Hollywood has a tradition of searching for physical perfection while casting out those who fail to meet their lofty and arbitrary standards. For generation, marginalized groups have fought for their place at the table. The short film anthology series, CripTales, represents a profound statement from the disabled community to the cinematic universe, saying: “we exist.”

The BBC series is curated by Mat Fraser. Himself a disabled actor, Fraser has nonetheless made a name for himself across stage and screen, with noteworthy roles in hot shows like American Horror Story: Freak Show and His Dark Materials. With CripTales, he seeks to showcase a platform for handicapped performers playing themselves, rather than having their ailments represented by non-disabled actors wearing makeup or using cinematic tricks to convey conditions that occur naturally on real-life afflicted people.

SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY

While promoting the release of CripTales, Mat Fraser spoke to Screen Rant about his work on the series and his own unique trajectory through Hollywood. He discusses why it’s so important for disabled actors to be allowed to portray their own conditions onscreen. He talks about how he had a nervous breakdown following a disastrous audition for the 1990s Judge Dredd film, and how it took him years to bounce back and return to mainstream acting roles. Finally, he shares his thoughts on Donald Trump, and how he should be criticized for his actions as a person, not his various physical oddities, in particular his infamously small hands, since, as he says, “I’ve got little hands! When you insult him like that, you’re insulting me, and I don’t want to be lumped in with bloody Donald Trump!”

CripTales debuts October 1 on BBC America.

First off, how’s it going? How are you holding up in quarantine?

I’m in New York. I normally spend half my time in London and half in New York, but I’ve spend a majority in New York. We got here just as life was locking down. And you should avoid unnecessary travel… I’ve been writing a lot. If I don’t have a creative project, my mind tends to wander. So at the moment, an wandering mind can be apt towards depression, I find. I’ve been suffering a little bit, Zak. Even though, of course, this week and next week I get to talk about the fantastic CripTales, but it’s been a bit tough! Sometimes, I’ve found myself a bit despondent and down. I guess everybody is, but we’re surviving. We’re okay. We’ve got each other, we love each other, and I talk to my mom on Skype in England every day. And my sister just had a baby. Things are okay, but I’m not going to pretend it’s easy all the time, because it’s very weird! We all want to go back to “the before times,” but we know we can’t. It must be the same with you, Zak, yeah?

Yeah. I feel kind of the same way. In some ways I feel like I have it a little easier because I get to do these interviews, talking to people instead of just talking to myself. So, let’s talk about CripTales on BBC America. These incredible short films, stirring monologues. You’re a driving force behind their existence, right?

Yeah, I curated the whole thing.

There’s a lot of talk about whitewashed roles, of hiring Hollywood’s A-list stars to play any role, regardless of race, age, gender, or anything else. And that extends to disabled roles, as well… At least until recently, perhaps. I think your series aims to show how much better it is to allow disabled people to play themselves.

Absolutely. And who would have thought that would be such a radical notion? I have talked about this subject quite a bit, as you can imagine. It’s a hot topic, this subject. But rather than complain about the past and how “this person shouldn’t have played that character,” and blah-blah-blah, rather than even mentioning actors who really should have known better, I’d much rather talk about the success of the future, and how amazing CripTales is, and what amazing actors we’ve got, and how we’re more inclusive and diverse than it ever has been. I will say that the BBC, bless them, have not used non-disabled actors in disabled character roles for two or three years now. That’s their policy, and one I totally applaud. Historically, of course, we’ve been misrepresented by people who are… Hunting an Oscar? I don’t know. Maybe they think they’re doing something good for people, I don’t know. That was that, and it is what it is, but have you heard about Run with Sarah Paulson and this new, young, wheelchair-using actress?

Yes, Kiera Allen.

