Trivia / Dustbin Baby

• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor:
  • In the film, both the character of Poppy and the actor who plays her, Lee Clark, have Asperger syndrome. Enforced as the BBC specifically searched for an actor with Asperger's to play Poppy.
  • Shortly after the film's release, Clark's mother Nicky, who would be diagnosed with autism herself seven years later, began the Don't Play Me, Pay Me campaign, which encouraged disabled actors to play characters with the same disabilities. She has compared non-disabled actors playing disabled characters to blackface, and Clark themself has stated:
    "It is not just mentally disabled actors who lose out when non-disabled people are employed to act them. Audiences think they are getting an authentic portrayal of a mentally disabled person, but they're not. It's not like putting on a different accent or learning what it was like to be raised in a different era. You can't understand what it is like to have a mental disability unless you've really lived with it. When non-disabled people try to portray us, they tend to fall back on stereotypes that have done our community so much harm in the past."
• Technology Marches On: Early in the book, April has a tantrum because Marian won't buy her a mobile phone for her birthday, which is treated like an expensive, outlandish commodity, whereas now they are not only extremely common but children much younger than April use them, so it seems far more like Marian is being stubbornly anti-technology than April is being materialistic, though April's delivery of her complaints still need work.

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