Posted April 14, 2019 by Alice Wong DVP Blog Posts and Essays
Disability Representation on TV: Interview with Katherine Beattie
Below is an interview with Katherine Beattie, a writer for the CBS series NCIS: New Orleans. Katherine shares the behind-the-scenes story of an episode she wrote this season featuring a number of disabled characters played by disabled actors.
You’re not only a badass extreme athlete, but you’re also a writer for television and film. How did you become involved in the entertainment industry?
I grew up in Los Angeles around a fair number of “industry folks,” so while I wasn’t always interested in entertainment, I always knew it was a possibility. My father, who has since passed, worked in the White House Office of Advance for 20 years, and he’d often let me tag along on his local trips. One of his stops was taking candidates on The Tonight Show, so I got to know some people there who eventually gave me a recommendation for a college internship on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. I worked at Ellen for a year after college before quitting to pursue a career in scripted TV, and spent almost a decade working in various assistant positions before finally becoming [...]