AHS Freak Show’s Paul – aka Mat Fraser – on being a sex object, Bradley Cooper and ‘crip confidence’

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Known to fans of American Horror Story Freak Show as Paul the Illustrated Seal, Mat Fraser is on the crest of a career of unusual variety and distinction – and still describes himself as a “performing crip”.

Fraser, 52, has been a rock drummer and BBC podcast host; collaborated with prestigious disabled-arts company Graeae and hosted burlesque strip nights; conducted academic research and worked as a genuine freakshow performer at Coney Island and beyond. He remains a very active and dedicated disability campaigner. Oh, and he drummed with Coldplay at the closing ceremony for the London 2012 Paralympics.

But it’s as a notoriously extreme performer on the London cabaret and underground performance circuit that I got to know Fraser. Born with short arms after his mother took the morning-sickness drug Thalidomide during pregnancy, he’s long been up for putting his unusual body to inventive and frequently grotesque artistic use. His acts at transgressive, progressive and raucously entertaining nights like Criptease and Sleaze (which he co-created) and the Double R Club tend to be bloody as hell and/or raunchy as fuck. His full-length collaborations with his wife, neo-burlesque star Julie Atlas Muz, in works such as The Freak and the Showgirl and Beauty and the Beast, offer more sustained explorations of scandalous sensationalism and provocative probing. (The pair also appeared in Beth B’s documentary about alternative performers Exposed: Beyond Burlesque.)

Sex, violence, comedy, politics and vulnerability are all in a day’s work.

Fraser was cast in the latest season of Ryan Murphy’s hit show American Horror Story after one of the producers heard about the rave reviews Beauty and the Beast picked up when it ran off Broadway earlier this year. So far, like many of the series’ disabled cast members, Fraser’s role has been eye-catching but distinctly secondary. But the sixth episode, which airs in the US tonight and the UK later in the month, is set to be his biggest yet as Paul “indulges in a secret romance” that’s sure to have viewers looking at him in a whole new light… 

Not Television: How much of an influence did you have on the development of the character of Paul?
Mat Fraser: I negotiated the character from a lizard man to a sealboy. And they also write for the actor, so once they’d seen me and got to know me, my character became somewhat darker and edgier – ha ha! – than the all-round nice guy they had planned. Thank fuck for that, I say.
I also just refused to have my face tattooed. I didn’t want to be stuck on my biggest break ever in a six-month shoot and not have my face recognisable! Plus, I really don’t want the chemical hell that is the facade of the modern film industry actually on my face.

In one episode, Paul talks about his good looks and how many more opportunities he’d have had if his body was ‘normal’. Is that something you feel yourself?
Fuck, nooo! Jesus, Ben, thanks for the opportunity to say this. I think that line was my punishment for not letting them tattoo my face! I actually think the complete opposite: that if I’d had long arms, I’d have been a complete wanker. Well, some people think that anyway, of course. Ha ha!
Everyone thinks that is me talking – it’s not! It’s written by non-disabled writers who have bought into the vision of disability that mainstream culture gives them, including the classic clichéd able-bodied notion, squeezed through a mangle of modern body culture, that the normal part of me is the best bit, and that I would have preferred to have long arms. Both untrue! But it serves the angst of the character that they have created, and I do the lines on the page because it’s my job! I would have written something more layered and dimensional.

In Paul’s latest storyline, he “indulges in a secret romance”. It’s rare to see disabled characters portrayed on screen as confident lovers. What are the most common mainstream misconceptions about disabled people and sex/romance?
That we don’t have any, and when we do it’s some kind of charity. Complete shit, obviously.

Are you conscious of people sexually fetishising your disability? What do you make of it?
Dude, YES! Why d’you think I used to go the fetish clubs so much? Ha ha ha!
But seriously, what seems to happen in more mainstream settings – as opposed to a fetish one, where the person can perhaps be open about their fascination/repulsion/attraction for deformity – is that a pitying assumptive position on disability is thrown upside down by a crip confidence of the sort I have. That coupled with being able to do the job, and now being given some screen time in AHS, seems to turn it all on its head and suddenly they all fancy me. ‘They’ being mostly teenage, vaguely goth or emo female fans of the show, judging from my recent surge in Twitter followers. Ha ha ha! Last time that happened was after I played with Coldplay for the Paralympics but a couple of posts about the Double R Club, The Freak and the Showgirl, and Sleaze soon sent them all away.
But in general the fetishising of my body never bothers me, for many reasons. It mostly amuses me, often baffles, rarely upsets but sometimes it can. A few of my older nude shots have been flagged up in light of this added attention so I’m sure my past is fast catching up with me! I’m going to admit to everything, even the stuff I didn’t do.

