Quiet Place movie gets it right and uses deaf actor

Wed,2 May 2018
News Equality & Rights

A Quiet place is a movie which is set in a post-apocalyptic world haunted by blind monsters that zero in on sound with the aid of supersensitive hearing. Silence becomes a matter of survival.

Link to Quiet Place featurette on Millicent Simmonds

The family portrayed in the film have an advantage because they can communicate in American Sign Language (ASL). Handy when the act of speaking can get you killed. Fortuitously, the family have learned sign language because their daughter is deaf.

Director John Krasinski is to be applauded for pushing to cast Millicent Simmonds, who is deaf, as daughter Regan Abbott. Even better, her performance enhances the movie.

Kamran Mallick, the chief executive of Disability Rights UK, speaking to the Independent, says, she brings "an extra dimension to the role which a hearing actor would not have been able to do”. 

“The nagging worry is non-disabled people continue to land the roles of disabled characters. It’s no longer acceptable for white actors to ‘black up’ for non-white roles, and rightly so. The same is true around disability.”

Read Metro interview with Millicent Simmonds

View movie trailer