Four years after CODA took home a best picture Oscar, Sian Heder is back with her follow-up project Being Heumann.
Heder — who also landed an Academy Award for adapted screenplay — wrote and directed the film, which tells the story of disability rights activist Judy Heumann. In 1977, Heumann (played by Ruth Madeley) led a 28-day occupation of San Francisco’s Federal Building in a fight for accessibility laws and equal rights. The onscreen retelling, as a result, features a large cast of disabled actors, some of whom are acting for the first time.
When it came to deciding what to do next after CODA, Heder told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s AFI Fest premiere on Sunday that “I did have a lot of options. I will say that I also had a moment of power in the industry where I was like, ‘Oh, people want to make what I want to make?’”
“This movie was impossible on paper; this was a movie that probably a lot of people would have said no to if I wasn’t using the capital I had just earned to go, ‘Actually I want to make this one next, and I want to have 12 disabled leads, and I want to have a lot of unknown actors, and it’s a period piece, and we need to build an accessibility team,’” the filmmaker continued. “I think a lot of it for me was like arriving at a moment where I finally could get the yes, and what was I going to use the moment for?”
D’Arcee Charington Neal, David Permut, Adam Caldwell, Francesco Le Metre, Ann Molin, Rein Barcel, Bernard Telsey, Geraud Brisson, Nic Novicki, Kevin J. Walsh, John W. Beach, Daniel Durant, Rio Finnegan, Kevin Cleary, Charlie Rush-Reese, Andrew Pilkington, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew August Jeffers, Sian Heder, Ruth Madeley, Roberta Colindrez, Antwan Tolliver, Siena Rafter, Ray Fisher, Diana Pokorny, Michael Patrick Thornton, Alex Astrachan, Madeline Delp, Kristen Joiner, Rebekah Taussig and James Lebrecht at the AFI Fest Being Heumann premiere.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
The movie’s success, though, largely rested on finding the right actress to play Heumann, who was known as “Mother of the Disability Rights Movement” and died in 2023. Heder had worked with Heumann for several years, which she said made casting “even more difficult” as she knew the real person she was trying to capture on screen.
Madeley eventually landed the role, noting that when she heard the news that Heder was telling Heumann’s story, “As a disabled person I was like, ‘Thank God it’s her,’ because I knew it was going to be done right. And then as a disabled actor I was like, ‘Get me in the damn room!’ I just wanted a shot.”
Now that the film is being released, after debuting at TIFF earlier this fall, Madeley said she’s excited “to just know the impact of what this movie will do, not just to the disabled community but to the industry. I feel like we’re in a real moment now and people can’t look away.”
Echoed Heder, who is once again getting Oscar buzz, “It’s so exciting with this cast to go out into the world because when you’re working with actors who are experiencing it for the first time, there’s so much joy around it — that joy is infectious and it makes me love what we do again and love this process. Even being on a red carpet, watching all these different bodies on a red carpet, this feels like rebellion to show up with this crew in Hollywood. That’s the work Judy was doing, and it feels like we’re continuing her fight with that.”
Being Heumann hits select theaters Nov. 6 and starts streaming on Apple TV on Nov. 13.
