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Before his starring role as Sam Gardner in Netflix’s new series Atypical, Keir Gilchrist played Marshall Gregson, a teenager coping with the effects of his mother’s dissociative identity disorder in Showtime’s United States of Tara. On the most basic level, the roles don’t seem that different: the characters are in high school, the shows explore the perspective of someone living with a disability, and the episodes center on daily life, not on any large event or incidence. While Gilchrist is great in both series (the conversation about whether an Autistic actor should be at the helm is for a different day), it’s the keen sense of empathy developed during his turn in Tara that enables him to play Sam so convincingly.
In United States of Tara, Gilchrist’s Marshall acts as the family’s stabilizing force when his mother’s alternate identities, or alters, resurface after years of being suppressed by medication. Marshall spends much of the series calming down his mother, her various alters–including T, a trashy 16-year-old, Buck, a beer-chugging redneck, and Alice, a perfect 1950s housewife–his older sister, and sometimes even his father. You know, the guy who’s supposed to be the rock of the family. Marshall is the glue that holds the Gregsons together through everything from typical family angst to Buck’s affair with a female bartender.
Throughout all this family drama, Marshall must also defend himself from the pervasive homophobia that so often exists in high school. He’s openly gay, and not once do we see him shy away from who he is. Even when he dates a girl, he does so in order to defy traditional labels rather than to fit in with heterosexual expectations. Gilchrist’s performance prevents Marshall from being a one-note stereotype; instead, Marshall becomes a character driven by a desire to help his family who just so happens to be gay.
Much like Marshall, Atypical’s Sam doesn’t want to be made to feel bad about who he is. When a snotty girl at school tries to defend him by saying that “he’s not all there,” Sam freaks out and angrily tells his dad later that night that he is all there. Gilchrist’s performance dramatizes the most obvious parts of Sam’s freakout, like when he runs out of the school building following the girl’s comment, but it also highlights the less noticeable behaviors that often affect people on the Autism spectrum, such as stimming and lack of eye contact. It’s important to note that these are just some of the behaviors that can manifest in Autistic people; no two cases are the same, and every person along the spectrum has varied challenges and strengths.
It’s clear from Gilchrist’s performance that Sam isn’t upset that some girl was mean to him. He’s upset because these people have decided that he’s not normal, and really, he’s just afraid of being rejected (but who isn’t?): by girls he’s interested in, by people at school, by his parents who don’t really get him. In this scene and many others, Gilchrist plays Sam with the confidence of an actor who has spent time thinking about the best way to convey the complexities of not only living with Autism, but also just being a human in the world.
If actors have to imagine actually living the lives they’re performing on screen, United States of Tara required Gilchrist to empathize with a mother whose disability affects her daily life, family members affected by the stigma surrounding differently-abled people, someone struggling to date in a less-than-welcoming environment, and people just trying to get by. Luckily for Gilchrist, Atypical requires him to do all of the above, this time in a leading role.
