Page 38 - Peter Farrelly Issue

"Daruma" - Toby Forrest with unique wheelchair camera mount
live just a mile apart and often help each other with audition prep.
Forrest was resistant to auditioning, saying “The role is for a paraplegic. I’m a quadriplegic. But John kept pushing me to do it anyway. I said, I’ve done these things where they bring me in, and then I can’t do any of the stuff the character can do.”
Lawson wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, Forrest auditioned for the lead role in ”Daruma.” At the call back, he remembers expressing his concerns to McNeil and Yellen.
“I said, ‘I really appreciate this, but there’s a lot that I cannot do that this character can.’ And they were like, ‘It’s no problem, we’ll figure out a way around that if we have to.’ And I told them it’s not like I wouldn’t really love to star in a movie, but that’s my dream. I did- n’t want to ruin their dream of creating a movie. But they were so insistent that I was their only choice to
play the lead,” Forrest said.
John Lawson thinks that he and Forrest brought more to the audition than just their authentic disabilities. He explained that their ‘authentic’ friendship probably also helped during their joint audition.
“At the time of our audition Toby and I had been friends for, I don’t know, 10, 15 years. It’s easy to portray anger. But we also had to do this scene that demonstrat- ed the characters were really close friends. I think that our actual friendship that existed came through in the audition scene, and that’s why they ended up casting both of us,” John said.
Forrest was especially happy to secure the “Daruma” role when he realized McNeil and Yellen planned to portray Patrick’s disability much differently. They dis- missed the temptation of some filmmakers to focus on and sometimes even exaggerate disabilities to elicit an emotional response from the audience.
38 ABILITY