AMBER SEALEY: We as a society are multifaceted, multi-layered. You know, we come in all shapes and sizes and kinds, and children who learn differently. My belief is that they should not be put in separate classrooms. I think we all learn better when we learn together, regardless of what our learning style is.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt this Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González. Today we’re talking about the Disney+ film Out of My Mind which is coincidentally the working title of my memoir…I’m really gonna have to change that.
The film is a funny, heartfelt, and illuminating family comedy that challenges long held stereotypes about students with disabilities. Played by Phoebe-Rae Taylor, our hero Melody is an ambitious young woman–or more accurately tween–living with cerebral palsy. Melody’s inner monologue is voiced by the always charming Jennifer Aniston.
Today we will be talking to the film’s director Amber Sealey. Amber is a director, producer, screenwriter, and actress. She has also directed the film, No Light and No Land Anywhere, as well as No Man of God. After our conversation with Amber, we’ll chat with author and educator. Dr. Priya Lalvani, who will give us a deep dive into the missteps public schools still make when educating disabled students and why everyone, regardless of their ability, should be invested in accessibility. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Today I’m sitting down with Amber Sealey, the director of Out of My Mind to talk more about the film, why making her set accessible wasn’t actually all that hard, and of course her praise for the star of the film, Phoebe-Rae Taylor. Please welcome to the podcast Amber Sealey. Hey Amber, how are you?
AMBER SEALEY: I’m doing well. How are you?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Awesome. Great. Thank you for joining us. How do you choose your projects? What initially draws you to a story?
AMBER SEALEY: I wanna tell different stories. I, you know, as an audience member, I enjoy watching different genres and so it’s kind of the same for me as a director and a writer. I enjoy telling different stories.
With Out of My Mind, I have children now and I know what it’s like to struggle looking for something meaningful and good to watch. And I also, my children have learning differences and so I know what it’s like to fight with the school system for your kids to get what they not only need to properly learn, but also are legally entitled to get and are often not getting.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It’s so interesting to hear, right, that you also drew from personal experience when directing Out of My Mind, and it feels like such a refreshing, disruptive film because it does center someone living with a disability. It centers an adolescent girl with cerebral palsy who’s also nonverbal, and we rarely get to see characters with disabilities on screens. Why do you think we are still seeing that lack of representation today?
AMBER SEALEY: I think it’s important to point out that about 30% of the American public identifies as having a disability, and I think that protagonists with disabilities represent somewhere in the 2 to 3% in television and movies in terms of, you know, leading protagonists. And it’s even rarer still when actors who have disabilities are portraying those same roles with disabilities.
I think a lot of it goes back to having a history of othering people with disabilities, thinking that there is such a thing as normal when there really isn’t, thinking there’s such a thing as typical when there really isn’t. And I think very luckily, we are just starting now to enter a phase of understanding that there is no such thing as normal and we are all different and all of our bodies work differently.
You know, I love, one of the things working on this film that I learned was the concept of presuming competence. I have Dr. Katherine Ray’s character say to Mr. Dimming, you know, “Presume competence, Mr. Dimming and I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.” And I think that’s really true. I think that if you meet somebody who has a disability or whose body moves differently than yours, and you presume that they’re a competent human, you will not be disappointed.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That was actually a phrase I looked up after watching the film. It’s one I had never heard before and it came up quite a bit in our research preparing for today.
AMBER SEALEY: I love that you caught that. That’s great.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s just such a unique phrase, and it’s so succinct about getting the point across, but you sort of find this universality through the specific story of Melody. I’m curious what the process was like, right? That often characters with disabilities may not be portrayed by people who are also living with disabilities, and might seem obvious, but why was it important for you to cast someone with a disability in this film to portray Melody?
AMBER SEALEY: In terms of casting, it just wasn’t even a question to not cast somebody who had cerebral palsy. I guess that’s maybe the benefit of all the, the talk that we’ve had about inclusivity and DEI in our world in the last, you know, sort of five to 10 years and understanding that this was a movie about somebody with a disability and that actor, actress was gonna have something very specific to say, and I wanted somebody who had lived experience with that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. And I think one of the reasons this movie shines and it’s so easy to connect with is because Melody is funny, smart, witty, full of hopes and dreams and you know, bad moods and good moods. And I’m wondering what the process of casting Melody was like? What was the moment when you first found Phoebe-Rae Taylor, who portrays Melody and is also a first time actor when it comes to films?