She’s the co-lead in a Hollywood film! That’s what I’m talking about! That’s what’s exciting to me. And CripTales is super exciting. No, it’s not Hollywood, and they’re not big features; they’re small monologues. I don’t know how many people will see it, but I’m sure it won’t be the millions who see a Godzilla film. But it’s a good start. And finally, we’re being allowed to, as you say, portray ourselves. I think the TV industry is realizing, that in order to get more authentic disability characterization in stories, you need disabled writers. For me, the real thrill about CripTales is being able to get six disabled writers to work on television, and prove that they’re good, that they have the writing chops to do a job with professional skill. Hopefully, this will convince the TV industry to employ them more, to do more stuff. Jack Thorne is a shoo-in. He’s written Enola Holmes, for goodness sake! There’s a long list of what Jack’s written, and it’s longer than your arms, let alone mine! Jack was first in because he wanted the opportunity to do his story, and he’s aware that he’s a well-known writer and his involvement would bring attention to the cause. But he said, “I want to write for Robert Softley Gale,” straight away. And Robert is one of my favorite actors. He’s a brilliant actor, and he has a wonderful story, it’s so poignant and sweet and different. It’s about such rude stuff, and it’s got such charm. I love the broad spectrum of subjects and styles covered and performed in these monologues. I just really want us to get more work from it. Myself, I’ve written a whole drama series. It wasn’t commissioned, but, you know, you can’t bang on about equality and disability and cultural apartheid and all these awful things, like I have done historically, without putting your money where your mouth is.

Yeah, write your own story, right?

I’m inspired by Quentin Tarantino, that story of him working in a video store and writing five film scripts, knowing that if one hit, they would want other ones and he had better be damn well ready! And I thought to myself, as I was in the middle of His Dark Materials, sitting in my hotel room more often than not, since I was only working two or three days a week on that for quite a few months, and thinking, yeah, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. So I co-wrote a drama series with lots of characters in it, and the lead is a 25-year-old wheelchair-using woman, because where have you ever seen that? It’s about time these things existed, and we have to write them.

You’re making an incredible leap for representation and for storytelling in general. I want to ask, for something like American Horror Story, do you have a degree of creative control over your character? That show has a realistic edge, but it’s also fantasy. Do you get to go, “No, that’s offensive, I’m not doing that,” or are you, as an actor, a hired gun and you kinda have to just go with the writer and director?

It’s somewhere in the middle, and it depends on the project. If you’re going to be in a thing about freak shows, if you accept that you are playing a “freak,” and I’m going to use the parlance of the sideshows here, I, as a natural-born freak, playing a natural-born freak, that’s pretty powerful. It’s a subject about which a lot of people have a huge amount of distaste, shame, and awfulness. There were no questions asked once we got on the set and accepted that we were doing a story about an old-time freak show. They were offensive. The offensiveness was in the concept, and if we had been offended by the concept, I would have shouted out. I have a couple of provisos, in terms of agreeing to do the show myself. At the time, I was coming from a place where I was not used to non-disabled people playing disabled people, coming from quite a radical stance in the UK. But then I realized, the core members of the acting company of American Horror Story, at that time, certainly, were a repertory company.

Right, because it was Season 4 by then.

It’s the same actors playing different characters, so I figured it was fair enough. And, after all, they were using me and a few of the others, “real ones,” so to speak. And I love sideshow history. It’s the cultural heritage of the disabled performer. I’ve done a whole play and show and documentary about Sealo the Seal Boy, a freak show performer who had flipper arms like mine. I know an immense amount about sideshow compared to most TV executives, so on set, I’d often be asked, “Is that authentic? Would that have happened?” It was nice to be asked those things. Occasionally, I got to be the sideshow expert, as it were, not that I am, but compared to most of the lot on that show, I was. What are you going to do? It’s a Ryan Murphy show. He doesn’t take a subject and make it more dull; he excites it! He puts crystal meth up its a**! He excites any subject he arrives at. The anthology is called “Horror Story,” so it’s Ryan Murphy doing a horror story about a freak show. It was never going to be fully realistic! I had a lot of people from the sideshow community going, “How dare you portray something that wasn’t really what happened?!” And I was like, it’s a horror story, what are you gonna do? Give him a break! I thought it was brilliant. I think it’s the best American Horror story out of all of them, but then I would, I’m a little biased.

So there was allowed to be some back-and-forth discussion.

