Ruth Madeley recognized some of her own experiences in Judy Heumann’s story, including the indignity of being called a fire hazard.
“The amount of times I’ve been called a fire hazard, it’s going to be the name of my autobiography. I’m telling you, it’s the perfect title,” Madeley said at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles.
Madeley was joined on the panel by casting directors Bernard Telsey and Adam Caldwell to discuss the Apple Original Films drama Being Heumann. Co-written and directed by Oscar-winning CODA filmmaker Siân Heder, the film adapts Heumann’s memoir, following the disability rights advocate as more than 100 disabled protesters occupied the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977. Their 28-day sit-in became the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. history.
Madeley read extensively and scoured footage of Heumann, looking for the details that would bring her personality into the performance.
“But also from a craft perspective, all of the other things that I wanted to show of her, like her humor, her joy — she was really cheeky, and I loved that charm that she had even when she was forgetting her pleases and her thank yous sometimes. Everyone’s rooting for her because she’s so damn charming,” Madeley said. “And the tiny things about her, how her accent shifts as well when she’s with her friends rather than when she’s in front of the press, and you can see in performance the tone shifts, she uses bigger words.”
She also studied how Heumann moved. “It was important for me to honor her physicality and the differences between her disability and my own. I wanted to make sure they were truthful as well as all her characteristics,” Madeley said.
Telsey and Caldwell had previously auditioned Madeley for Wicked. Her audition for Judy quickly got them excited. “We knew that she had the chutzpah, I like to say, that Judy had, even though she’s not from Brooklyn,” Telsey said.
Casting the wider ensemble meant reaching beyond familiar audition channels, given the film’s inclusive nature and the real-life movement. “I think as casting directors, we love a good search. We love when we get to go deep, find people, and do it expansively. And in most projects, you might have one character that needs that, maybe two, maybe,” Caldwell said. “But seeing this, we had to be really methodical about, OK, so we’re going to start with Judy, we’re going to start with women in wheelchairs, and we’re going to do something as comprehensive as possible, doing open calls for anyone with a disability that wants to be considered, to see thousands of people that way, however we can.”
Those open calls were one part of the work. Caldwell explained: “But then we had to start being targeted and actually making sure that the people we needed for these historical characters knew we wanted them. So to do a targeted search for a young Black blind man, to do a targeted search for people with cerebral palsy, to do the deaf community, do it one at a time on a rolling basis and try to keep them all organized and straight and moving forward simultaneously.”
The takeaway, he said, was simple: “The lesson learned is that they’re out there. If you’re given the time to go look for them, you can find them.”
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