AMBER SEALEY: Well, I have to shout out our casting directors, Barden / Schnee. Paul Schnee was amazing and he was involved in the two year process of trying to find somebody. And you know, largely because people with disabilities aren’t really welcomed in Hollywood, when you reach out to the agents and managers, you know, and you say, Hey, we want a girl between 10 and 13 who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, oftentimes we’d get crickets back. So we were really reaching out to, you know, doctor’s offices, CP organizations, friends of ours that have CP, you know, who know other people who have CP. It was really a broad outreach and the community just came together so beautifully ’cause everyone was like, oh my God, yes, this has to be a movie. It has to get made. But in terms of Phoebe-Rae Taylor, she just shines. So the minute I saw her video, I was like, oh my God, that girl’s amazing. And I was like, it has to be, it has to be her.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s that opening shot that’s slowly zooming in on her, and the first time she smiles and you’re hearing Jennifer Aniston’s voice and you’re not sure why yet. It’s such a disorienting, but warm and inviting moment. It’s so much fun.
CLIP: Out of My Mind
Hi, my name is Melody Brooks and for the price of a smoothie you can save a child like me with cerebral palsy. No, I’m just kidding. I don’t want your money and I don’t want your pity either. Go ahead and stare. It’s 2002. You’ve never seen a girl in a wheelchair who doesn’t talk before? It’s not like I have nothing to say. Oh, believe me, I have so much to say. But my tongue won’t cooperate. I know what you’re thinking. I sound pretty grown up for a 12-year-old, right? I told you I can’t talk, so I don’t have a voice. This will all go a lot better if you just listen…
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I think one of the moments that really stuck out to me was the arc with the Wiz Kids, Melody’s school trivia team, right? To participate, Melody uses AAC – which stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. In this case, she’s using an electronic device that helps her to communicate. You watch Melody become such an essential part of her team.
She really shines when she’s in class for the first time, but she still ends up feeling kind of that sting of rejection from her teammates and her coach, who’s also her teacher. So I’m wondering, could you tell us why it was important for you to demonstrate this kind of harmful behavior in a children’s movie, and what lesson you hope is being communicated to young viewers by watching Melody go through this hardship?
AMBER SEALEY: I want audiences and people to understand that the onus is not on the person who uses AAC to be heard all the time or make a scene for people to listen to them. The onus is on us to take the time to stop and to listen. I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken with anyone who uses AAC, but it’s actually like a really beautiful experience because you, you’ve learned how much we talk over each other, don’t really listen to each other, don’t really take the time to think about what is it we’re gonna say? What is it we are gonna ask? And I have ADHD, so I do that all the time. And so speaking with somebody who uses AACs, it’s amazing because it takes the time to slow down and to listen.
And so it was important to me that like, who better to learn this? I mean, children are so, they have open hearts and open minds, and they’re usually much more willing to change and to grow. I had so many kids ask the best questions in Q&A’s after the film, you know, and questions like, you know, Hey, there’s a kid who uses a wheelchair in my class like, what should I say to him? And I got to answer that question and say, well, what would you say to any other kid that you wanted to get to know or be friends with?
You know, I think it’s not only an important message for kids, but for all of us. I learned so much in doing this film. Obviously you do films for various reasons, but selfishly it’s just been life-changing for me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m curious, what did you want the audience to understand about how to better support children living with a disability?
AMBER SEALEY: To not other them. You know that we as a society are multifaceted, multi-layered. You know, we come in all shapes and sizes and kinds. And children who learn differently, my belief is that they should not be put in separate classrooms. I think we all learn better when we learn together, regardless of what our learning style is.
Most of the people that I’ve met are like just come up and say hi. You know, if you don’t know if you can shake my hand or not, ask me, do you shake hands? You know, ask that person. Ask them. Do you prefer if I, you know, crouch down when I talk to you, do you prefer if I stay standing? Do you shake hands? Do you hug?
You know, and then wait slowly for the answer. I mean, we all know what it’s like to feel shut out, right? You know, to feel not seen as worthy or whole. And I think that people with disabilities feel that. In an extreme way all the time, and they are, you know, having to navigate a world and a society that was not built for them and is very often not inclusive to them.
I mean, that’s one of the things about our set being an accessible set, meaning that anybody with any disability, any neurodiversity, the whole set is accessible to them. It made it better for everybody. Not just Phoebe who uses a wheelchair or other people with disabilities on our set. It made all of us feel so much more welcomed.
