The majority of autistic and autistic-coded characters in film and television have long looked, moved, and sounded a certain way. Think Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond in Rain Man or Jim Parsons’ Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, Keir Gilchrist’s Sam in Atypical or Freddie Highmore’s Sean in The Good Doctor.
They stand with the same awkward posture. They make the same kinds of gestures and twitches. They have a similar arrhythmic cadence that slips into a hyperverbal torrent during moments of stress and excitement. These portrayals aren’t entirely wrong. These are all traits that some autistic people exhibit. But there’s so much more to these people and to the autistic experience in general than one standard collection of external tells.
As Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams put it in an interview with Glamour last month, “Sometimes autism’s portrayed in movies with quirky head movements, weird blinks, and weird inflections. And it’s like, Okay…? That is sometimes truthful but that’s always the reach. That’s always the way it’s expressed.” He went on, “Sometimes it is flat affect. It’s just being immobile in your seat and taking 10 seconds to move your hand to do something because you don’t know what this movement looks like or means.”
Shane Hollander, Williams’ character in the Canadian queer hockey romance that has taken the world by storm, diverges from that usual autistic archetype in a number of meaningful and refreshing ways. He’s Asian at a time when most autistic representation is still overwhelmingly white. The lack of explicit discussion of autism in his story makes sense for his character—plenty of people who thrive in a field related to their special interest don’t realize that they’re autistic until later in life, if at all—and neither the writer who created him nor the actor who portrays him are cagey about the fact that they consider him autistic.
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This is a welcome change of pace from the litany of actors and performers who have been perfectly happy to exploit autistic traits and stereotypes for their own creative fulfillment while coyly refusing to admit that’s what they’re doing. Shane also looks, moves, and sounds thoroughly autistic in a way that is different from the usual mode that Williams detailed. He has the flat affect that Williams talked about, with a voice that rarely breaks out of a small range of notes and a face that’s largely unreadable unless you’re watching carefully for microexpressions. Once you’re paying attention, you might also notice the gears spinning as he tries to process unexpected situations and conversations in real time. Or the tension he carries in his body, as if he’s never quite sure what he’s supposed to be doing with himself off the ice—or how it eases when he’s with someone who truly gets him. And all of these outward expressions feel like they’re part of a cohesive whole.
There’s another big difference that might explain why Shane comes across so differently: He’s informed by a genuine love and understanding of real-life autistic people. His character was brought to life by people who actually know autistic people are full-fledged human beings who live in the world with them, and don’t just study them for the sake of a role or story.
Rachel Reid, the author of the books that the TV series is based on, has an autistic child and said in interviews that it was only later that she realized that relationship was informing the character. “When I wrote Heated Rivalry, I wasn’t specifically thinking about Shane being neurodivergent because I wasn’t particularly informed about that sort of thing. He was just uptight/anxious/focused etc. I then went through the long and complicated journey of getting my neurodivergent oldest child diagnosed, and I learned a lot then, and since. So by the time I wrote The Long Game, I had a better understanding of Shane, I think, and I realized that, yeah, he’s probably autistic,” she explained in a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything.
Williams also has a close autistic family member. “After reading Jacob’s [Tierney, the show’s creator, writer, and director] scripts, even before the book, I immediately saw how he would operate. My dad is on the spectrum, he knows it,” the actor told the Hollywood Reporter. “He has told me, I’m not even paraphrasing, ‘I relate more with Vulcan than human,’ referencing the Star Trek, the hyper-cerebral alien creatures. I love my dad to death, and I’ve always felt very connected to him. He has a sensitivity to him that is very boyish. I think when I read the script, I took a huge page out of living my life with him. Rachel has said [Shane] is autistic, so I think I knew how it should look. I empathized with him a lot, immediately.”
Knowing and caring about an autistic person doesn’t make you an expert on autism. Nor does it mean that you’re automatically capable of producing art that is representative or particularly good. And even the most empathetic and loving autism-adjacent artists can falter sometimes, whether in their portrayals or the discussions around them. When Williams described his character as “a giant wooden suit with not too many articulating joints” or “like a Roomba, and has the emotional expression of one as well” to Timid Magazine, the words just didn’t land like the way a person who is not autistic should be discussing one who is. Most likely, these kinds of talking points come from his close relationship with an autistic person, too. Some of us make in-group jokes about stereotypes that have hurt us—and many autistic people are dismissed and discriminated against because people think we’re too wooden or robotic—and we sometimes share them in private with the non-autistic people we trust. It makes sense that as someone new to his role as a public figure, he’s still finding the boundary between what’s appropriate to say in safe company and what to present in an interview.
On the whole, pop culture’s relationship with autism has become more informed, nuanced, and generally more interesting over the past decade or so. Shows like Nordic crime drama The Bridge have introduced more well-rounded characters. Autistic writers and actors are slowly being given more opportunities to tell our own stories and are making the most of it with excellent programs like Dinosaur, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, and A Kind of Spark. There’s also the occasional non-autistic artist who has taken it upon themselves to look deeper than a set of symptoms while researching an autistic character. The Pitt’s Taylor Dearden has drawn on her own experiences with ADHD to help influence her performance as the ADHD/autistic coded Mel. The world didn’t really need another autistic coded cop drama when Chasing Shadows premiered in 2014, but star Reece Shearsmith’s willingness to find common ground between himself and his character and play him as someone with an internal life brought something new to the table.
Still, the majority of autistic characters that we’ve seen on screen have been the result of outsiders observing external behaviors in a population that they consider alien. Dustin Hoffman studied autistic savants in order to mimic their mannerisms for Rain Man. Other actors were influenced by Hoffman’s performance and their own observations. Some productions, like Atypical, turned to non-autistic “experts” on autism for their insights. Autistic people were studied like zoo animals with little regard for who we are or what might be happening beneath the surface and turned into caricatures that were celebrated as bold artistic statements.
Art by people who know and love autistic people is better than all of that. But isn’t a substitute for art by autistic people. There are some explorations of our neurology and experiences that can only come from the inside. But when I think about the kind of inclusion and radical acceptance for autistic people that I want to see as an autistic writer and autistic person in general, characters like Shane and his genesis are absolutely part of that picture. When autistic people are truly understood, valued, and welcomed into the world as we are, we will naturally rub off on the creative people around us, as all human beings do. And pieces of us will find their way into their work. Not as freaks to be studied from afar, mimicked, and exploited for other people’s creative whims or amusement, but as complex and whole parts of the world worth exploring and celebrating.
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