Marlee Matlin, Whitney Cummings, Keith Carradine Discuss Fox's Accused

In the Fox crime drama Accused, each episode begins in a courtroom and ends with the surprising turn of events that landed everyday citizens in the defendant’s chair on trial. The American version of the British anthology series of the same name was developed by Howard Gordon and boasts an ensemble of A-list talent in front of and behind the cameras, including Marlee Matlin, who made her directorial debut with Episode 2, “Ava’s Story,” a tale of a deaf surrogate mother who faces charges of kidnapping and endangering a minor.

“The story itself was very sensitive and it’s actually based on true events … so to be able to understand where Ava was coming from as a woman, as a deaf woman, and, not as a mother really, but as a surrogate, there were so many layers, that I could identify with,” said Matlin at a recent THR Presents Live at The London Hotel, powered by Vision Media. “To be able to feel protective of the deaf community, of the deaf baby, of everyone in this story — there’s so many cultural references in there and I understood them all 100 percent.”

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One of the more personal aspects of the story for Matlin was the hearing actors’ journey as parents trying to decide what’s best for their newborn baby who was diagnosed as deaf shortly after birth.

“Watching that as I was directing them in the monitor and seeing the close up, I started to lose it and cry because it reminded me of my parents and what they had to go through on their unexpected journey, never having met or even seen a deaf child before,” she added.

In Episode 7, “Brenda’s Story,” actress and comedienne Whitney Cummings portrays a stand-up comic who’s raped by a former partner and fellow comedian. She, too, had a strong response to the storyline, hers coming as soon as she read the script. “My reactions to it were that it broke my heart and that it pissed me off, and I think those are the things that for a litany of reasons right now, we’ve been made afraid to do,” Cummings said.

“I’ll speak for myself and what I’ve seen around me, which is there’s so much horrific stuff and I feel we’re all going a little bit numb when you hear about a different school shooting every morning. Then you wake up and you watch an episode of Accused and suddenly you’re enraged again because this is what artists do when we’re at our best, what TV does and movies do when we’re at our best. We make people angry again and we confront people, and we wake them up.”

In “Billy’s Story,” the final episode of Season 1, actor Keith Carradine portrays a veteran rock star trying to help his son who’s battling addiction. Beyond relating to the narrative around the limitlessness of a parent’s love as a husband and a father, Carradine, who’s also a musician, connected to the music he performs onscreen, which was written by Gordon’s son.

“Micah managed to write to my sensibility,” he said. “It felt like something that I would write anyway.”

For more from the cast of Accused, watch the full video at the top of the page. This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Fox.

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