BRATTLEBORO — Casey Metcalfe - formerly of Putney and Brattleboro, currently of Burlington - poses with flair in front of a promotional poster. With his snazzy hat just akilter over a telling smile, it's clear that a dream has come true.
Metcalfe, now 27, landed a role in Champions, a Focus Films feature-length movie to be released Friday, March 10, with a special Brattleboro showing Sunday, March 12. (See sidebar.)
Building off the 2018 Spanish film of the same name - Campeones - Champions tells the story of Marcus (Woody Harrelson), a minor league basketball coach who hits a rough patch and ends up with a community service stint, reluctantly chosen as the lesser of two troubling sentences.
His assignment: to coach the Friends, a team of 10 disabled 20-somethings at a local rec center run by Julio (Cheech Marin, of Cheech & Chong fame). The nine disabled young men and one young woman have a range of conditions from Down Syndrome to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Among the latter is Metcalfe, playing the role of a quirky guy named Marlon.
A young actor proves his chops
Casey Metcalfe first got into acting at age nine while living in Los Angeles with his family, including his filmmaker father, Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia, The Haunting in Connecticut, Killer: A Journal of a Murder).
Moving to Putney nearly 20 years ago, the young Metcalfe's mother (and self-titled “chief organizer”) Prudence Baird, recalls, she and her husband, Tim Metcalfe, were “environmental refugees”: “Our Hollywood Hills home was partially destroyed in what was called a “hundred-year flood event” that now comes every five years in L.A.”
Once rerooted in Vermont, Casey Metcalfe enrolled at Putney Central School and soon found his way to New England Youth Theatre (NEYT) in Brattleboro, where he studied and performed from 2007 to 2015.
He first participated in the Theatre Adventure program for developmentally disabled players, then moved into mainstream NEYT roles such as King Alonzo in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Philly Cullen in J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. After moving on to Brattleboro Union High School (BUHS), he performed a bit there, too.
As his interest in the craft grew, Metcalfe found a well-suited coach with Joey Travolta, brother of actor John Travolta, whose Actors for Autism group could dial into Metcalfe's talents.
Having appeared as himself in Kids with Cameras, a 2009 documentary about the challenges seven kids on the autism spectrum face on the road to self discovery, Metcalfe's appetite for film acting had seemingly been whetted.
But years later, after his 2015 graduation from BUHS, his move on to higher education, and his settling into life and work in Burlington, an old family friend in Los Angeles reconnected with the family. Linda Kessell had been following the young actor's work at NEYT on Facebook and with her husband, Brad Kessell, an executive producer of Champions, she suggested that he invite Metcalfe to audition.
He was one of hundreds of young people who auditioned in Canada and the U.S. Since all the family basketballs had been given to the thrift shop, Metcalfe recruited a bright orange chicken from his flock for his 2021 audition. He's quick to quip that no animals were harmed in the process.
It was not the actor's basketball (or chicken-ball) chops that won him the part. In fact, he explains, his character is a hypochondriac. And between him and the coach, they regularly find an excuse for him to stay off the court in any given game.
An openness for improv
Champions is directed by Bobby Farrelly, who, with his brother, Peter, are filmmakers known for their advocacy of disabled actors.
As Baird explains, “the Farrellys have a close family friend with a disability who convinced them to include disabled actors in all their films and shows.”
Metcalfe heard he'd been cast in early October 2021 and two months or so of filming began later that month, primarily in and around Winnipeg.
Baird recalls that “upon meeting the Friends actors in person, director Bobby Farrelly and writer Mark Rizzo adjusted the script to include many of the cast members' individual strengths, pet sayings, and habits.”
Metcalfe's penchant for reading Wikipedia pages “translated into a line in the script,” she said.
The Farrellys made a point of incorporating the special skills and talents of each member of the Friends team, too.
With Metcalfe, it was his love of languages. Having studied Mandarin at Putney Central School in all three years of middle school there, he also acquired French and a bit of Spanish.
And all that figures into the script - even in his exchanges with Cheech Marin, of whom Metcalfe grew quite fond. That openness for input resonated with Metcalfe and his fellow Friends.
Another of Casey Metcalfe's loves is improv comedy. Having first studied it with Jane Baker at NEYT, he was smitten - and he was in good company among the Friends.
Harrelson's co-star, Kaitlin Olson, of It's Always Sunny in Philadephia fame, played the coach's romantic interest who turns out to be sister to one of the Friends, and she noted the improvisational spirit in the whole cast. According to Focus Films production notes, Olson said that she most appreciated the Friends' innate ability to improvise within a scene.
Of the experience, Metcalfe proclaims it was “the best experience ever.”
“We all became lifelong friends,” he said. Together they bonded, they shared, they learned curling in Winnipeg, they met the challenges of missed meals and 5 a.m. wake-up calls.
“There were times they'd wake us and we'd be grumpy, wouldn't know where we were going,” said Metcalfe, but he acknowledged that the benefits outweighed the challenges.
“I'm a huggy person,” said the warm and upbeat Metcalfe. When he first met Harrelson, he slid right by the star's extended hand and gave him a big hug. And it was returned.
At the New York premiere of the film at AMC's Lincoln Square 13 theater on Feb. 27, Metcalfe was happy to reunite with the cast; hugs abounded then, too. It was “joyful,” Metcalfe added.
The whirlwind of activity around the premiere included an interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC News (a segment on Today is set to air March 10), hobnobbing with Harrelson and his Friends costars at Lincoln Center Plaza, and a private screening of the film.
'We are not broken'
Metcalfe believes that same joy reads on the screen as a message becomes clear.
“We are not broken,” he says, “It's society that needs enlightenment.” With people with disabilities comprising one of the largest marginalized groups in the U.S., it's clearly frustrating to Metcalfe, Baird, and, no doubt, many other advocates that disability garners so little attention or understanding from the media or from the public at large.
The experience on the Champions set was, Baird recalled, one of the most “sensitive and accommodating” she'd ever witnessed.
The Friends were clustered into pods, each with its own leader - a dedicated staff member who worked with their groups on learning lines, maintaining communications, and troubleshooting.
Chief go-to staffer was A.B. Farrelly, director Bobby Farrelly's son, who calls his work on Champions “a fantastic experience.”
Quoted in production notes, he says: “a lot of disabled actors have been told their whole life [sic] what they can't do, and to watch them every day be movie stars with Woody and Kaitlin was pretty cool.”
“It reminded me that you should never tell people what they can or can't do,” he said.
“Casey is so funny,” Farrelly said. “He always wanted to know how to make things better and how to do it better.”
Metcalfe - witty and vastly knowledgeable - engages as an avid Anglophile and BBC fan who, his father notes, knows life data of myriad British actors and can do a spot-on Maggie Smith impression.
“I love clothing, art, acting - a lot of things,” he said.
In the meantime, normal life for Metcalfe has resumed in Burlington, where he lives with some support. A member of the cashiers' union, Metcalfe works at Burlington's City Market while pursuing improv with the Vermont Comedy Club.
Grateful for the assistance he's received in navigating the ins and outs of his day job as a cashier, Metcalfe notes that he, like many with an ASD diagnosis, has issues with communications.
“I don't always know what people's intentions are,” he said.
That said, one steadfast rule Metcalfe has learned through improvisation is to say, “Yes, and....” For an improvisation to take wing, “You can never say 'no,'” he explained.
As antithetical as that can be to the autistic mindset, which generally prefers predictability and routine, that “yes, and” guideline has become Metcalfe's key to success.
“I couldn't be prouder,” his father said. “He's worked hard, and he doesn't give up.”