'I'm an actress living with a disability. Here's what it's like on set.'

I’m going to be honest. It feels strange to have my words back on this website after so many years. I was 15, when I crash-landed on Planet Mamamia after a bold and well-timed Twitter tag led to a blog post of mine being republished, and later a job offer. 

In the six or seven years since I was last orbiting this slice of cyberspace, a lot of life has happened. I finished high school. I got two uni degrees. And I became publicly known as a wearer of many hats; a writer/a disability advocate/the Editor In Chief of my own media company and a few others. But perhaps the most unexpected string to my bow these days is that I've become an actress.

Even though I grew up a Disney Channel obsessed drama kid, acting never really felt like anything other than the clouds of a hazy fantasy world. A world where I wasn’t living with a disability. That is, until Latecomers came along and changed everything.

While you're here, watch the trailer for Latecomers, a series exploring the complexities of sex and disability. Story continues after video.

No one was more surprised than me when I secured the lead role of Sarah – a cynical, sexually inexperienced twenty-something with Cerebral Palsy (CP for short) in this gritty groundbreaking new dramatic comedy that also serves a healthy dose of romance. 

I mean, I had no acting training. Auditioning wasn’t even on my radar. That only happened after an unexpected email from one of the show’s producers, inviting me to participate in what they call, a ‘read through’ which is basically a workshop designed to help writers figure out what’s working and what’s not. 

There’s no expectation that anyone involved in a writer’s read-through will have anything more permanent to do with whatever is being made. When the director told me afterwards she expected to see my audition tape, I laughed. In my head, there was a better chance that pigs might fly.

I mean, of course I LOVED the scripts – they made me laugh, cry, and feel seen in a way I never had before. There was even lived experience guiding the show’s creation; two of the writers Angus Thompson and Emma Meyers live with CP and so do the two main characters, Frank and Sarah. But I never thought for a second that the captivating lead actress I pictured cheering on from my living room as she made Australian television history would be me. 

That first day on set, my body hummed with nerves through each of the 10 takes it took to nail my first scene. My brain spinning as I tried to remember my lines, not look like a robot while delivering them and ignore the giant camera only metres from my face (Hi Grég!).

Filming a TV show might seem and sound glamourous, but the truth is, it’s actually incredibly gruelling. We were on set for 13 working days at least 10 hours a day, often more, blurry with exhaustion by the end, especially when like me, you live and move in a body that already struggles with fatigue because the most basic of tasks burn energy at sometimes triple the rate. 

Every day was a new location somewhere in Sydney or Newcastle, except for the grounding three days we spent at my character’s house. Do you know how disorienting it is to walk through a house you’ve never seen before and spot your own childhood photos pinned to the fridge or in frames on the walls?

Moving around all the time was fun but complicated – two people who use wheelchairs can’t necessarily go everywhere and if they can get somewhere, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. Locations that fit the aesthetic of the show weren’t always entirely accessible, so we were always adapting. From rickety portable ramps that production had to purchase so we could navigate places with a few steps to the varying degrees of what was classified a disabled bathroom, every single able-bodied person involved was left unpleasantly surprised by how difficult it is to move through the world when accessibility is a non-negotiable priority. 

Add to that the logistical chaos of multiple costume changes in a day, stunts, sex scenes, filming in water when your body doesn’t react well to cold, and it’s late autumn/early winter, and you start to get an idea of just how intense yet special this show was to make. Even with all the extra considerations that had to be made, not a single person on that crew ever made me feel like I was a burden or not allowed to take up the space I needed, a rare experience. This also wasn’t a case of able-bodied people swooping in and making this project because they thought it could be inspiring or tragic. This was and is disabled people both in front of and behind the camera telling their real, raw stories as we have always deserved to do. This is disabled people as messy, imperfect, cruel, hopeless romantics – full humans in all their glory being seen for everything they are. 

And while Latecomers is a first, it won’t be a last.

Latecomers is bold, confronting, hilarious and at times heart-wrenching, a series exploring the complexities of sex and disability. You can now binge-watch it on SBS On Demand.

Feature Image: Supplied.