Julie Fernandez is a full-time wheelchair user who was an actor and disability consultant, and now brings over three decades of production experience to her role as an Access Coordinator (AC) and Agent. She is the leading AC at Casarotto and runs the Access Team alongside Sara Johnson, where they represent 17 ACs and other access experts and consultants.
Here Julie writes about the importance of the AC role and how it came to be.
“I am often asked about my job; what it entails and what my responsibilities are on a production. In short, an Access Coordinator provides on the ground expert advice and support as well as helping to signpost, guide and oversee the production team to make sure each office, studio and location is as accessible as possible.
Another vital part of the role is to enable anyone from the cast, crew or creative team who is deaf, disabled and/or neurodivergent (DDN,) to safely disclose their access requirements to ensure that these are met. This enables them to do the job that they have been hired to do, barrier free.
The AC begins by sending an introductory letter to all cast, crew and creatives on production to explain the role and how it can help. We do this because despite it being nearly three years since I first called myself an AC, many people have still not worked with one. We encourage anyone who has disclosed, and anyone who might want to, to arrange for a 1:1 chat where we discuss their relevant access requirements. This is then sensitively shared with the relevant production department. The AC is there to help guide and oversee any accommodations being made.
I look back to when I was eighteen and was cast as the first disabled actor to play a main character in a soap in the UK, appearing as Nessa in Eldorado. Even at that early age it was clear to me that it was seen as my responsibility to educate everyone about my disability and requirements, as well as being the expert on disability in general. I always had to provide this education unpaid and in addition to the job I was hired to do. Despite this rarely did I have my own access requirements met, even when collaborating with good people along the way. Disabled creatives in the industry have tried to centre the disabled experience for decades, but we have come up against a real lack of genuine inclusion formed around ableist attitudes and practices. All these obstacles, as well as the failure of the industry to sufficiently fund accessible facilities and locations, has contributed toward make working life exceedingly difficult for my peers and I over the last 30 years.
Mine and Sara’s work in building the shape of the AC role into something practical and affordable has been a game changer, and I see it as the most sensible first piece of the jigsaw to genuine sustainable representation.
It was Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart lecture in 2021 that was the key to the formalisation of the role. Jack used his opportunity as a Call to Action for the disabled community. He along with Katie Player, Genevieve Barr and Holly Lubran then created the lobby group Underlying Health Condition, which suggested simple practical recommendations for change. One of these was to have an Access Coordinator on all high end TV productions. Katie and Jack asked Sara Johnson to put together a course to train 12 ACs and I was brought in as co-lead to work with her. Our working life began in the Spring of 2022 when I took my first job as an AC and we built the course around that experience. The work of Jack and the Underlying Health Condition team encouraged a pan-industry response to the lack of disability representation on and off screen. The TV Access Project stemmed from that and it continues to do vital work with the goal of full inclusion by 2030. All to improve the industry we work in for the one in five of us who are DDN or who have a health condition.
I still find it staggering that many people do not know that twenty percent of the global population live with a health condition or disability, and that by extension this makes up twenty percent of a film and television audience.
Though there is still much to be done I am proud of the work Sara and I have been able to do in such a short space of time. The Access Coordinator is now a paid crew role that is both commercially practical and accountable. There is no longer the need for anyone who has a health condition or disability to feel uncomfortable in having to be the spokesperson for their own or anyone else’s access requirements. That is immensely rewarding.”
Photo Credit: David Proud
Jon Creamer
Share this story
