“Everybody knows what it’s like to be underestimated,” says actor Anthony Michael Lopez. “It’s not a niche experience. Everyone knows what it’s like to be injured or what it’s like to be sick. As disabled people, maybe we have more daily experience with those things. Maybe we’re more familiar with them than the non-disabled.”
And maybe the non-disabled crowd is finally recognizing how incredibly relevant disability is to their own lives—how much they can learn from people with disabilities, how much value-add there is in disabled perspectives.
Or maybe we’re just being Pollyannas (although we hope not, because we’ve worked long and hard to cultivate our curmudgeon cred). But it’s undeniably encouraging that Lopez is the second amputee actor within a six-month span to land a prominent Broadway role, following Katy Sullivan (of whom, more here). They’re the first performers with limb difference to appear on Broadway in more than 30 years. And they herald an era in which the casting of amputees in big roles is no longer any big deal—a matter of routine, rather than a remarkable occurrence.
Lopez (a congenital above-knee amputee) will be playing Sir Dinadan in the much-anticipated revival of Camelot, which opens next week at the Lincoln Center Theater. He’ll share the stage with multiple Tony and Grammy winners, read updated lines penned by Oscar- and Emmy-winner Aaron Sorkin, and take direction from Tony winner Bartlett Sher. If you haven’t bought tickets yet, don’t mess around. A lot of dates are already sold out. The show is currently slated to run through June 25, although there’s a decent chance it will get extended. You can buy tickets here.
We caught up with Lopez last month, during one of his rare days off from a heavy rehearsal schedule. Follow him on Instagram at @flittergaggot and get an overview of his career at his IMdB page. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Camelot was originally produced more than 60 years ago. How has it been updated to appeal to today’s audiences?
I saw Camelot once when I was in high school, but I don’t remember it very well. What I think Aaron [Sorkin] has tried to do is to explore the conflict between political responsibility and human nature. Human needs, versus the responsibilities of power and politics. How do we exist as human beings who need love and companionship and affection, when there are huge responsibilities on our shoulders and millions of people who rely on us? Is it even a worthy thing to try to impose your ideals onto an entire society? One thing I really love about our production, and this is something that Sorkin does all the time, is that it poses more questions than it answers.
I like that approach too.
You leave the theater having pondered these deep questions. Arthur has his purpose, his ideals, the things he wants to see come to fruition during his reign. And there are people who are completely opposed to what he’s doing. But no matter which side you fall on, every character has a very valid reason for their point of view. The play poses the question, “Does human nature respond more to fear or inspiration? What are the roles of fear and inspiration in trying to build a society based on ideals?”
Those seem like highly relevant themes in 2023.
Arthur is basically trying to establish the world’s first democracy, and trying to figure out how law and morality fit into it. And because it’s the first time that anybody on the planet has done it, he bumps into lots of conundrums. My character and the other knights come from an establishment that’s worked for a certain way for thousands of years. We have benefited from that system, and we are definitely some of the most privileged people in the world of the play. But we also have an incredible amount of political experience, so we understand what needs to happen in order to make systems work. And we find Arthur’s plan to be too idealistic and impractical. Our opposition to his plan is based on valid reasons. There are very good reasons to be sort of conservative and traditional.
Another thing I really love about our production is that it doesn’t lose any of the sumptuousness of the original production—the musicality, the romance, the beauty. It’s all there. It’s a huge cast. There are tons of costumes, tons of lights. The set pieces are massive and beautiful. When it comes together, it takes your breath away.
Do you have a solo?
I do.
And is that breaking new ground for you professionally?
No, I grew up doing musical theater. I started doing musicals in community theater when I was 10 years old. I did musicals all throughout high school and into college. The first play I ever did professionally, when I was 23, was a musical—The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
As I started to work more in New York, I started doing commercials and television and plays and Shakespeare, and musical theater just wasn’t wasn’t as available. I wasn’t being considered for musicals that often, and I think it was partially because of my disability. Maybe it was also partially because of my own internalized ableism. I thought, “I can’t really do that. There’s not a space for me in the musical theater industry.” But the reason I’m in Camelot is because casting directors had seen me audition for other musicals. I didn’t get those jobs, but I got close. They liked me and they remembered me. A couple of years ago, one of those people said, “You should go sing in a workshop for Camelot,” so I did. I stayed with the workshops for a couple of years, and they hired me to be a principal actor in the show.
So it sounds like this production has been literally years in the making.
Producing it was always the goal, but they had to wait and see. In the first workshop, Lin Manuel Miranda played King Arthur. The second workshop was in November 2021, and I did that as an ensemble member and I had a little solo. And then I came back in June 2022, and they were just trying to make sure that the music—which is from this golden era of American musical theater, this luscious experience—could fit with Aaron Sorkin’s new book. It was in that workshop that they realized it was really going to work.
Are those workshops what gave you the confidence to audition?
I didn’t audition. Those workshops essentially were my audition. I started off in the ensemble, and then somebody who was in a principal role had to leave the workshop, so they asked me to step in for them. That essentially was my audition.
Katy Sullivan told me that getting to Broadway was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Would you say that applies to you as well?
When I was a kid, and I think through my college life, I thought there was definitely a future for me on Broadway. As I got into the professional world, I revised that idea because I thought there wasn’t a place for a leg amputee on Broadway. I do think there was some internalized ableism in there. I just thought, “I don’t belong there.” But when we sang through Camelot for the first time with the orchestra—this incredible, overwhelming sound—I cried. That’s when I realized I had never let go of the fantasy. The fact that it’s actually happening was just completely overwhelming to me. I definitely was a mess.
It sounds like that almost snuck up on you a little bit.
