Disabled Actors for Casting Directors

146 items • Updated 4/10/2026

"Creativity is about making interesting choices, and casting a disabled actor is always an interesting choice." Zak Ford-Williams, Actor

This is a list of disabled actors who have screen credits and most have been cast in roles written as disabled, or cast in a roles not written as disabled, but where they have used their disability to add depth and interest to a character.

Some facts and figures about on-screen disability:

8% of all people in society have a visible disability.

0.3% of all actors have a visible disability.

Visibly disabled actors have not been able to access formal training. Up until the last few years drama schools have actively excluded them, in the words of one school in The Stage in 2019, "why train people the industry does not want."

0.15% of all characters in drama and movies are written as visibly disabled.

In the last 50 years over 80% of all disabled characters have been cast with non-disabled actors, and apart from one exception all disabled roles that have been Academy Award winners were played by non-disabled actors.

Less than 0.01% of mainstream roles are cast with a disabled actor, despite a study in 2019 showing that over 98% of all roles could be cast as disabled. Very few roles could not be performed by someone with either a vision, hearing or physical disability.

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