Actress Kayla Cromer who plays autistic comes out

Post Reply New Topic

Kayla Cromer steps out for the 2019 ABC Walt Disney Television Upfront earlier this week in New York City.

The newcomer will be starring in Freeform’s upcoming Everything’s Gonna To Be Okay, which introduces Nicholas (Josh Thomas), a neurotic 25-year-old visiting his single dad and two teenage half-sisters, one of whom is on the autism spectrum.

He hasn’t been particularly present in his siblings’ lives, but when their dad reveals that he is terminally ill, the girls have to cope with not only a devastating loss but also the realization that Nicholas is the one who will have to rise to the occasion, move in and hold it all together.

Kayla revealed during Freeform’s annual summit earlier this year that she is autistic herself.

“I have learned to trust the journey and this event is the perfect place for me to come out publicly for the first time that I’m actually on the autism spectrum,” she shared, before opening up that the autism aspect of the show helped her land the part.

Kayla added, “I never thought I was even funny before playing Matilda, but my acting coach convinced me by saying, ‘Kayla, I think you’re capable of comedy because frankly, your quirks resemble those of Sheldon Cooper.’”

Autism is set to be front and center on a new television series starring a woman who’s on the spectrum.

The cable network Freeform, which caters to teens and young adults, will introduce the show “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay” this month.

The half-hour comedy is about a 20-something who steps in to take care of his two teenage half sisters when their father dies of cancer.

Cromer has spoken up about the need for people with disabilities and other differences to represent those like themselves on screen.

“So many characters on television today, they’re portrayed by people that do not have a difference. And, honestly, people with a difference, we’re fully capable of portraying our own type and we deserve that right,” she said while speaking on a panel at the Freeform Summit last March. “With so many changes in the industry right now, why not now? Just give us our chance. Include us. We can do this.”

Freeform said the show will tackle “navigating autism, budding sexuality, consent, parenthood, adolescence, family and grief” while following a family discovering the “importance of finding happiness in the middle of really difficult moments.”

“Everything’s Gonna Be Okay” will premiere Jan. 16 with two episodes starting at 8:30 p.m. ET on Freeform.

Less than a year ago, Everything's Gonna Be Okay star Kayla Cromer was sitting on stage at a Freeform event feeling like someone had punched her in the gut. She'd just taken a risk and revealed to the audience that she's on the autism spectrum. Divulging that information in Hollywood, Cromer tells Bustle, "can either make or break your career depending on people's perceptions." But given the film and television industry's long-standing — and much-criticized — tendency to cast neurotypical actors to play autistic characters (see: The Good Doctor, Atypical, and even the Oscar-winning Rain Man), she wanted the chance to show that actors on the spectrum are just as capable as anyone else.

By not casting people with autism to play autistic characters like those, they're acting like we don't exist," Cromer says. While she adds that playing characters who are dissimilar from you is part of being an actor, she says neurotypical actors portraying people on the spectrum aren't able to connect to their roles on a fundamental level. "All they've done is research. They haven't walked in our shoes every day. It just comes down to that."

Cromer hopes to make space for more actors on the spectrum in her role as Matilda, a 17-year-old high schooler with high-functioning autism on Everything's Gonna Be Okay. It The show comes from creator, writer, and executive producer Josh Thomas (Please Like Me), who plays Matilda's 20-something Australian half-brother, Nicholas. He's visiting his family in America when their father announces that he has cancer and dies shortly thereafter, leaving Nicholas as the ill-equipped guardian of Matilda and her 14-year-old sister Genevieve (Maeve Press). It also makes Cromer the first actor with autism to portray a lead character in a TV show.

Thomas said in a BUILD Series interview that while the choice to cast a person with autism in the role of Matilda started as the "ethical and woke" thing to do, "it was so much better to get the authentic person doing the authentic thing.”

Cromer agrees. To her, getting autism right on TV is actually pretty simple — and something Everything's Gonna Be Okay manages to accomplish. "It's the best that one show can do, because Matilda is only one character with autism. She doesn't represent the entire autistic community, because everyone with autism has different forms of autism or has different levels, different quirks," she says. "By hiring an on-the-spectrum actress to play [Matilda], it just makes the performance more accurate and more honest and more respectful."

It's still a performance, though, and Cromer says she and her character do have a few key differences. For example, Matilda is a talented composer who plays her piano when she's stressed or overwhelmed, while Cromer doesn't know how to read music. However, both are "high-functioning" (a term Cromer admittedly hates), and Cromer can relate to the loneliness that Matilda experiences. "I'd say we're both outcasts in high school," she says. "[Matilda's] isolation was more by choice because she prefers that. With me, I was isolated by my peers through bullying because they already knew I was different. But we both went through that same form of loneliness."

