Ruth Madeley on playing Judy Heumann, the activist who fought to make the world accessible
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Ruth Madeley likes to think she was determined before she was born. “I think I was stubborn before I even arrived,” she says, laughing.It’s a quality the British actress, who was…
Ruth Madeley likes to think she was determined before she was born. “I think I was stubborn before I even arrived,” she says, laughing.
It’s a quality the British actress, who was diagnosed with spina bifida while still in the womb, recognises in Judy Heumann, the American disability rights activist she plays in the new film Being Heumann.
Heumann spent her life pushing back against the barriers that kept disabled people from participating fully in society. When she found something worth fighting for, Madeley says, she was “like a dog with a bone”.
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Madeley knows something about that determination herself. Growing up, she watched her mother fight for her, just as Heumann’s mother had done for her daughter. Over time, Madeley began to find her own voice.
“There’s a lot of life experience that comes with having a disability,” she tells The National. “You can tap into so many great emotions when you’re acting.”
That experience has informed a career that has taken her from British television to the lead role in a film about a woman whose work changed the lives of disabled people around the world.
Madeley, who is from Greater Manchester, earned a Bafta nomination for the 2015 drama Don’t Take My Baby and went on to appear in series including Years and Years and Doctor Who. Now, in Being Heumann, she leads an ensemble cast alongside Mark Ruffalo and Dylan O’Brien.
Directed by Sian Heder, whose film Coda won the Oscar for best picture, Being Heumann focuses on a defining chapter in its subject’s life: the 1977 occupation of a federal building in San Francisco by disability rights activists.
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