When Phoebe-Rae Taylor found out that Jennifer Aniston would express her inner thoughts in the new Disney movie Out of my mindshe “couldn’t stop crying.”
In the film, which debuts on Disney+ on November 22, the new actress stars as Melody, a sixth grader with cerebral palsy (CP) who navigates home and school while not speaking. She also has to stand up for herself, with the help of her parents (Rosemarie DeWitt and Luke Kirby) and an educator (Courtney Taylor), while not being given the same opportunities as able-bodied children.
Taylor has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, but unlike her character, she can talk.
The 15-year-old told Yahoo Entertainment that Aniston and Friends were a “big part of my house growing up,” and she was even named after Lisa Kudrow’s character on the show.
“It was crazy because I loved her since I was little,” she said of Aniston. “I always loved her and she helped me a lot in my life.”
Out of my mind is based on the 2010 young adult novel by Sharon M. Draper, which called for many of Melody’s inner thoughts to be adapted for the screen.
“When you’re tasked with translating from a book to a film, there’s so much internal dialogue going on in a novel and so you worry about how much I can transfer to the film,” director Amber Sealey told Yahoo Entertainment. “So we ultimately decided that we liked the concept of her having an inner voice.”
That’s when Sealey and her team chose Aniston and then incorporated the ’90s sitcom into the film.
“Phoebe herself has this love and obsession with it in real life Friends and with Jennifer Aniston,” she said, “so we borrowed that from Phoebe’s real life and incorporated that into the movie.”
Rosemarie DeWitt, who plays Melody’s mother, told Yahoo Entertainment that Aniston and Taylor are “now forever connected through celluloid [is] so cool.”
DeWitt said the actors were able to “bring a lot of ourselves into their roles.” ‘A lot of our fears, a lot of our desires, or a lot of our love, you know, and [the movie] was able to hold it,” she explained.
The search for who would play Melody took about two years, Sealey said. She and her team also wanted to be conscious about the process.
“We had amazing casting directors who reached out not only to agencies and actors, but also to disability rights organizations and CP organizations, doctors’ offices and physical therapy practices, spreading a wide, global network,” she explained.
Since this was Taylor’s first foray into acting, Sealey said the teen came to the project with “a really open heart.”
“We did fun things like sing songs,” she said, “and actually, even with a child, it’s so much fun because as a director you can really play. So we got to play a lot, which I thought was great.
Taylor admitted that she was “so nervous because I had no idea what to expect, having never been on a movie set before.”
She added: “I remember having no idea what was going to happen, but I met the most amazing people – my classmates, the crew, the director – they were all so welcoming and understanding. It really helped a lot.”
While the film tackles the challenges of having a disability, it also confronts the misconceptions that many able-bodied people have.
For DeWitt, she hopes audiences will see “how marginalized people with disabilities can be, how people don’t try to become a person in a wheelchair — they just do.”
Taylor said she just doesn’t “want people to judge.”
“I feel like people need to understand that children and adults with disabilities are just people. Even though we may look, sound or act a little differently, we are exactly the same,” she said. “We have our opinions, we have preferences, we hate things, we love things, but we are mothers, fathers, daughters [and] sisters.”
Out of my mind begins streaming on November 22 on Disney+.
