Last Thursday, Movistar Plus+ premiered ‘Easy’, a five-episode series that took us through the lives of four cousins who have an intellectual disability and share a supervised apartment in Barcelona. Based on the book ‘Easy reading’ by Cristina Morales, its main cast soon drew attention.
And it is that the series, created by Anna R. Costa (‘Arde Madrid’), had Natalia Molina (‘Mirror mirror’), Anna Castillo (‘The olive’), Coria Castillo and Anna Marchessi. Of the four, only the last one lives with functional diversity, something that has caused some controversy as it is a fiction about how a part of the population lives.
“We had to adjust the percentage of having an actress with a disability, who could not be intellectual because then the production has to be different in terms of time and money,” would explain Anna R. Costa in an interview with Vertele. In it, the creator of ‘Easy’ justifies the choice to preserve her artistic vision.
“I knew that with intellectual disabilities it was impossible”
As he recounts, before production he had to see if his story was going to have to be conditioned by having a cast with people with disabilities:
«No, I knew that with intellectual disabilities it was impossible. Not because I said so, but because advisors had told me. If you want people with intellectual disabilities, it can be done, but it has to be another project. That you tell them the situation and they say it in their own way. And that is not my nature as an artist. I wanted what I wanted to say to be said. We opted as a solution to have one person with a physical disability, another who was very close, and two who were actresses who could interpret a disability. That was the bet. And then, that there were people with real disabilities in the environment.»
I’ll tell you about ‘Easy’ (spoiler: I liked it) but I admit that personally at first the choice of cast squeaked meespecially since the purpose of the series is to somehow celebrate life with disabilities and, at the same time, touch on serious issues about them.
In this sense, the truth is that I do see very difficult to make such delicate plots like that of Marga’s (Natalia de Molina) sexuality with an actress who has the degree of disability of the character she represents.
Be careful, the cast chosen is great. Nevertheless, I can’t stop thinking that it could have been chosen by actors who have an autism spectrum disorder or something similar that would allow them to work well without compromising the “nature” of the project. This year we have had a great example with ‘As We See It’ on Amazon Prime Video.