From The Times in the UK:Cara Readle (pictured) giggles bashfully at the thought of being a trailblazer. She is 18, full of plans to study drama at university, and her first performance in a lead role is broadcast on BBC Scotland next week. But as a young woman with cerebral palsy, she recognises such a prominent part in a big television drama is a rarity. “I want to be an actress, but the thing is getting the jobs, because there are not many roles for people with disabilities,” she says bluntly. “It’s a hard fact, but it does make it more difficult.”
So there is significance in her breakthrough performance in Zig Zag Love, but Readle is simply thrilled to be working alongside such an established actor as Robert Carlyle. Her previous acting experience was limited to a minor role in Tracy Beaker, the Children’s BBC series, but there is a stirring lack of apprehension in Readle.
Her first leading role required the filming of her first sex scene, but she took it in her stride. “I thought I was going to be really nervous, but I wasn’t,” she says. “I don’t know why, but it was comfortable.”
Sex, death, first love — the themes of Zig Zag Love are uncompromising. Following the burgeoning relationship between Ziggy, Readle’s character, and Peter, a teenage boy suffering from cancer, it is the first production in the collaboration between BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen. Ziggy’s cerebral palsy, although crucial to her motivation in running away with Peter (River City’s Anthony Martin), is not the focus of the story.
“I have this disability and I’m not ashamed,” says Readle. “I just want to act. There should be more — it’s true life, there are disabled people out there. There should be parts in a soap, which is supposed to be everyday life. We are just normal people with difficulties.”
It is, instead, the character of Peter who struggles to cope with his circumstances. He suffers from testicular cancer and, after watching his best friend die while in the midst of chemotherapy, becomes terrified by the prospect of never experiencing sex. His father (Carlyle) provides little ballast to his life and in Ziggy, a feisty girl being suffocated by her overprotective father, he finds a similarly restless soul. The pair escape to the Highlands, where their relationship develops as uncertainly as any teenage romance.
When Readle read the script, there was a resonance. “When I first meet someone, I’m quite nervous, but once I get to know them and they get to know me, there isn’t a barrier,” she says of her disability.
Mary Morris, who worked on Tracy Beaker, wrote the part specifically for her. “She didn’t have much dialogue but I got to know her through that and found her to be extremely hard-working, extremely generous and just a lot of fun,” says Morris. “When I met her again when she was 16, with her energy and her face, I thought, ‘My God, the camera is just going to love this girl,’ and there and then decided to write for her.”
Morris knew there was always a possibility that another actress would be cast in the role.“I had no doubt in my gut that she would wow everybody,” she says. “It would have been horrendous if they’d said they would prefer somebody with less visible cerebral palsy — I would have been devastated — but that never even looked like happening.
“One of the things I’m desperately hoping for once this is screened is that people will say, ‘She’s got an interesting face, she’s a lovely actress, I’ll put her in Casualty as one of the receptionists.’ Hopefully, people will realise how good she is, she’ll get more parts and other disabled people will get more work.”
Once Gillies MacKinnon, the director, met Readle he was convinced she would thrive under the demands of a leading role. Like Morris, he is captivated by her enthusiasm and determination. The hope that her performance might prove pioneering is also infectious.
“Television has become so unimaginative that whenever you would want to use somebody like Cara, it would have to be in an issue-based film,” says MacKinnon, whose previous films include Small Faces, Regeneration and Hideous Kinky. “There’s a tendency to cast an Asian or Caribbean person only when it says in the script that they are of another race. But there’s no reason why we can’t cast a person from any racial group as any character or why Cara can’t be cast as an ordinary character — she doesn’t have to be described as having cerebral palsy. We’re just a bit rigid these days; everything’s genre-based and it's a slightly plodding, box-ticking mentality that’s developed in the last decade. We can be more creative than that.”
Having attended drama school since she was 10, Readle is finally fulfilling some of her ambitions. The role in Zig Zag Love might enable that experience to continue.
“Robert didn’t start acting until he was in his 20s and he was really inspirational,” she adds. “He said, ‘Just go for it.’ ”