Coda: 'Deafness is not a costume you can put on,' says film director

The director of a multi award-winning film about a Coda - the acronym for child of deaf adult - says she was determined to cast deaf actors in her film, saying, "Deafness is not a costume you can put on."

Coda is directed by Siân Heder, who made 2016's Tallulah, starring Elliot Page, and was also a writer-director on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. It's the story of 17-year-old Ruby, the only hearing person in the Rossi family.

Used to her responsibilities of acting as an interpreter, Ruby finds it hard to choose between her loving family's fishing business and fulfilling her own dream of going to music school.

"I think that it would have been such a missed opportunity to not use deaf actors regardless of it being the right thing to do," Heder explains.

"It was so important to me creatively because they'd lived that experience. Deafness is not a costume you can put on. And there are so many aspects to that culture and experience you can't play, unless you've lived it."

Ruby is played by Emilia Jones, the British star of Netflix's Locke & Key, but unlike the original French film Coda is based on, La Famille Bélier, the cast who play the other Rossi family are all deaf.

They include Marlee Matlin, who won a best actress Oscar in 1987 for the film Children of a Lesser God - the only deaf performer in history to do so - and Troy Kotsur, who starred in 2019's The Mandalorian, where he choreographed an adapted form of sign language for the Disney+ series.

Although deafness and hearing loss has been portrayed in recent movies such as Sound of Metal, A Star is Born, A Quiet Place and Wonderstruck, Heder says on-screen representation has been lacking. In the UK, the RNID reports that one in five adults are deaf or have hearing loss.

"I do think my actors have missed out," she says. "Troy Kotsur has been working on stage for many years, he's an absolutely brilliant unexplored actor, he's been a total chameleon in everything I've seen him in.

"The opportunities are so rare as there has been so little representation. The more we get writers together in writers' rooms to start to think, 'What if this character was deaf":[]}