Six-year-old Sam is different from most kids, but his mother doesn’t want to see that. She prefers that everything goes according to her plan. “You actually want to squeeze that person,” says actress Lies Visschedijk about her character.
You have to be from a good family to make a credible drama series about something as complicated as autism. The EO drama series “The A Word” is surprisingly honest and not romanticized. It is about the boy Sam, who turns six in the first episode. His mother has invited the whole class and is just finishing a giant cake with an octopus. The sea theme has been carried through to perfection: the house is filled with shark garlands and seahorse balloons and a voluptuous lady with a fish tail has been invited to entertain the toddlers.
While mom manages the kids at the party like a dictator, Sam makes his own plan. He doesn’t feel like the underwater violence and puts on loud music. The soundtrack of his life; he effortlessly sings the songs on his iPod along. It calms him down.
It’s clear to everyone that Sam is different from other kids. Sam is often unmanageable and that results in uncomfortable situations. Only mother Mariël stubbornly uses the head-in-the-sand technique. After the first few minutes, you want to yell at the woman, “Do something,” but she refuses to acknowledge that the family needs help.
“That woman suffocates everyone around her,” says Lies Visschedijk, who plays the role of Mariël. The actress, best known for “Gooische Women” and “Soof”, had to dig deep into herself to understand her character, but precisely because she is so far away from her it was fun to play her. “By nature I am a huge pleaser, I like to do what others want me to do. This woman takes everything to herself. She goes through rows and diamonds and sometimes loses sight of the interests of her child. ”
Fortunately, there are plenty of happy moments in the series. For example, the somewhat rude grandpa, played by Peter Blok, regularly puts his stubborn daughter to her number. He often expresses exactly what the viewer thinks. He answers dryly to Mother Mariel’s hysterical question what he is feeding Sam: “plant and animal”, while pointing to a plate of fries with a frikandel, carefully sorted by Sam. No, it was certainly not the intention to make it too heavy a drama, says Visschedijk. “It shouldn’t be a Sire commercial.”
The series is based on the acclaimed Israeli series “Yellow Peppers” that creator Keren Margalit wrote based on her own experiences. The BBC translated the series into an English situation and won a Bafta award with “The A Word”. And now there is also a Dutch version, which takes place in a small village in the polder. Visschedijk also has experience with autism in her immediate environment, but she does not want to say too much about it for the sake of privacy. It was an important motivation for her to work. “I hope for more understanding and that the conversation about autism will start within a family.”
She has seen that the presence of an autistic person has a significant impact on his environment. “We just don’t understand each other.” Still, autists are very valuable, she says. “They make you look at the world in a different way and make you think.”
The A word. From Monday September 21 at 9.35 pm at the EO on NPO 1
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What it’s like growing up with a brother or sister with autism: “Your problems are always smaller than the other’s”
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