I’m sitting in an Italian restaurant in Sydney celebrating my 23rd birthday when my friend Liam looks at me across the table and says, “I’ve had someone ask me about you being in a movie.” He laughs at the look on my face.
While this conversation might be normal for him as one of the busiest new producers in Australia, it’s not for me. The burst of hope in my chest tells me this could be another moment. One where I can feel the colours of life shifting in front of my eyes, and solidifying into a distinct before & after.
A little voice in my head, sensible and pragmatic, tells me not to get too excited, that there’s no guarantee anything will happen. I do that a lot.
The last time I felt like this, I was at a read-through for what would become Latecomers, the award-winning SBS series in which I played a woman with cerebral palsy navigating the dating world.
Liam and a team of other wonderful humans took a chance on me and turned me into a professional actor overnight. I don’t have any training, just an innate fascination with storytelling and formative years spent as a drama kid.
A drama kid with a dream
When I was a kid growing up in Sydney, I wanted to be both an actor and an author. The fact that I am now both constantly blows my mind.
I was a lonely, disabled kid with no real reference point for what my life might look like. Watching Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato on TV (I was a Disney Channel kid), they seemed so cool and put together as teenagers. They had a voice. They were seen and heard around the world. Acting seemed, at least by my logic, to be a path to getting that.
I’ve written thousands of words about the holes left in a person, particularly a child, when they don’t see themselves represented anywhere. Not on TV or in movies, in books or in toys available on the shelf. The holes that were left in me. The ones I now actively try to prevent for the next generation and clean up for the adults like me left behind.
For the first 10 years of my life I never saw a disabled character on screen. A whole decade of invisibility at a time when absorbing narratives from media is a huge chunk of how you formulate a place in this world.
Then in 2009 Glee burst onto the scene. The second Artie Abrams wheeled onto my screen, I thought everything I’d always hoped for had finally arrived. Here was a guy who looked like me, got to sing, have friends, and had relationship storylines. I was as excited for the actor Kevin McHale as I was for the character and what that might mean for me one day.
That is until a dance sequence revealed him to be perfectly able-bodied. The puncture of defeat I felt was almost indescribably intense. This wasn’t someone who knew what it was like to be me at all. This was someone wearing my life like a costume. I’ve since learned that feeling of defeat over and over again.
Disabled characters, if they existed at all, were handed to able-bodied actors with such regularity that I left the part of me who wanted to be an actor in the halls of The National Institute of Art (NIDA). I only let her out in my high school drama room and then I packed her away, sure she’d never really be seen again.
There was no way I was ever going to get work or be able to build a career because no matter how hard I tried, unlike the best in the business, I couldn’t make myself disappear or transform completely. There was a part of me that was always going to be attached, the part of me I hated the most.
The role that changed everything
Then Latecomers happened, this history-making TV show that changed my life. I got to claim actor as part of my identity, no matter what else happened. Even though I was hopeful and excited about the doors the show might open, my expectations were (and honestly still are) tempered by the knowledge that the likelihood of ever getting more than one role was slim. That would require acceptance, inclusion, diverse storytelling and imagination from an industry which sadly in 2024 still gravely undervalues those things. Each time I book a job it surprises the hell out of me. I’m always going in with gratitude and the knowledge it might be my last.
So when a few months after that fateful birthday dinner I get an email from a casting director actually offering me the role of Norah Lipsick in this new dark comedy (quite literally pitch black) film called Audrey — without an audition — I couldn’t believe it. Surely this only happens to actors with established names — not a girl with one credit? But they’re serious, so I grab the opportunity to inhabit this snarky, sarcastic and dry teenager who’s the ‘forgotten child’ in her twisted family dynamic, with both hands.
I lived out of home for the first time; six weeks in the middle of a Gold Coast summer, cursing the war flashbacks as I slip Norah’s school uniform over my head every morning. It’s independence I thought I’d never have.
When I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, my parents were told I would never walk, talk or feed myself. Yet here I was, alongside my support workers, filming my first ever movie.
I do my own stunts — bouncing down stairs, sliding into cars, throwing phones at heads and learning one end of a fencing sword from the other. I deliver punchlines and crack jokes, collaborating and crafting alongside our incredible director Natalie Bailey and genius writer Lou Sanz. I ask Lou a thousand questions, picturing the day I too will be sitting on set watching something from my brain come to life.
Soaking up my hours on set like a sponge, I watch as my co-stars Jackie van Beek, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor and Josie Blazier snap into character, all the while taking notes for my own process. We laugh, cringe, grumble our way through eating sad tacos and feel like even though we’ve read the script, we almost have no idea what we’re making.
It’s too tricky shooting out of order to see how all the pieces might come together, so when we finally do, watching alongside audiences for the first time, it’s an exhilarating shock. Raucous laughter, groans of disgust, jaws falling open in disbelief. Questions, sprinklings of praise and a general feeling that no one’s quite sure what the hell they’ve watched, only that there’s never been anything like it abound.
But I did it. I was in a movie. And even though it’s definitely not appropriate for children, I wish I could show my younger self. I think she’d float to the moon. Who knows what might come next? I can’t wait to find out.
Hannah Diviney is an author, actor, writer and advocate. You can follow her adventures on Instagram or on Twitter.
Audrey is in select cinemas from November 7.
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