Trending badgeTrendingPosted 54 minutes agoSubscribe to BuzzFeed Daily NewsletterCaret Down18 Terrible, Terrible, Terrible Portrayals Of Disabilities Onscreen"The character (and the performance) came off as a slapdash Rain Man riff when the film came out, and time has certainly not improved it."by Hannah MarderBuzzFeed StaffFacebookPinterestLink Recently, Reddit user Stocklit asked about the worst onscreen portrayals of characters with disabilities - and they're really bad. Here are 18 times neurotypical actors played autistic or intellectually disabled characters...and did NOT do a good job. 1. Freddie Highmore plays Dr. Shaun Murphy, a surgical resident with autism, on The Good Doctor. While the show was wildly popular, lasting seven seasons, many people felt the show fed into stereotypes about autism - especially autistic people being savants with special skills. Murphy also exhibits problematic behaviors and comments that are blamed on his autism, like the time he does not respect pronouns. ABC Suggested by u/Secksualinnuendo"It just falls into the classic trope of depicting autism as a superpower where the main character basically weaponizes his autism into solving every medical case he comes across."-u/AsstacularSpiderman People with autism, in particular, found the portrayal problematic. As Sarah Kurchak writes for Time, the character "struck me as more of an amalgamation of non-autistic people's misconceptions, fears, and fantasies about autism than a nuanced exploration of what it's actually like to be someone like me." Oh, and none of the writers or cast members on the show were autistic until the seventh season. ABC / Via youtube.com 2. Elizabeth Shue's performance as the titular character in Molly is borderline unwatchable. In the film, she plays an autistic woman who acts like a child. She pees her pants, shouts "NO!" a lot, and gets naked randomly...before surgery to literally fix her autism, placing this movie in the "disabilities need to be fixed" trope. Oh, and she has super hearing, for some reason, in case you forgot the "autistic people=savants" trope. They threw in some incest vibes and the r-slur for good measure. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures / Via youtube.com "This movie is soooo cringe. Beyond her ridiculous performance, it's a rom-com. Sooooo bad. 14% on Rotten Tomatoes."-u/Blazenkks 3. Gigli was filled with problems - don't get me started on Jennifer Lopez's character asking for oral sex with "gobble gobble" - but one of the worst parts was Justin Bartha's portrayal of a man with an unspecified disability. Bartha gave what was referred to as a "cringe-y" and "wildly offensive performance" of the character Brian, relying on an overly exaggerated, stereotypical portrayal. The Guardian wrote, "The character (and the performance) came off as a slapdash Rain Man riff when the film came out, and time has certainly not improved it." The character was also little more than a plot device. Columbia / courtesy Everett Collection "It's painful to watch."-[deleted]"I have no idea what he thought he was doing."-u/ZooterOne 4. The Blind Side doesn't really assign a specific disability to Michael Oher, but it portrays him as having an extremely low IQ and apparent cognitive issues. Oher himself criticized this portrayal, saying, "I felt like it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it." Portraying Oher as potentially having cognitive impairments just fed into the white savior narrative of the film. Oh, and there was the wildly dumb part about Oher scoring low on everything but "protective instinct." Alcon Entertainment "Not for the acting, but for the choice of portraying Michael Oher as having a developmental disability to begin with.
He is, of course: a) a real person, b) not developmentally disabled, c) quite offended by his portrayal as such, and d) suing the family involved in the story for cheating him out of the licensing deals for his own life story."-u/StinkyBrittches"The first time I saw this movie and heard the quip about scoring so high on 'protective instincts,' I burst out laughing."-u/oboshoe 5. John Travolta's portrayal of an autistic man who is obsessed with an actor in The Fanatic was called "too scatter-shot and offensive to be funny" and a "woefully misguided, over-the-top, fence swinging performance delivered packed with equal parts actorly indulgence and ignorance." Other critics called Travolta's performance "cringe-worthy" and said Travolta "comes across like a grown man trying to imitate a first-grader." Quiver Distribution / courtesy Everett Collection "Freakin awful, lol."-u/ImportantBalls666"That was some of the worst acting I've ever seen."-u/asdf072 Another said the film was "a brainless, exploitative folly which gives John Travolta free rein to mine the history of cringe-worthy autism portrayals for an offensively garish Frankenstein pantomime of unhinged obsession." The film also suggest