It may well be the funniest scene in any of this year’s Oscar-nominated films. Towards the beginning of Coda, the Massachusetts-set comedy-drama, Frank Rossi is telling his doctor about a delicate problem. “My nuts are on fire,” says the fiftysomething father of two. “They’re like hard angry little beets covered in barnacles.” His wife, Jackie, sitting beside him, has it even worse, he says. “Like a boiled lobster claw.”
Except that Frank, who is deaf, is speaking in sign language and his hearing daughter, Ruby — the CODA, child of deaf adults — has the luckless task of translating for the bemused doctor. It turns out that Frank, played by the deaf actor Troy Kotsur, is suffering from jock itch, a hazard of wearing wet clothes, as he does in his job as a fisherman (hence the marine similes). He has passed it on to Jackie (Marlee Matlin of The West Wing) through sex but neither is remotely self-conscious. Unlike the teenage Ruby — played by Emilia Jones, daughter of Aled — who is absolutely mortified.
Coda is one of the surprise successes of the Oscars, with nominations for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Kotsur, 53. The first deaf male actor to be nominated for an Academy award, he is the odds-on favourite, having already won a Bafta in the same category for a turn that bursts with charm, mischief and humanity. He brought the house down with his acceptance speech at the Baftas in which said, “Have you considered a deaf James Bond?”
He met Barbara Broccoli, the Bond supremo, at the afterparty, he says on Zoom from Los Angeles via his sign-language interpreter, Justin. “She asked me if I would audition for her and I said, ‘Of course! Hey, maybe I can play a villain?’ ” Kotsur is dapper in black shirt and flat cap, the wild beard from the film neatly trimmed. He loves Bond, he says. “It’s very visual for a deaf person — a lot of action.”
For the same reason Kotsur loves the films of Steven Spielberg, whom he met at the lunch for Oscar nominees. “We’re both from Arizona, so we have that connection, and I told him, ‘Thank you for all of your visual storytelling.’ He enjoyed Coda a lot and he had an ex-wife [presumably Amy Irving] who knew sign language so he’s a bit familiar with deaf culture. I hope he’ll consider working with me one day.”
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Matlin already has an Oscar, having won best actress in 1987 for Children of a Lesser God. “She was quite young when she won [21] but I’m an old fart who’s been struggling as an actor,” Kotsur says. “She’s really been my mentor during this award season process. She’s given me a lot of advice: what to wear, what to say — don’t forget to mention folks.”
No false modesty here: Kotsur is embracing his status as favourite. He has done plenty of thinking about his Oscars speech, he says. “I’m trying not to give the same speech every time. You only have about a minute and a half or something so I need to keep it short and sweet, but I hope they’ll give me extra time because we have two languages with an interpreter.” At the Baftas it was three languages because Kotsur had two interpreters: one for American Sign Language (ASL); the other for British Sign Language (BSL).
Seeing Matlin win her Oscar “really kept my hope alive”, he says. During his lean early years she came to watch him act and direct at the Tony-winning Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles, where he moved to from Arizona in 1994. Matlin is one of the most successful deaf actors in the world but she was often in a minority of one on screen or stage. “She knew that we needed more than one deaf character in Coda,” Kotsur says. That rarely happens “due to fear, politics, financing and the need to cast A-listers. But I’m so glad that Marlee stood up for us as a deaf ensemble cast.” In Coda the Rossis have a deaf son, Leo, played by another deaf actor, Daniel Durant, and the film won the prize for outstanding performance by a cast at the Screen Actors Guild awards. Deaf West Theatre is developing a stage musical of the film, which was itself based on the 2014 French movie La Famille Bélier.
Kotsur is the third deaf actor I have interviewed in the past few months, after Rose Ayling-Ellis, the EastEnders star who won Strictly Come Dancing, and Lauren Ridloff, who played a hearing-impaired superhero in Marvel’s Eternals. “I’m starting to see more and more deaf representation,” Kotsur says. He points also to the two A Quiet Place films, which starred the deaf actress Millicent Simmonds.