With that experience behind her, Cromer is optimistic about the future ahead of her. She wants to portray a Marvel superhero, like Cloud 9 or Squirrel Girl (she claims she already has the buckteeth); join a major action franchise like the Fast and the Furious; and do a guest spot on one of her favorite shows, Law & Order: SVU. Another item on her acting bucket list? Playing a neurotypical character. "I would like that opportunity to prove the industry wrong," Cromer says. "Whatever they throw at me, I will do."

Depicting the murky gray area of sexual consent on a TV show is a complex task. But doing so through the lens of a character with autism is even more complicated. And yet Everything's Gonna Be Okay — a new Freeform comedy from Please Like Me's Josh Thomas — manages to do so with great nuance in one quietly powerful episode.

The series follows Nicholas (Thomas), an Australian 20-something who becomes the legal guardian of his two American teenage half-sisters after their father dies of cancer. One of the girls is Matilda, a 17-year-old on the autism spectrum who's been exploring her budding sexuality. In the Feb. 6 episode, this culminates in her crush rejecting her at a house party, and Matilda subsequently getting drunk and propositioning his friend Zane to have sex.

Though we as viewers are able to see that Matilda was the one who initiated sex, when her younger sister Genevieve learns what happened, she immediately worries that Zane took advantage of Matilda and confronts him at school. The fact that Matilda was drinking and in a vulnerable headspace would be enough to raise questions about her ability to fully consent in that moment. That she is also a neurodiverse person having sex with someone who is neurotypical only further blurs the line. "[There's a] really difficult balance ... between respecting the fact that this is a grown-up who gets to make their own choices, and making sure that they're not out there behind closed doors making choices ... where the other person has such an upper hand," Thomas tells Bustle.

Entering into a conversation about consent at this particular sociopolitical moment made Thomas nervous, but he felt it was important to portray because people with disabilities are often desexualized, and sex came up as a common concern among the parents of neurodiverse children he spoke to while writing the show. As Matilda is wont to proclaim throughout the episode, she's a young woman exploring her sexuality. Part of that, for any person, includes thinking about consent.

For Kayla Cromer, who plays Matilda and is on the autism spectrum, the ambiguity of the situation actually has less to do with Matilda's autism and more to do with the circumstances surrounding this specific sexual encounter. "There is a misconception [that people with] neurological differences [aren't able] to consent to sexual activity," she says. "Some [people with] more severe differences may not be able to tell what is happening. In Matilda's case, she [could]." Matilda asked Zane to kiss her, provided the condom, and said she couldn't wait to have sex again after they'd finished, "but she didn't make the right choice because of her drinking," Cromer adds.

At the end of the episode, both Zane and Genevieve are left feeling uneasy and confused. We've yet to hear from Matilda, but Everything's Gonna Be Okay doesn't try to provide a clear answer about who was or wasn't in the wrong, if anyone at all. Thomas says they wanted to lean into that gray area — not to be preachy, but simply to capture a real conversation parents of neurodiverse children are struggling to have. And to maybe expand someone's perspective in the process.

Thomas decided to write a character with autism primarily because he hadn’t seen the experience represented well onscreen before. “I was interested in how little I knew about [autism], and how little everyone that I know knew about it,” he says. “Those characters are always geniuses who come in and solve problems and leave; it’s rare for them to have interpersonal relationships [onscreen],” he says. His character’s sister Matilda, who has high-functioning autism, gets drunk, fights with her friends, and acts on her sexual desires. For research, Thomas interviewed teenage girls on the spectrum, and read books and watched videos on the subject, including a Ted Talk by Alix Generous, a woman with Asperger’s who became a consultant on the series. The idea that someone on the spectrum would do well with public speaking became a plot point, when Matilda excels at giving a eulogy at her father’s funeral, full of the kinds of bleak jokes that have become Thomas’s specialty. (“Dad used to get frustrated when I always made things about myself,” Matilda starts her speech, “but he is dead now. Surprise!”)

Thomas wanted to cast someone with autism to play the lead part, in defiance of TV’s history of having neurotypical actors play characters on the spectrum (as in Atypical or The Good Doctor). He and his collaborators initially weren’t sure if it would be possible to find an actor with autism who could carry a leading role on a series, but quickly discovered that there were “heaps of girls” who could play the part. Matilda also takes classes with other kids on the spectrum, allowing Thomas to depict a range of autistic experiences, and to make it clear that Matilda’s specific attributes aren’t universal.

Does he worry about getting it wrong? “It’s a community that’s had such little representation, and you get very nervous that you’re going to f**k their representation up, because it means so much to them,” he says. “But my experience with the community is that they’re very understanding.”

Thomas compares the pressure he feels in representing autism on television to the way he often got asked about depicting gay characters on Please Like Me. “It always annoyed me a bit when I would get praised for not making the guys too camp,” he says. “I don’t think people would say that anymore.”