In the aforementioned interview, Marlee Matlin talked about the importance of representation in acting and the need for deaf actors to play deaf characters. “Enough is enough. Deaf is not a costume,” she said told The Guardian. “It’s not authentic and insults the community that you’re portraying. Because we exist, we deaf actors. We do a much better job of portraying characters, telling stories that involve deaf characters, because we lived it. We know it.”
As serious as these issues are to Matlin, she hasn’t lost her sense of humor. During an appearance on “The Late Show,” she shared a prank she played on her co-star from “The West Wing,” Josh Malina. Malina invited Matlin to appear on his podcast and during the visit, she faked a fight with her sign-language interpreter and sent him away. Malina understandably panicked over the thought of Matlin having no one to translate for her. The old friends shared a laugh over the prank, which is par for the course for those two.
Marlin and her other costars from “The West Wing” had a chance to get together for a reunion in 2020 for an Entertainment Weekly cover, but Malina was absent, per Yahoo!. Still, the cast took the opportunity to reflect on Malina’s own pranks from their time on-set. They talked about how he put Vaseline on a phone that was set to be used and put a fish in another co-star’s trailer. Considering his sense of humor, Malina surely appreciated Matlin’s joke.