It was caustic at times, but I was brought up on ‘caustic.’ I worked as a nightclub entertainer for ten years. I’ve done some stuff I can never talk about in print! American Horror Story is something I’m happy to talk about! We were a happy family. It’s where I met Kathy Bates. If “Salt of the Earth” could be used to describe any human being on the planet, it should be applied to Kathy Bates. She is one of the nicest people you could ever meet. She gave me acting advice. We got on like a house on fire! I got on with everybody there. Everybody got on with everybody. I’m asked, and I don’t like it when people ask these things, “Which one was the a**hole?” And I go, “Well, there wasn’t one, so it was probably me!”

Ha! That’s hilarious.

If you look around and there isn’t an a**hole on set or on a job, and there’s always one, so it’s probably me! (Laughs)

You were a nightclub guy for a long time, and you’ve played in real sideshows even after you became famous on TV. Did you have the ambition of being a movie and TV star when you were a boy? What was your trajectory?

It’s all I ever wanted to do. Both of my parents were actors. My dad died when I was 21, my mom’s still alive, she’s just done a day on a big feature film. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I was quite clearly told to f*** off. I remember, I went for an audition, and it was the moment I realized I was disabled. It’s a social construct, just like celebrity is, as I realized after American Horror Story… I went to audition as an extra, as a mutant extra in 2000 A.D., the Judge Dredd film with Sly Stallone, back in the day.

Oh yeah, I remember that one.

The casting woman said to me, and I’m paraphrasing, but what she actually said, in different words but quite directly, was, “We can’t put you in this film as a mutant because you’re a real mutant.” That blew my brain. I had a bit of a mental nervous breakdown. I went straight to Disability Arts in London, because I didn’t know where else to go. Straight from Shepperton to there, and I broke down in tears and told them what happened. When I came to, I realized I was disabled. That sounds so weird, maybe, to non-disabled people, but I never looked back after that. But it put my back up a bit, and I became a bit aggressive and difficult to work with. I went off and did fringe stuff, developed my skills in an arena that would welcome me, and I wasn’t getting work in acting, but it was all I ever wanted. So I ended up doing short form material in cabaret and stuff. But I’m so glad I’m back. It’s where I’ve always belonged. I love to tell stories. I love to be part of storytelling and this human experience, and disability is part of the human experience. I love drama and plots and characters. I’m glad to be back in it. I don’t ever want to leave it. I want to do this now, and I want the industry to let me do it. I want access to bigger work.

And anyone who’s seen your work knows you deserve it!

If your readers are thinking, “Oh, this guy has got a big ego,” of course I f****** have, I’m an actor! You think ordinary people can be actors? No! Only people with a desperate need to be liked become actors! Anyway, I’m being lighthearted and colloquial and flippant and rude, and I apologize, but seriously, the industry has to let me and my CripTales friends do more of this. Trust us more. I’m so bored of half of the stuff on TV. It’s the same writers coming up with the same stuff that we’ve all seen before. No more “human colonies were here ten years ago, and now we have to go to a bar with aliens who have information and someone’s got weird ears because they’re an alien.” AHHHHH! No more of that stuff! Let’s have some new stuff. Lovecraft Country, I’m digging that like hell. And did you see the British thing, I May Destroy You? There’s two black projects that are really different and fantastic and wonderful. And, I’ll be honest, Pose, a fantastic trans story, written by Our Lady J and other writers who are trans writers. The authenticity is bleeding from the project, and we feel it and appreciate it. Now it’s time for disabled people to have a go at doing that. And I do believe program makers are listening. I know, for a fact, that audiences are ready. Just because you didn’t go to school with any disabled people, you still think we’re weird and “other,” and you mistakenly think that’s how the audience will react. It is not. Everyone has a relationship disability, either direct or indirectly, and we all want to see disabled people on television, portraying disabled people. I really believe everybody wants that, not just me and my lot.

Hell yeah, man!

Okay, it’s a little high for me to jump down from this soap box, I’m a little scared. Would you mind setting fire to it?

(Laughs) You’ve given us so much, I want to try and leave you with something. I recently interviewed Mercedes Kilmer, daughter of Val Kilmer. They were in a movie together, and she talked about how, and I had never thought about it in this way, that because of his cancer that ravaged his throat and vocal chords, and he had a tracheotomy, he is a disabled person. His voice is dubbed in the movie. That movie stars a disabled actor. It’s a different type of disability that what we’re talking about in CripTales, but would you find that valid and comparable, or would you go, “That’s not really what we’re talking about in this case?”

