At San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, Marvel announced that Lauren Ridloff was set to join the cast of Eternals, making her the first deaf superhero to be introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In November, she will arrive on our screens as an entirely new interpretation of the speedster Makkari (who appears as a hulking, white, hearing man in the comics). The following year, Marvel announced that Alaqua Cox, who is also deaf, had been cast as Echo in the upcoming Hawkeye series on Disney+. While more deaf performers are being cast in major roles across the industry, Lauren Ridloff's recent interview with The New York Times addressed the needs of the deaf community that still need to be met across the entertainment industry — from actors on set to audience members headed to the movie theater.
Oftentimes, people are afraid to ask for the accommodations they require, out of fear of how their able-bodied peers might react or perceive them. Studios have to be ready to meet the needs of their casts and crew. "I got to set believing that I had to show how easy I am to work with as a deaf person. I was concerned about seeming too fragile," she continued. "But after working with others, I realized everyone has their own unique set of challenges, and that I need to think about what I need to deliver as an actor, and don’t apologize for it."
In the interview, Ridloff explained one specific scenario on the set of Eternals where Makkari's starting mark was facing a wall. With her back to the camera, she had no way to know when the director Chloé Zhao had called action; fortunately, her co-star Angelina Jolie had an ingenious idea:
"At one point, I was sharing my frustration with Angie [...] at a holiday party after a day of shooting. And she immediately made a suggestion — why don’t we use a laser pen that special effects can easily erase?" Ridloff described it as an 'Aha, wow moment.' "Whenever I’m looking at a wall, the interpreters would use a laser pen to make a circle on the wall — 'rolling, rolling, rolling' — and once it went away that meant, 'Action!'"
Ridloff also highlighted the lack of subtitling across the industry, saying "Hollywood needs to take the lead on subtitling ads, trailers and those cute little interviews with clips that celebrities do promoting their movies." This inaccessibility has been brought up recently from all areas of the entertainment industry, including the press who often receive screeners without captioning options.
Sony's first trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was posted to Twitter, incorporated captioning in a clever way, but it still lacked some of the crucial elements needed in subtitling, like audio descriptions. The trailer did prove that studios can easily include captioning in their promotional materials, making it both accessible and fun in the process.
As movie theaters continue to adapt amid the ever-changing COVID-19 regulations and expectations, the inaccessibility has been more pronounced than ever. The issues that Ridloff spoke to the NYT about are not new, unfortunately, and many moviegoers just like her have been met with similar experiences:
"We’re an afterthought in movie theaters, and that needs to change. You have to use a special closed-captioning device to watch subtitling in a theater, and it’s a headache, because most of the time the devices don’t work. Then you have to go back to the front desk and find somebody to help, and by the time they figure it out that it’s not working — that it’s not going to be subtitled at all — the movie’s halfway done."
With Disney opting to premiere their remaining 2021 slate, including Eternals, exclusively in theaters, the inequity and audism found in theaters will likely be felt by the deaf community that will be headed to the theaters to see Marvel's first deaf superhero on the big screen. Eternals will premiere November 5.