Yet few of his peers have stolen a show as thoroughly as he does in Coda. Frank is a hoot: swearing, farting, having loud sex with Jackie and embarrassing Ruby with gusto. Finding her with a boy, he gives them a talk on safe sex which involves graphic miming of how to put on a condom. “He’s a positive deaf role model,” Kotsur says, “He’s strong, he loves his family, he drops lots of F-bombs and he has a great sense of humour. He’s not the victim; he’s a character that can make everyone shift their perspective on the deaf community. That’s one of the reasons why our film has been so impactful.”
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As well as funny it’s often sob-inducing. In one scene the family are watching Ruby sing at a school show and the sound vanishes to give a sense of how deaf people experience music. “It’s such a special moment that all of you hearing people are able to have 30 seconds in my silent world,” Kotsur says. It echoed that lovely silent section in one of Ayling-Ellis’s routines in Strictly Come Dancing.
Deaf people can certainly enjoy music, as Frank shows when he picks up Ruby from school while listening to hip-hop at prodigious volume in the car. Like Frank, it’s the percussion that Kotsur enjoys, concerts where “the kick drum feels like a massage if I have my back up against the speakers. It’s so easy to find deaf people at concerts because they’re right in front of the speakers to feel that bass. And we can still chat regardless of how loud it is.”
The scenario depicted in Coda — deaf parents with one deaf and one hearing child — is quite common, Kotsur says. He and his wife, Deanne Bray, a deaf actress and ASL interpreter, have a teenage daughter, Kyra, who is a CODA, as is Justin, his interpreter. “Emilia has told me that I remind her of her father a bit, and Emilia reminds me of my daughter too,” Kotsur says with a smile. Had he heard of Aled Jones? “I know that he was a musician, writer and producer with quite a stellar reputation. So I hope to meet him some day.”
Emilia Jones is not a CODA, one reason why Kotsur was “extremely worried” before the shoot. “But when we met, I was so impressed with her,” he says. “She had already taken about a year’s worth of sign-language classes before our first day of rehearsal. I’ve noticed many actors who just focus on learning their lines and never really bothered to engage with their deaf cast members, but it was the opposite for Emilia. We were all extremely involved in each other’s lives. Maybe we’ll do Coda part 2 and I can become a grandfather.”
Born in Mesa, Arizona, to a hearing mother and father, who was the local police chief, Kotsur discovered acting at school. By the time he moved to Los Angeles he was playing lead roles in deaf productions including Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire and Lenny in Of Mice and Men and in 2013 he directed a film, No Ordinary Hero: The SuperDeafy Movie. Coda, though, has increased his clout significantly. “Before I really had to struggle even to get an audition,” he says. “Now the tables are turned and they’re chasing me down and sending me scripts.” Next up he will play a sports coach in Flash Before the Bang, an indie movie based on the true story of a deaf athletics team who became Oregon state champions in the Eighties.
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He says he is thrilled at Apple’s decision to release Coda with subtitles for the hearing impaired that are “burned in”, ie which cannot be removed by the viewer. “I’m really hoping that the audience don’t feel annoyed by the subtitles, but so far no one has complained,” he says. “All my life I always had to ask my hearing family members what was going on and I would always react with a delay.” Watching Coda in a cinema “was really the first time that I’ve seen the entire audience be able to laugh and cry simultaneously”. Without having to fiddle with the equipment provided for the deaf, which often doesn’t work, he had his hands free. “I could put my arm around my wife, give her a kiss, have some popcorn. It was wonderful.”
There is optimism in the way Kotsur talks about the future. “We’ve covered a lot of history regarding slavery and Latinos in the United States, so as deaf Americans we would love to share our history as well,” he says. “When I was growing up, sometimes I didn’t have any patience with the hearing world because 98 per cent were just ignorant about my language and my culture. But with Coda, I’ve seen so many more folks motivated to learn sign language.” The actresses Jessica Chastain and Rosario Dawson were signing like pros when he met them at an awards do. “It was quite amazing to be able to communicate directly with them.”
The ultimate goal, Kotsur says, is to play characters like Frank, “who just happen to be deaf and aren’t accompanied by the strains of violins”. And who, like dads everywhere, love nothing more than making their daughters cringe.
Coda is out now on Apple TV+ ; the Oscars are on Sky from 1am on Monday