You can talk about “Big D” or “Little D” disability, the difference being a Big D disability becomes politicized around the issue of disability. People who are coming fresh into the physical status of “not what they had before,” and they have become impaired, let’s not bombard them with bloody politics! They’ve got to get over the grief, first. And it’s a huge lost opportunity: many people become disabled. A lot of those people are actors. They should still act, but with their new body. I think we should, if Val would be comfortable with that, because it is up to him, after all, to identify as disabled and say, “Look, there are disabled people in films.” People who are “out” with their disabilities. I know some famous actors who are disabled who haven’t outed themselves. I’m not an outer, I find it immoral.

Sure.

But yes, you’re absolutely right. When actors become disabled, of course they assume that they must now tuck themselves away in their L.A. home and never come outside again. That’s what the history of the industry has told them will be the case, but it’s not the case. I’ll say to you now: I tried to get Michael J. Fox for this.

For CripTales.

I was thinking way out of my league when I started. I always start at the top and pilfer down. And they were interested! Michael J. Fox is way too busy doing his own projects and stuff, but they heard me, they listened to my request, and they appreciated what I was doing. When I say, “them,” I mean he and his people. And I really appreciated that. He is a disabled actor, and he’s a brilliant disabled actor. We should be using him more. To end this particular subject, I want to lead to Drew Barrymore. I know she’s doing her daytime show, but she is a film producer, and a really good film actor. Lionel Barrymore, who I believe was her great-uncle, was a huge star in silent films. He became a wheelchair user with an interim transitional period of using crutches. But he just carried on making films. He made twenty years worth of films as a leading actor as a wheelchair user, because he had been so famous, previously. The industry, which I guess was pre-cultural apartheid, or pre-not-wanting-real-disabled-people-in-the-industry, I don’t know what to call it, but pre-that. And he just carried on making movies! I’m like, wow! Why isn’t Michael J. Fox, who is a brilliant actor, portraying a man with his condition and lives in a story that isn’t necessarily about that condition? What I would say is, I think Drew Barrymore would get a real buzz out of producing a film that has a disabled actor in it, for obvious reasons. I’ve always found Lionel Barrymore’s career utterly fascinating, It flies in the face of all other “disabled actor” stories that we know about. The future is… Saying, “the future is crippled” is not going to go well, is it?

Well, not if I say it! You can say it, though!

I can, but I won’t. “The future is ever more inclusive.” And finally, real disabled people are being allowed to the table. And you know why? Because they built a ramp to the table… That was a very awkward and amateur metaphor, and no writer should have ever written that down.

Well, I’m a very awkward and amateur writer, so it’s perfect! Times are so horrible screwed up right now, a little awkwardness won’t hurt anyone.

On a final note… God knows I hate “45” more than probably most people.

For sure, and there’s plenty of that to go around.

But I will not have people mock him for his little hands. Get out of here with that. Mock him for what he says and does, not for the size of his hands. I’ve got little hands! When you insult him like that, you’re insulting me, and I don’t want to be lumped in with bloody Donald Trump! So back off! Anyway, that’s that.

That’s a perfect note to end on. If you’re gonna hate someone, do it for what they do, not their physical make-up.

Hell yes.

CripTales debuts October 1 on BBC America.

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About The Author


Zak Wojnar
(946 Articles Published)

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Zak Wojnar is a writer from New York City. He’s covered everything from video games and movies to maple syrup and deli business. Thanks to Screen Rant, he’s discovered his newest passion, interviewing artists. He takes great joy in letting film and gaming legends tell their own story and share their passion for their art.
Zak’s first memory is going with his dad to Tower Records and buying the VHS boxed set of the original Star Wars trilogy. Over the next decade or so, those tapes would be completely worn out through overuse. When he’s not preparing for the next big interview, he can usually be found sitting too close to the TV, either re-watching Miami Vice or The X-Files, or getting lost in a video game.
Zak has bylines at Game Informer, Muscle & Fitness, PopCultureGalaxy, Men’s Fitness, Cheese Connoisseur, and Deli Business (see, that wasn’t a joke before!), among others.
Follow and engage with him on Twitter @ZakWojnar.

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