Actors lied about being disabled to audition for a role in Run, according to the movie's co-writer. The thriller starring Sarah Paulson about a wheelchair-bound teenager who believes her mother is keeping a dark secret released on Hulu on Friday, November 20.

Director Aneesh Chaganty and his creative partners Sev Ohanian and Natalie Qasabian are no strangers to working through creative limitations. Their first movie, 2018's Searching starring John Cho (Star Trek), told the story of a man's search for his missing daughter entirely through computer and smartphone screens. For Run, they filmed mostly inside a single home, telling a story about the desire to go outside that ended up being far more relevant in 2020 than they intended. Originally scheduled for theatrical release back in May, Run was pulled due by Lionsgate due to COVID-19 and almost kept in scheduling limbo, but Hulu acquired the distribution rights in August.

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In an interview with MovieMaker about their new movie, Chaganty, Ohanian, and Qasabian discuss their process for casting the second lead and make it clear they were never in doubt about wanting an actor that actually uses a wheelchair for the part. In their online search for an unknown, Ohanian recounts how a few actors lied about being disabled to get an audition:

There were a couple of young ladies we saw that submitted themselves as people with disabilities. And we were like, wow, they’re really talented… but somebody looked them up on Instagram. There were videos of them walking on the beach from like, two hours ago.

Kiera Allen and Sarah Paulson in Run

These encounters only made them more determined to find the right performer, and Kiera Allen, a 20-year-old student at Columbia University whose only previous acting credit was a short film, fit the bill. The Run team warned her the role would require some serious stunt work alongside the usual emotional range of a thriller, and she responded with a video of her training on an arm bike to the music from Rocky. The filmmakers' determination to find new talent seems to have paid off, with Allen's performance receiving positive attention from critics.

With the general public more aware of issues surrounding on-screen representation, casting choices for movies like Run are under much more scrutiny than they used to be. While many creative teams like Chaganty, Ohanian, and Qasabian have embraced the call to prioritize lived experience as a way to make better art, big-budget casting scandals still frequent the headlines. Those stories don't usually feature an attempt at audition subterfuge, though. Film and TV actors have a long and usually lighthearted history of lying on their resumes, usually collecting a few talk show stories along the way, but lying about having a disability is obviously several steps too far. Their laughable inability to cover their tracks is just salt in the wound.

Next: Everything We Know About Run 2

Source: MovieMaker

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