Transcript
My name is Aidan O’Reilly, I’m an actor or trying to be an actor. We’ll see how that goes. The nature of my disability is that I only have one eye. This one is glass. In technical terms what you see at 200 feet, I see at 20 feet. So kind of details and things are gone.
Three months after the audition [they told me that] they wanted me to come to England for a third round. Which I don’t remember having been mentioned to me, beforehand, which is good actually ’cause then if I don?t like flying I might have said “oh no I don?t want to do that”. But I said “Alright. Fine”. And I flew over and they called us in I think it was a whole day and they kind of put you through the classes that you’re gonna go though with a group of people who are also auditioning.
I read with a magnifying glass, so they just had to deal with me, being like this, (holds paper close to face) reading a text I was unfamiliar with. It was fun. It was a lovely day and I remember thinking at the end of the day ‘I don’t even care if I get in at this point, I’ve had such a wonderful time’.
The first time I came to RADA I went to Bardy Thomas’s office and we drew up a learning agreement. She said “What will be difficult?” And I said “Well I haven’t done the course yet. I couldn’t tell you”. But you l know, I would guess things that were very physical things would be hard. Getting around the school might be difficult. It’s a very strange building. So they had two people assigned to me, who would show me around the school or look out for me if I was looking lost. But really with this type of thing you just have to jump in I think and see what happens. Because every person is different, every disability is different.
She drew it up and she showed it to me. And it was when they first had me so it was blown up like this big, you know it was huge. And I remember reading it and it was just what we had talked about, what we had discussed and I just kind of signed it and this was the agreement that would be passed out to the teachers. This is what the teachers would see before they had me, ’cause you know teaching is a very vulnerable thing to do anyway and if someone kind of jumps in and goes “oh by the way, I’m half blind”, they?ll wanna know what to do.
I think what’s wonderful about RADA is they expose you to so many different ways of working from all over the place. And you realise there kind of is no one way of working, and that each production you do is gonna be a new challenge and people are going to go about doping it in a new way. And so you just have to consistently rise to whatever the bizarre challenge is put in front of you.