What’s been the most challenging thing about working on AHS: Freak Show?
I won’t lie to you, my friend – you’ve seen my dark soul on stages many times and you know who I am. It has been very challenging for me at times, Ben. Everybody is so enamoured of TV that they all shit themselves and expect me to find this to be the most exciting thing ever, an honour. “Ooh, what a gig!” And yes, of course, it really is all that – the money’s great, the deal, the life, the fellow performers all being stars.
But… To basically be a subsidiary character in the portrayal of my own cultural heritage as a disabled performer – moreover, one whose presence lends an authenticity to the production that it would not otherwise enjoy… To be the one person on set who has for a lifetime lived and breathed the experience of being a physical outsider, and has actually both acted and been a performing freak professionally… That has made it hard to be asked to stand, sit and be in the background to so many scenes where a non-disabled actor delivers passionate speeches about being different, being a freak in this cruel world et cetera et cetera et fucking cetera. It’s had me very upset privately many times.
I really like all these guys and where do you find a two-headed actor? I get it. And the repertory company vibe, where the star regulars get to play the main people, is all fine. But because it’s my history they’re taking about, it’s been hard.
I have also found working with actors who portray people with learning disabilities quite challenging. But that might just be a personal thing because I have friends with learning disabilities – although no ‘pinheads’, its true.

And what’s been most pleasing?
The opposite to all the stuff above. Ryan Murphy decided to cast me as the lover! Never been done on US TV, but I play a lover type, with lines that no disabled actor would ever usually have in any mainstream TV thing. I was pleased to finally be allowed to flex my acting muscles, and the bittersweet irony of finally getting to show audiences my ‘everyman’ humanity by playing a character who works in a freak show is not lost on me. People have often said I look “too freaky” to be accepted as a regular character in mainstream screen productions, so to be the real freak playing the lover with all his humanity in this mainstream thing – fuck, its deep. I have Ryan Murphy and his writing team to thank for this and no one else. It’s almost as if he might think I’m a decent actor… But of course, I’ve thought that before, Ben.
I’m not holding my breath for any knock-on work from him, them, or anyone, but being cast after this in a drama where my disability isn’t the primary reason for my presence, where I get to play a rounded human with all that goes with it, would be the only real proof that anything has changed for me as a result of this series. It was in Ireland, of all places, working for their soap Fair City in 2011, that I got to play that.

You know a lot about the history of freak shows. How historically credible is AHS’s take on the subject?
Ha ha ha! It bears almost no resemblance to the actual history of freak shows in the early 1950s. But that’s okay because it’s a horror series, not even pretending to be historically authentic. Indeed, that’s one of its saving graces, I feel.

How do you think the show sits in the history of films and TV shows about freaks?
Hans, the little guy in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, had one of the main roles, and his love story propagated the entire film’s narrative. Then no one used real freaks until now in AHS Freak Show, where the real freaks are in the background. What does that tell us?

Still, AHS is one of the few mainstream shows or movies to cast disabled performers. Do you think the industry is making progress on this front?
Mm, yeah, so I’ve been told. I mean, talented two-headed women may be hard to find but a regular young wheelchair user? Please! There’s no reason not to have more people like that on our screens. I think the US is kinda behind the UK on disabled screen presence but I also think some of the big changes will come from the USA. The industry is making the slowest possible progress but it is progress. AHS Freak Show is getting us out there and on screen, and lack of visibility is currently the single worst thing about disability on TV. The one thing that would make the big difference would be to cast disabled actors in roles that don’t revolve around the character’s impairment.

What do you think of Bradley Cooper starring on Broadway in The Elephant Man?
I think a lot about it. Mostly I’m depressed that people still don’t see anything weird about non-disabled/able-bodied people playing disabled people, and that the Broadway/Hollyweird machine still thinks that the simple act of spazzing yourself, cripping your body into an effigy of impairment (which, by the way is not hard! It’s fucking easy to pretend to have cerebral palsy – don’t you remember school?) is worthy of the greatest accolade, the Disability Oscar. Getting an award for that is ridiculous, I think. It’s not ‘process’, you pretentious wannabe luvvies. It’s ‘pretending to be disabled’ and ‘wanking on stage’, which, frankly, any cunt can do in their sleep, Bradley! Just watch Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy…
My good friend, and an amazing actor with a disability, Gregg Mozgala, runs The Apothetae, a theatre company in New York with disabled actors, and they’re responding to Bradley’s recent Broadway engagement by inviting producers and directors to a reading of it with disabled actors trying the role. Some casting people will no doubt think it’s distasteful to have a disabled actor on stage, um, wait, er, portraying a disabled… Mm, we still have some way to go, it appears.

Have you been approached for other work on the back of AHS?
Ha ha, yes! Loads of people who’ve never written anything, or have ignored me before, are now saying they’re writing something with a part for me in it. I will of course consider any funded, actually-going-to-happen role, and will do most things. And I’ll get a slightly increased interest in what I do, so the next run of Beauty and the Beast, at the Adelaide Festival in March 2015, will hopefully get more bums on seats, and maybe one of my crazy film ideas might get nearer to being funded or something. That would be good.
But I am so fucking bored, Ben, by us lot still not having a proper collective on-screen presence. Where is our fucking Spike Lee, eh? Sidney Poitier? Paul Robeson? How far do I have to go back? Somebody out there: have the fucking backbone or balls or non-physically-based strength to cast me in something ‘normal’.

American Horror Story Freak Show airs weekly on Fox at 10pm Wednesdays in the US and 10pm Tuesdays in the UK.
Read Not Television’s review of Cabinet of Curiosities, Mat Fraser’s performance lecture about how disability has been presented in museums. 

Posted by Ben Walters at 13:06 on November 12 2014.