Ryan Gosling: If you really are contemplating playing Oscar Pistorius in a film about the double-amputee Olympian and convicted killer, you might want to take that role.
Of course, one can quibble over the definition of the word “barrier.” Hawking has ALS, a profound disability; King George VI, played by Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech,” had a stutter. In “Shine,” David Helfgott, the pianist played by Geoffrey Rush, had an ambiguously defined mental illness — what one critic lambasted as ” ‘movie madness,’ a celluloid amalgam of schizophrenia, manic-depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and idiot savant.” And Nicolas Cage’s alcoholism in “Leaving Las Vegas” was way more debilitating than Jeff Bridges’s in “Crazy Heart.”
Moreover, it’s hard to say what percentage of main characters in film — or theater and literature, for that matter — are mentally or physically afflicted. Isn’t any nuanced lead damaged in some way? Hamlet had no diagnosis, but struggled as much as the hunchbacked Richard III.
Yet, in the past few decades, playing the sick or handicapped seems a clear path to Oscar gold. Heck, Tom Hanks — playing Andrew Beckett, the gay lawyer with AIDS in “Philadelphia,” and the mentally challenged Forrest Gump — did it twice in two years.
For some, the bevy of Academy Awards won by able actors transforming themselves to appear otherwise isn’t a cause for celebration.
“The ultimate ambition of David Oyelowo’s performance as Martin Luther King, Jr. is to express the reality of black life and black history in a way that resonates with those within the black community and educates those outside it,” Scott Jordan Harris, a disabled author, wrote in Slate. “The ultimate ambition of Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking is to contort his body convincingly enough to make other able-bodied people think ‘Wow! By the end I really believed he was a cripple!’ Our attitudes to disability should have evolved past the stage when this mimicry is considered worthy of our most famous award for acting.”
Whether a good or bad thing, here’s who won what when:
1988
Dustin Hoffman
“Rain Man”
Malady: Autism
1989
Daniel Day-Lewis
“My Left Foot”
Malady: Cerebral palsy
1991
Anthony Hopkins
“The Silence of the Lambs”
Malady: Psychosis
1992
Al Pacino
“Scent of a Woman”
Malady: Blindness
1993
Tom Hanks
“Philadelphia”
Malady: AIDS
1994
Tom Hanks
“Forrest Gump”
Malady: Non-specific learning disability
1995
Nicolas Cage
“Leaving Las Vegas”
Malady: Alcoholism
1996
Geoffrey Rush
“Shine”
Malady: Non-specific mental illness
1997
Jack Nicholson
“As Good as It Gets”
Malady: Obsessive-compulsive disorder
2004
Jamie Foxx
“Ray”
Malady: Blindness
2009
Jeff Bridges
“Crazy Heart”
Malady: Alcoholism
2010
Colin Firth
“The King’s Speech”
Malady: Stutter
2013
Matthew McConaughey
“Dallas Buyers Club”
Malady: AIDS
2014
Eddie Redmayne
“The Theory of Everything”
Malady: ALS