It did. I had kind of given up on it.
Could this even have happened five years ago? Suppose five years ago you were at the same point in your career that you are now. Was Broadway in 2018 ready to cast an amputee in a production like this?
I’m not sure. I mean, Ali Stroker definitely knocked down some walls for us. I had been in callbacks to play her love interest in that show, and that was the year before Covid. So I knew back then people were starting to seriously consider us. And in 2016 and 2017, I did a production of Othello with Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, so at that time that people were starting to think of us as more legitimate. Sam Gold, the director, really wanted a disabled actor in the show, so he made a concerted effort to find us and get us in the room. It just took some creative leaders to recognize that audiences deserve to see disabled people on stage, because we exist in real life.
So it was always just a matter of time. But we were ready, you know? We were trained. We had gone to school and gotten a lot of experience. And I’m very privileged in a sense, because you wouldn’t necessarily know my disability just from looking at me. It is a significant disability, but on screen you don’t always necessarily know right away. I shot a commercial for Disney in 2019, and they didn’t know I was disabled until I got to Florida. I got off the plane and I was wearing shorts, and they saw my prosthesis. They didn’t know before then. So I’ve been able evade ableism here and there. I’ve definitely run into a lot of ableism in the industry, of course. You can’t escape it.
In Othello, was your prosthesis visible to the audience?
Yes. I’ve never tried to hide my disability.
So when you are playing a character who’s written as able-bodied, how does having a disability in real life inform that portrayal? What can you bring to the role that another actor can’t?
I think every character I play—whether or not it’s written with a disability—has a disability because I’m playing it. There are certain perspectives that we have as disabled people that we bring to every role we play as actors. For example, being sort of infantilized. Being underestimated and having people assume we’re less capable than we actually are. Those are things that have informed my personality and become part of every character that I play.
And these are very human experiences. Everybody knows what it’s like to be underestimated. It’s not just a niche experience. Everyone knows what it’s like to be injured or what it’s like to be sick.
Especially post-COVID.
Absolutely. As disabled people, maybe we just have more daily experience with those things. Maybe we’re just more familiar with them than the non-disabled.
And maybe you also have more experience finding adaptations to deal with those situations.
Right, because our coping skills are more finely honed. And the thing is, anybody can become disabled at any time. About 25 percent of the population identifies as disabled. It’s so common. And we all are disabled at some point, temporarily or permanently, so I think anyone can identify can identify with our experience.
Yeah, I basically think 100% of the population is dealing with one disability or another. Visible or invisible.
No question. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and my family didn’t really understand how to deal with a child who had a disability. They were young, they did their best, and they took great care of me. I have a beautiful family. But their approach was to encourage me to be just like everybody else. So I grew up ignoring my own physical limitations, pushing past them, not resting enough, not caring for myself. And I was proud of this. I would be in pain, or I would be bleeding or something, and I would just keep going and I would take pride in my ability to do that.
But as I’m getting into my late 30s, those physical limitations are a little bit more limiting, and I’m becoming more and more familiar with how my disability has actually influenced my experience. I learn new aspects of my personality that come from having a disability, things I wasn’t aware of when I was younger. I find myself adjusting to my disability all the time. Camelot is the first play that I ever asked for an adaptable costume. I’ve got stretches of time where I’m not on stage, and sometimes I just like to take off my leg. But in this play, because I’m covered in armor, it would be a huge process to do that. So our costume designer, Jen Moeller—who is a genius, and if she doesn’t win the Tony for this show, I’ll be shocked—she whipped up a pair of pants that can just come undone, so my prosthetic leg stays dressed at all times. I can take it off, and then just put it back on when I have to go back on stage.
But I’ve never asked for anything like that in my life. I always just went with it, even if I was uncomfortable, or chafing, or sweaty, whatever. I thought I just had to push through it. I’m just now learning that I can ask for support. And this time I’m proud of myself for not pushing through, and taking care of myself instead. I don’t want to feel shame asking for accommodations that are totally reasonable. Accommodations are being made constantly across the board, for all the performers. I would like to grow more comfortable asserting my boundaries and asking for things that just let me do my job.
In other words, if I have all four of my limbs but I’ve got an arthritic shoulder, I might ask for an accommodation in my costume or in how something gets staged, and I wouldn’t even think twice about asking—and nobody would accuse me of asking for special treatment. But if I need the same accommodation and I have a prosthetic limb, it gets perceived differently.
And as actors, we’re brought up being told that we’re a dime a dozen, so you just don’t want to piss anybody off or become viewed as the too-squeaky wheel. There are always so many other people out there who could play any role. But I’m getting more comfortable with the idea that I’m there for a reason. I’m there because of my talent, my experience, my skill, my particular energy, and how it blends with the rest of the production. Lots of people gave it careful consideration and agreed I’m the right person for this role.
I’m poking at this in part because so many of our readers have had the kind of experience you described. Maybe they’re out for an evening and they are walking with a limp, or they need somebody to hold the door, and then they feel intensely self-conscious about it. They start feeling like a problem, so they just suck it up. But they might not feel as self-conscious if they had a minor challenge that didn’t involve limb loss.
I get that. It’s not like I go into every day feeling 100 percent confident or un-selfconscious. I can be incredibly insecure. But I’m learning how to just sort of ride the waves. And I’ve always been a little bit contrarian. I’ve always been somebody who likes to push on people’s limits, including my own. So if I’m having some kind of discomfort in my leg, I’m not going to try to walk with less of a limp. I’m gonna let my body do what it needs to do to get around comfortably. And if it makes somebody else uncomfortable, I have no problem letting that be their issue and not mine.