One Way to Justify Stranger Things Binge Watching – Gaten Matarazzo

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably got swept up in Stranger Things’ mix of ‘80s nostalgia and spot-on casting. While Winona Ryder (as Joyce) and Millie Bobby Brown (as Eleven, get it gurl …) stole the show, Gaten Matarazzo is incredible for more than just his portrayal of Dustin.

Matarazzo has cleidocranial dysplasia, a disorder that affects tooth and bone growth. As a result, he doesn’t have collarbones or adult teeth; he wears fake ones over his baby teeth. The disorder hasn’t stopped him from being adorable or hilarious, but it has prevented him from being cast for hundreds of roles.

Matarazzo originally opened up about his cleidocranial dysplasia on The Jonathan Ross Show, but elaborated about how it has impacted his career while on BBC Radio 5Live with costar Caleb McLaughlin.

“The thing is, I knew why I was getting rejected,” Matarazzo said about struggling as an actor.

“It was always because of my lisp, and me being shorter, and having the teeth issue. That was always the reason they couldn’t cast me; they couldn’t write a disability into the show because they had already written the script,” he continued.

That didn’t stop the Duffer brothers from casting Matarazzo or from writing his disability into the script – in the first episode Dustin lectures the bullies who call him “Toothless” and mock his lisp. It doesn’t impact Dustin’s character in any other ways throughout the show, however; he is just another part of the D&D gang dealing with monsters, a telekinetic stranger, and government cover-ups.

While it’s great to see a young man as talented as Matarazzo find success and spread awareness and acceptance of cleidocranial dysplasia, the surge of public support for him after his interviews made me hopeful for queer folks as well.

Queer theory and disability/crip theory have some basic overlap: queer and disabled folks are surviving in non-normative bodies in a world designed around heteronormative and able-bodied standards. Queer disabled folks often find themselves caught between two communities that have little support for the other, and mainstream society still struggles with treating anyone different as, well, human. Good-intentioned attempts at acceptance by able-bodied campaigns usually result in cringe-worthy terms like “handi-capable,” and the public faces of queer campaigns tend to be White and cisgender.

We’ve seen that sometimes it takes celebrities, not activism, to change public opinion. Transwomen of color didn’t have a public narrative until Laverne Cox starred in Orange is the New Black; hopefully Gaten Matarazzo can make the same progress for non-normative folks as well.