You know, we had crew members coming up and asking for things, saying like, Hey, I’ve never had the courage to ask for this ’cause I always thought the producers would get mad or they’d think I wasn’t capable of the job, but I actually need, you know, X, Y, or Z special tool to do my job really well. And we’d be like, great, you know? So making a set accessible, I think makes it better for everybody and really doesn’t cost very much more at all.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I love that. That’s incredible. What has this process taught you about what the film industry can do better to accommodate people with different abilities?
AMBER SEALEY: Every set, every actor, every crew member comes with their own personality. You know, say you have an actor who I don’t know, they don’t eat eggs, so you have to make sure that there is a breakfast available to them that doesn’t have eggs. You know, like we are actually used to accommodations. You know, we make a lot of accommodations for celebrity and for very wealthy people, and I’m just saying, let’s expand the accommodations to include people with disabilities. It’s not that big of a deal.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When Melody first gets to school, we even see her sort of othered based on where she’s learning, right? She doesn’t have access to the main building. It is not made accessible to her or any of the other students who are put in Special Ed. They’re all in a trailer. They’re all of different ages and different abilities, and yet they’re all sort of siloed. And at one point, early in the film, Dr. Katherine Ray says, “Disabilities don’t hold kids back, schools do.”
CLIP: Out of My Mind
I admire your idealism, Dr. Ray. I really do. But I have to work in the real world.
What world do you think Melody lives in when you’re done here, what do you think was gonna happen? Those kids were always gonna go back to special ed. I can’t afford to hire someone to babysit them. And even if I did and it had all the magical benefits that you seem to imagine, what then? More disabled kids would move into my district. They need resources to support them too. Did you ever think of that?
You know what? Thank you. You just helped me figure out my thesis for my book. Disabilities don’t hold students back, schools do.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Can you talk about why it was important to include some of these systemic reasons, these broader reasons why children with disabilities are disadvantaged in education?
AMBER SEALEY: Our producer Peter Sarraf and our writer Daniel Stiepleman, they actually met in New York City at one of the first like entirely mainstreamed schools. And that line, that is pure Daniel Stiepleman, that’s his line. I can’t take any credit for that, but he, he just again, like really sums up beautifully; it’s not the person’s disability that’s holding them back. It’s all the surrounding sort of prisons that we put ourselves in. You know, in society it’s these presumptions, you know?
And when the principal says, you know, well, if I make my school welcoming to kids with disabilities, then more kids with disabilities will move into our district. And I can’t afford that, you know?” And it’s like, well, okay, so that’s sort of true. But also you could be the trendsetter and you could make other schools and other school districts do the right thing and become more inclusive and have, you know, the ability for kids with disabilities to learn.
It is a complicated thing. I’m just gonna give you one example. One of my children, you know, they were going to a very progressive school. There was a young girl who has CP and uses a wheelchair and she’s been in that school for like five years, you know, all the way up through pre-K. And here they are now in fifth grade and the school gets a big grant to totally redesign their play yard and the playground, you know, the whole kind of yard area. And they start the design and they’re like halfway through it and becomes evident that the entire thing is not ADA compliant. That this child who uses a wheelchair cannot use the playground that they’ve just spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s like you have a child in your school that uses a wheelchair, you have known her for six years. How is this possible?
It’s a shame that we are in 2025 and more of us don’t know about you know, just being inclusive like in the most human simple way. And I guess I just hope that Out of My Mind is a drop in the bucket, you know, in terms of helping people open their minds and open their hearts.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Amber, for joining us today. I certainly walked away learning quite a bit from this film and looking at the world differently, so I appreciate it and I, I hope our listeners did too. Before I let you go, I’m wondering, is there anything that you’d like to leave us with?
AMBER SEALEY: I guess I would just say like to rigorously examine the things that you’re afraid of. That, I mean, it’s, you know, makes sense to be afraid of like a shark that’s gonna bite you in the water or something. But things that you’re afraid of that actually aren’t hurting you personally. You know, people with disabilities, trans people, gay people, you know, whatever that is, to really rigorously examine what is it that you’re afraid of. And hopefully you come out of the other end of that question with the answer of like, oh, I’ve been wrong in judging you know this, or othering this person or making them feel less than human. And hopefully we can have some change from that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you. That’s a perfect sentiment for us to end on. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you again, Amber Sealey for coming on We Disrupt this Broadcast.
AMBER SEALEY: Thank you so much. It was really fun.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Very grateful for that thoughtful and refreshing conversation with Amber Sealey. One of my favorite things about talking to her was learning how deeply she researched and included folks from the communities centered in this film. It speaks to the power of entertainment to educate and humanize those whose experiences might not mirror our own.
