Guest Column: Showman Jason Katims’ ‘As We See’ on Why Authentic Casting Matters

When Amazon called me and told me they were covering a pilot episode how we see himThe joy of picking up the pickaxe quickly turned into low-level anxiety. Then some physical discomfort. Finally, straight panic.

While the show is an adaptation of the beautiful Israeli show. in the spectrumIt’s also a deeply personal story for me. I have a son with autism who is the same age as the three main characters on the show, so I felt a deep sense of responsibility to get the story right. And getting this right was, above all, treating the show’s three presenters with respect and dignity.

Typically, the first steps after a Greenlight call might be finding a director, a budget, and determining where and when to shoot. But in this case, my initial focus was just capturing our three leaders.

The three main characters of the Israeli show were brilliantly played by actors who were not autistic. I did a show with a variety of characters. Inside children on the riseMax Brewerman’s character was beautifully played by Max Burkholder, who is also not on the spectrum. But instinctively I wanted to take it another way. When we were with Jack, Violet and Harrison, I wanted the audience to feel what I was feeling. Everything had to be authentic. Not just dialogue and narration, but nuances. Details. Idiosyncrasies, mites. We needed a real-life testimony.

My first call was to Kami Patton, an excellent casting director I’ve worked with on a number of projects, including children on the rise. I told him I wanted to find three lead roles with actors on the autism spectrum. This was in 2019 and the idea of ​​authentic casting was much less prevalent in Zeitgeist than it is now. When I spoke to him, he may have had a slightly apologetic tone. I thought I was asking you to start a search that might take a long time and might not lead to a viable option. I was so wrong. In two weeks I watched dozens of wonderful actors listen.

The first audition I saw was Su Ann Pien, who ended up being cast as Violet. One of her audition scenes was a scene from a pilot episode where she melts after her brother tells her she’s not normal. I was in the office, looking at my laptop, and in less than a minute I was crying.

I literally wrote down the words he said, but they felt unwritten, as if they had been spoken from some deep part of his soul. To be blunt, Violet and Su’s characters are very different. He doesn’t play alone. However, he lived in that role for which he was immediately arrested.

“It was an instant bodily reaction,” he said of his hearing. “I know exactly what Jason is writing about and I know exactly how he felt. It comes when I was very young. Thunder, repetition of words… whether from a place of frustration or anger, I would get to a place where I couldn’t express my frustration. And I just hung up.”

In every scene, Siu An used emotions and behaviors from her past and present to represent Violet. Violet was approached not from the outside, but from the inside. Her acting is fearless and unfiltered. That’s what makes her performance so deeply resonant.

For Rick Glasman, who plays Jack, his approach was different, but just as fascinating. Rick was diagnosed with autism as an adult just a few years before joining the show. For Rick, coming to terms with Jack was tied to his own process of figuring out who he was and what was pushing him. I asked many questions. He is also a brilliant comedian and constantly uses the physical world as the medium for his scenes. One day I went to the shooting range and we were holding a roll while a staff member ran to get some chips. Rick ordered fries not for his character, but for the actor sitting next to him on stage. His character had to be agitated on stage, and Rick wanted to use the voice of the man eating the fries next to him to rouse his agitation.

Albert Rutek reveals the serenity in the role of Harrison, which made this character so deeply appealing. It’s amazing that this was Albert’s first professional acting job. During the filming of the first season, I noticed that Albert’s confidence and professionalism grew at an incredible rate. Harrison is often discreetly involved in scenes compared to Jack and Violet, but for the final episode I wrote a huge public outburst for Harrison’s character that is the culmination of the entire season. It was seeing Albert’s character as an actor during the season that inspired me to write this scene for him. When he came to film the day we were shooting this scene, he was obviously nervous. But he penetrated to the deep, true part of himself and delivered one of the most vulnerable and compelling performances of the first season.

I heard that when we first brought Albert to Los Angeles for his audience, some of his family didn’t think he was being screened for the Amazon Prime Video series. They thought it was a hoax. That’s how unexpected this twist was for him and, to some extent, for all of us who came to the show.

I’m thinking of the first call I made to Kami Patton when I didn’t know if we could play one of our three lead roles with neurodiversity actors. It’s impossible to imagine now how we see him Shoot another way. Rick, Su Ann and Albert put specificity, humor, heart, pain, stupidity and honesty into every scene of this show. Next time I call Kami to tell her I want to authenticate the paper, I will do so unforgivably.

The story first appeared in a separate June issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.