If an artist benefits from making art about an underrepresented group, should said artist try to use the rest of their career to benefit said group?

This question is brought to you by Relay, specifically the decision to cast a deaf actor for a single-scene character, even though his lack of hearing isn’t a primary plot point in the sequence. 

Yet it still informs how he interacts with Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed, injecting a different sort of expressive language into their otherwise rote exchange. 

You know, the same Sound of Metal that’s about the deaf community. 

Relatedly, “a hearing machine for the deaf” plays a pivotal role in Relay. 

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Speaking of the expressivity of underrepresented thespians, Peter Dinklage’s physical performance in Shakespeare in the Park’s Twelfth Night is a reminder of what we’ve missed by refusing to embody such classical forms of comedy in a wider variety of  body types.

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Meanwhile, The Toxic Avenger forgoes an opportunity to use Dinklage’s casting to add a wrinkle to how the plot revolves around a corporeal pivot; what if we had watched the juxtaposition between his pre-transformation life, partially defined by Dinklage’s body being “othered”…before he inhabits the most extreme version of an othered body. 

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Another opportunity that The Toxic Avengers forgoes:

A part of acting is figuring out how to collaborate with design effects to create the final result…

Which is impossible when it’s not actually Dinklage under those effects on screen.