusion you draw from it is that autism is what helped him and others like him to become superhuman killing machines,” the review continues. The film also reinforces the idea that people with disabilities, and autism in particular, are dangerous.
11.
Both Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribis were criticized for their roles in the rom-com The Other Sister, where they played two people with intellectual disabilities who fall in love. Famed critic Rober Ebert wrote in his one-star review that the “offensive” film was “shameless” in its use of their disabilities as “a gimmick, a prop and a plot device.” He continued, “It treats the characters like cute little performing seals” who spout dialogue meant to display their disability, “with perfect timing and an edge of irony and drama. Their zingers slide out with the precision of sitcom punch lines.”
12.
Shaun Cassidy and Linda Purl’s performances as two people with disabilities who fall in love in Like Normal People are also not great, particularly Purl’s. As one Letterboxd user points out, Purl “is a cartoon with her whiny voice and her deeply offensive display of over-the-top mannerisms. It’s the very worst performance I have ever seen from her.” The film also reinforces the notion that people with disabilities don’t or shouldn’t have autonomy, especially when it comes to romantic relationships.
13.
Adam Sandler never actually played a character with a specific disability, but many of his characters are implied to have low social and intellectual prowess. His character in The Waterboy was specifically referred to as “slow”, which is often understood as an ableist reference to possessing an intellectual or learning disability. The character was even called the r–slur. His character’s “slowness” is played for laughs, as is his stutter.
14.
There’s Something about Mary also makes use of the r–slur and plays Warren’s disability for laughs, as well as a plot device to impart Mary’s “goodness” on the viewer. Warren is very much played as a stereotype, and even co-director Peter Farrelly stated there was one thing he’d change about the character. “I would have used an actor with an intellectual disability instead of another actor. Even though, by the way, the actor in it was incredible, there’s too many actors out there with intellectual disabilities who don’t get those opportunities,” Farrelly said, reflecting on his decision to cast an actor, W. Earl Brown, without a disability.
15.
Technically, Duddits (portrayed by Donnie Wahlberg) from Dreamcatcher is an alien, but he is portrayed at least at first as having a disability…which in itself seems to call people with disabilities “alien.” The r–slur is used multiple times, and Wahlberg’s portrayal is less than favorable — he also has, for no real reason, a lisp.
16.
Kevin Bacon’s portrayal of a man with a disability who befriends a young Evan Rachel Wood in Digging to China was also less than ideal. The Seattle Times wrote in its review, “Bacon is a gifted actor, and it would be nice to report that he pulls it off, but in too much of Digging to China, his twitching and posturing is transparently the work of an actor trying too hard.” While perhaps not the worst example on this list, Bacon is a neurotypical actor, and his performance fails to live up to anything resembling reality for people with disabilities.
17.
Team America: World Police parodied a bunch of celebs, but its portrayal of Matt Damon felt extra problematic. In the film, they portrayed Damon as wildly dumb, only able to say his own name. According to Damon, the reason for this was: “The puppet came in looking kind of mentally deficient and they didn’t have time to change it, so they just made me someone who could really only say his own name.” This reasoning reveals that the joke of Damon’s character was not just that he was dumb — they were clearly trying to paint him as having a disability (suggesting that people with disabilities are dumb), and playing it for laughs.
18.
And finally, while Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic man in Rain Man was, at the time, near-universally praised, in the ensuing years, fans have found some problems — namely that Kim Peek, on whom Hoffman was based, did not have autism. He was a savant, but not all savants are people with autism (and vice versa), as we’ve established in this post. Though it’s worth noting the character was also based on Bill Sackter, who was diagnosed as having a disability.