And it reminds us listening who are outside the disability community, that the burden is on us to learn and help make the world accessible for all our peers. On that note, it’s really encouraging to hear Amber say that accessible sets not only make the experience better for everyone, but should be the norm. That should also be the case in schools. But why it isn’t and what disability rights advocates have been asking us to change about our schooling system is something we’ll get into with our next guest. After the break, we’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Our next guest is Dr. Priya Lalvani, a professor at Montclair State University and co-author of Undoing Ableism, a source book for teaching about disability and anti ableism in K through 12 classrooms. She’s also the editor of Constructing the Mother: Disability Studies in Education.
Hey folks. Please welcome author and Professor of Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at Montclair State University, Dr. Priya Lalvani. Dr. Lalvani, how are you today? Thanks for joining us.
PRIYA LALVANI: I’m great. Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thanks for being here. What do you feel Out of My Mind better illustrates about the experiences of children with disabilities and how they navigate the education system?
PRIYA LALVANI: For one, it gets right that often for children and adults of course too, but especially for children with disabilities, the experience of disability may have less to do with the impairment itself and more to do with the stigmas about disability, right? The isolation, the rejection, the exclusion that they might face.
From an educator’s perspective, I noted right away that the movie highlights the low expectations, the stereotypes and the negative assumptions for students with disabilities that are quite often a part of their schooling experiences. And it also shows that non-disabled children don’t always know, genuinely don’t know how to interact with their peers with disabilities.
And so that also came out from the film, but, having said all of that for me, the thing that the movie really gets right is that even today there is a lack of access for students with disabilities in our schools. And the thing is, Gabe, when people think of access, the first thing they think of is ramps. Right? Children with disabilities don’t just need access into spaces. They also need access to communication. They need access to participation. They need access to forming friendships and relationships. So for Melody, the character in the film, the device that she was given was access. It was the key to all of these things.
And what’s interesting is that in our schools, it’s required by law that students with disabilities will receive all the supports that they need. And yet despite that, it’s the everyday experience of so many students with disabilities, particularly those who are non-speaking, like Melody in the film, that they have not been provided alternative means of communication. And ironically, here’s the funny part, many non-speaking students are placed in a separate classroom based on the very reasoning that they can’t speak. But they are not provided the means to communicate.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Why has it taken this long to make sure that all students have accessibility? What are some of the largest impediments in making sure that every student attending a public school has accessibility to the education they need?
PRIYA LALVANI: That’s a great question. I mean, if there’s one thing I’ve come to understand from listening to disabled activists, there’s this idea that impairments, while they definitely bring challenges or difficulties, the impairments by themselves do not define the experience of disability, right? Because disability is not experienced in a social vacuum. It’s experienced in the context of a society like everything is, and we live in a society that generally devalues people with disabilities.
We currently have an education system in which large numbers of disabled students continue to be placed in a separate classroom. It limits our access to everything that happens during school, the conversations, the interactions, opportunities to push their thinking.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: What would the ideal school environment look like for students with disabilities?
PRIYA LALVANI: Basically, inclusive education is an approach to educating students based on an understanding that all children, regardless of ethnicity, social class, gender, whatever, home language or disability, have the right to an education in their neighborhood schools and provided the supports they need. Now, when we’re talking specifically about students with disabilities, this means that regardless of the nature or severity of the disability, the student is not isolated, is not clustered with only a handful of other disabled students. Instead what we want is that services, supports, interventions are infused within the general education environment.
But here’s where it gets muddled. Just placing a child with a disability in a general education environment doesn’t make it inclusive education. And that’s where we sometimes go wrong. But inclusivity requires that teachers create environments in which all students can actually learn and communicate and interact and form relationships with each other.
And there’s a wide range of things that can be used to support children inclusively. We can make adaptations to the curriculum. There’s specialized mobility equipment, scribes, sign language interpretation, alternative text formats, assistive technology. But all of that, Gabe, is eventually not going to be enough, in my opinion. If we want a genuinely inclusive environment, it requires that we talk openly about disability. We include the topic within the curriculum, we de-stigmatize it so that disability is not a hush topic for children.
Why should the burden always be on the disabled kids to learn how to communicate and interact with their non-disabled peers to fit into the box? Why can’t we also teach non-disabled kids about other ways of being and communicating? That’s what I think a truly inclusive education looks like, and that’s what I strive to prepare the teachers that I work with for this kind of environment.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I am wondering, I mean, it’s almost a cynical question, but how do we make the case that people of all abilities should be invested in educational inclusivity?
