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FX's American Horror Story has admitted the world's smallest woman to its Freak Show.
Showrunner Ryan Murphyannounced Wednesday via Twitter that Jyoti Amge(pictured) has joined the cast of the fourth season of the FX anthology series.
Season four of the series, subtitled Freak Show, is set in Jupiter, Fla., in the 1950s, with Jessica Lange
(pictured) in the lead role. The Emmy winner will portray a German expat managing
one of the last remaining freak shows in the country.
Returning stars
set for Freak Show include Lange,Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Frances Conroy, Sarah Paulson, Emma Roberts, Gabourey Sidibe and Evan Peters, among others, as well as AHSnewcomers Michael Chiklis, The Hunger Games'Wes Bentley, Fargo's JohnCarroll Lynchand The Normal Heart's Finn Wittrock. Chiklis is playing Bassett's husband and Bates' ex-husband.
Amge, 20, is the world's smallest living woman, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. She earned the title on her 18th birthday with a height of 2 feet, 0.6 inches. According to Wikipedia, her limited height is because of a growth anomaly called achondroplasia.
The AHS role marks Amge's latest tour in Hollywood. She was featured in a 2009 documentary, Body Shock: Two Foot High Teen, and was a guest on Bigg Boss 6, an Indian Big Brother-like TV competition show.
Amge joins recent addition Patti LaBelle on AHS: Freak Show. The former will have a four-episode arc, playing the mother to Sidibe's character. AHS: Freak Show debuts in October; a specific date has not yet been announced.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
