What it's like for a sighted person to play blind for In the Dark

The New York Times

Writer Andrew Leland, who is partially blind, was curious about the controversy over Perry Mattfeld's casting as a sighted person playing the blind lead role on The CW drama, which recently returned for Season 3. So he visited the set of the Toronto-based series and observed Mattfeld getting into character. "Much of Mattfeld’s performance of blindness comes down to a tendency toward mellow groping for objects and looking just off to the side of the action," says Leland. "Her acting emphasizes the imprecision of blindness: It’s unlikely that you’ll find something right away without seeing it, or knowing in advance where it is. So Mattfeld pats, feels and fumbles. Her eyes are always on some fixed point beyond the person she’s speaking to. As she moves around, her gaze is permanently averted, like a terminally shy person trying at all costs to avoid eye contact. Like any performance, this is an exaggeration of reality. Any sighted person who has had a more than cursory conversation with someone who’s blind has had the uncanny experience of the blind person’s suddenly making direct eye contact with you. This is because your voice comes out of your face, and when one face is pointed at another, odds are that, occasionally, the eyes will meet. Many blind people, from Stevie Wonder to blind YouTubers, have been accused of faking their blindness, and eye contact is usually offered as one piece of (totally spurious) evidence. For the doubters, blindness can only look like slapstick and imprecision — anything else belongs strictly to the realm of sight. The biggest inaccuracy of Mattfeld’s performance, then, may be its failure to allow for the appearance of sightedness within blindness — to occasionally make direct eye contact, or once in a while reach for an object and nail it on the first try." Mattfeld explained to Leland how she constructed her performance of blindness. "She described the process as a conscious turning-off of vision, the way you might tune out an annoying song playing in a cafe where you’re trying to read," says Leland. Or as Mattfeld put it: “I try really hard to not focus on specific details,” she said, gazing through the invisible wall of the bar out into the expanse of the soundstage. “Like that ladder over there. I will note it, I will mentally take in the ladder, but I will not bring my focus to the bolts that are on the ladder.”