PRIYA LALVANI: If a child is in a segregated setting for all of their schooling, how are they supposed to be prepared for life as an adult in their community? The community, the world is not neatly divided into two groups. Disabled and non-disabled. Inclusive education then is preparation for life as adults. So the benefits then are to everyone.
And when you think about it, also, when non-disabled children sit next to a child with down syndrome or cerebral palsy or autism in a classroom, they get to know them. They also benefit. They learn how to communicate and interact with people with differences. At the very neural level, children need to be with and learn from other children. They should all be exposed to the full range of humans.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: One of the teachers in Out of My Mind who is particularly insensitive to Melody comments about his lack of training, this sort of lack of awareness. Do you have any thoughts regarding the way teachers are trained or the lack of training they receive when it comes to students with disabilities?
PRIYA LALVANI: So I think that part of the problem is actually the ways in which teachers have been traditionally prepared, our education system operates as a parallel system of education. General education and special education. Within this parallel system, this parallel universe, if you will. So it’s unfair to expect any teacher to take any of this on. If we don’t send them out there with the practical knowledge, the skills, the ability to know what resources, technological supports, and all of this is out there. The program that we have at Montclair State University, I’ll give it a pitch right here, is based in a very different model, right? It’s based in a justice model.
We start with an understanding of disability as a form of human diversity first of all, and I think that’s really important. We don’t start with a fix it model. We start with a disability is a valued form of human diversity and inclusive education is a civil right. After that conceptual understanding, we work to prepare teachers with the practical skills and understanding of access tools that they will need to be able to teach any child that walks into or rolls into their classroom.
And we overlay that with an understanding about how to teach non-disabled kids about disability. In the appropriate places within their curriculum. But in my opinion, teachers are not the problem. Teachers teach within an institutionally ableist system. The culture of segregation is at an institutional level. It’s at the cultural level, actually. It’s an unquestioned way of thinking that students with significant disabilities are just best supported in these small, separate clusters. That is harder to change. And that’s what most people who are advocating for inclusive education are up against.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dr. Lalvani, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we’ve gotten such a broader and more detailed picture of the world in which Out of My Mind exists. Right? I think this movie was such a beautiful, intimate introduction to the topic, but it’s been so refreshing to talk to you today to realize that there are folks doing the work and thinking about how massive a shift is needed, as you mentioned culturally and institutionally, to make sure that every student attending public schools in this country gets access to what they need to thrive there amongst their peers and educationally.
PRIYA LALVANI: Thank you so much for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: As we wrap up this episode, I wanna say thank you again to Amber Sealey and Dr. Priya Lalvani for joining us. One of the quotes that really stuck with me from my conversation with Dr. Lalvani was “teachers teach with an ableist system.” It’s a fact Amber Sealey’s movie reminds us of when our protagonist Melody is hurt by a teacher that doesn’t mean her harm, but hasn’t been provided the tools or the knowledge to do better.
If we’re going to offer all students an adequate education, we need a system where schools are adequately funded to give everyone a fair shot. And one where kids are placed in the right classroom for them, not the one most convenient for others. If there’s one thing Melody’s story teaches us, it’s that every kid is bubbling with curiosity and aspirations. So why not live in a world where that’s nurtured rather than stifled based on our presumption of someone’s ability?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: The Peabody Awards are decided unanimously. So to close out our episode, I bring you, We Disrupt this Broadcast‘s, Unanimous Decision where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day:
AMBER SEALEY: We are actually used to accommodations. You know, we make a lot of accommodations for celebrity and for very wealthy people, and I’m just saying, let’s expand the accommodations to include people with disabilities. It’s not that big of a deal.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That’s it for this week. Please join us next time when our guest will be Julio Torres, creator of the mind bending and surreal Peabody award-winning show. Fantasmas.
JULIO TORRES: Jumping from lily pad to lily pad immigration-wise, visa-wise, it feels like you are constantly attempting to make a bigger bubble for yourself. Make a little more leeway with what you are able to legally do. And so, it’s this constant feeling of being here but being not here and that feels quite ghostly. That is why the show is called Fantasmas, it’s ghosts in Spanish. And I am attracted to the idea of ghosts, not because I’m attracted to death or horror but because I’m attracted to people who feel like they’re here, but they are not quite here. People who… I love the mythology of the ghosts of they can walk through walls but they can’t open a door. They can be seen sometimes and sometimes they can’t be seen.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Associate producer, Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.