Coming out this week is "a 'feel good', inspirational film about disability" - the problem? There is no one disabled in it.

There is an official term for this. It's called "Cripping-up" - and disabled actors/people are sick of it happening.

The film not only intentionally did not cast disabled actors or even take a brief moment to look for them - whom there are thousands of - all professionally trained and highly qualified as well as skilled, and all would have loved to have auditioned for what is in theory a wonderful plot-line; but they use the wrong language and terms, infantilise disabled people, misrepresent disability and sexuality, and are profiting on the exploitation of specific conditions.

The trailer for the film shows the abled actors going on a road trip, two wheelchair users and one visually impaired person (they don't clarify the level of the character's sight) - however they don't even use the right language to refer to these. Already rejecting the real disabled community, they are on a road trip with the purpose of having sex. Funnily enough, you can't show the genuinely wonderful complexities and normalities of sex and disability without disabled people. Sex with disabilities is different, but in the same way that everything in our lives is just adapted, so is sex. It is no more awkward or any less natural than abled's sex, as the trailer begins to imply it is. Disabled actors are not only trained and have experience in on-screen/stage sexual situations, but are entirely knowledgeable and able to accurately portray what sex with a disability is actually like - like an abled actor is knowledgeable on abled sex. The film trailer also shows the adults' parents following them around, reinforcing that disabled adults are like children. Infantilising disabled people is something we face every day, and so to have a film that's supposedly disability-positive reinforce it is damaging to our community in a way they seem to have not understood.

When asked about why they decided not to cast disabled actors, they replied that "We had a lot of discussions around the subject, even with the Belgian film, Hasta la Vista; we had loads of discussion and tried to capture people with disabilities. At the end of the day you’ve got to say “are we going to portray an amazing message with great actors who are actually prepared to take on this role or are we going to spend years trying to cast someone with a disability just because they have a disability?” (Lopez, K, Feb 2020, Forbes) They use the excuse of having a 'token' disabled person to collaborate with to imply they aren't upsetting the entire disabled community.

With the abundance of disabled professional actors who have joined the uproar on twitter and other social medias, each of us whom have been cast in projects very last minute and still have been able to do wonderful jobs, had the casting team of Come As You Are attempted to find some of us to audition - they'd have had NO problem. Be it if they'd contacted the multiple talent agencies who represent disabled actors across multiple continents (such as Zebedee, visABLE etc) - or if they'd put out on social media that they were looking - they'd have found what they were looking for. And should they have not? Then at least they would have given disabled actors an equal opportunity. That's after all what they're supposedly preaching with their film: 'equality'.

On top of the obvious common sense to employ disabled actors as disabled characters, disabled actors have a variety of skills and ranges that abled actors cripping-up don't have - for example one-liners that could be hilarious and witty coming from a disabled person would be merely offensive coming from an abled person.

We as a disabled acting community, the disabled community, along with our wonderful abled allies: call for the film to either be pulled; or to be remade with real disabled actors. The choice between the two falling to the creators.