A Quote by Sean Berdy
The deaf culture is portrayed very accurately on 'Switched at Birth' because the writers did the opposite of the norm. They did their homework before portraying anything on television.
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The deaf community is nearly never portrayed accurately on television/film because most writers never took the time to immerse themselves in the deaf culture before portraying it on television. They also never got to know their deaf actors.
The availability of roles for deaf actors has always been very limited. After 'Switched at Birth' began including deaf actors, a ripple effect has definitely been created in the industry. 'Switched at Birth' has made an impact for the better.
I did my first series lead back in 1991 on a show called 'Reasonable Doubts' and have done many shows with other actors who are deaf. But 'Switched at Birth' is the first TV show where there is more than one actor who is deaf or hard of hearing and who are series regulars.
I had called her up a couple of weeks before then, because I had heard this vicious rumour that she did not like the movie. It was very upsetting for me. I am very sensitive to that, because I am portraying her life and did not want her to be unhappy.
I know a little bit about deaf culture because a friend of mine has been in the deaf culture for awhile. Over the course of 25 years, she and I have talked about many of the issues and concerns for deaf people and deaf culture.
I was, like, the guy who sat at the front of the class and did his homework and did everyone else's homework and got A grades.
I did radio, I did television, I did opera, I did films in which I had very, very little to say. But I had a lot of experience in front of the camera, and that's what really counts.
...when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.
If someone says: "I don't want to have a cochlear implant, because I want my child to grow up with a rich sense of deaf culture," he must acknowledge that the deaf culture that exists in the world today has a different scale than the deaf culture that's likely to exist in the world 50 years from now.
The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.
Changing things is not easy, and I say this without any irony. It is not that someone does not want to, but because it is a hard thing to do. Take Obama, a forward-thinking man, a liberal, a democrat. Did he not pledge to shut down Guantanamo before his election? But did he do it? No, he did not. And may I ask why not? Did he not want to do it? He wanted to, I am sure he did, but it did not work out. He sincerely wanted to do it, but did not succeed, since it turned out to be very complicated.
I find it very difficult to do anything on my own now because people recognize me. This has never happened to me before because I haven't really done television before. But I suppose if you're in people's rooms all the time, I don't know - I was thinking the other night with people like DiCaprio and, you know, those big stars and Cate Blanchett, and you just think how did they exist? It's so difficult. And I think now it's very intrusive because of these cellphones, you know, with cameras.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
I've been involved in the deaf community for years, and my friends in the community that are actors or performers get very frustrated when they see hearing people portraying a deaf role.
Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn't do television - they certainly didn't do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.
Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?
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