When she was younger, Aria Mia Loberti had big dreams. The 29-year-old from Rhode Island loved to dance, sing, and perform, and thought about giving theater a try. But her doubts held her back.
“I was just like, No one's ever going to want me,” she tells me over coffee in Manhattan. “Because as soon as you disclose anything about yourself that's different, even if you don't look different, you're perceived as different. People don't want to deal with that.”
Loberti was born with the genetic eye condition achromatopsia, which means she is one of the approximately 6 million Americans who identify as either blind or low vision. So she focused on other goals. She went to college, got her master’s degree, and began working toward her PhD at Penn State University, studying the ancient history of communication. But something wasn’t clicking. Loberti felt restless, and unsure what she was doing with her life.
Then she heard about an open casting call for the Netflix miniseries All the Light We Cannot See. Producers were looking for a woman who was blind or low vision to play the main role of Marie-Laure Leblanc, and Loberti figured she may as well make a tape.
“I got on camera and recorded my take of Marie reading with myself, sent in one take, and just was like, Well, that was a fun afternoon,” she recalls. “Maybe I'll get the courage to do a theater class.”
She got way more than that. Loberti was chosen after a global search to play Marie-Laure in the miniseries, which premiered last month. Critics have been raving about her deft portrayal of the character, with The Hollywood Reporter calling her performance “radiant.”
Now, Loberti says, she is just getting started. As one of the few blind or low-vision actors currently working in Hollywood, she’s ready to represent her community both onscreen and off, and already has several other projects lined up, including the forthcoming The Spiderwick Chronicles and others she can’t share with us just yet. And while she has preferences for the characters she plays (no two-dimensional women who are just someone’s girlfriend, she says), she is eager to play characters with full vision as well.
“There's no reason why I should be limited to characters who are blind or have low vision,” she says. “But I think it's really important for me to also continue that representation when the right role comes up.”
Glamour chatted with Loberti for our series New Here about what that representation means to her and her community, the best purchase she’s made since landing the role, and how she managed to hire her best friend to travel the world with her.
Glamour: All the Light We Cannot See was a hugely popular book upon its release in 2014. Had you read it before the casting call?
Aria Mia Loberti: My mom read it when it came out in 2014…before it won the Pulitzer. She loved it. She’d read it and she'd call me crying…. It meant a lot to her to read that book. In a lot of ways it was also really hard for her to read the book. It hit her.
So then she passed it on to me…. I read it 75% of the way through, and then I stopped because I thought, This is going to end and I'm going to be sad, because I knew that they weren't going to get a happy ending.… I was like, Well, someday I'll have the confidence, the courage, I'll be in the place where I can finish the story. It was genuinely one of the best things I've ever read.
It went with me every place I ever moved for seven years. It was the only book I did that with. I’m a die-hard Harry Potter fan, a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan. Maybe I would bring one of those books or something with me, but this was the one book I always had. It sat on my nightstand. When I did my recording at Penn State to film the video, I had the book there. And then I took it to set with me, and every member of the crew, every cast member signed that book.
That is amazing. So I assume you did finish it though, right?
Yeah, the night I got cast.
What was that moment like, when you found out you got the part?
I just cried a lot. And then I asked [director Shawn Levy] to call my parents because I couldn't dial. I was crying so hard and I couldn't get my hands to move…. I couldn't go see them in Rhode Island. It's like seven hours away [from Pennsylvania], and I can't drive, obviously.
So I'm sitting in my apartment. I didn't have groceries, all I had was flour and butter and eggs. So I made cookies and I sat and I ate two dozen cookies with my parents and my best friend with my dog on FaceTime. My parents went out and bought fancy Champagne, and we sat and we all just cried.
Your life changed forever in that moment. How did you even process it?
It was just a weird thing to happen to somebody. I was just like everybody else, in school, kind of struggling, figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. At the time I wasn't even sure if [the series] would be the thing. I thought, Maybe I'll do it and I'll enjoy the experience and then I can keep searching. But it was the thing.
I feel like so many women struggle with that in their 20s, feeling they aren’t sure if they are on the right path, but afraid to try something new and fail.
I think that's the big message that I want to send to that group of people. Like everyone, I was afraid to take a leap. I didn't want to embarrass myself. I didn't want to be silly. I didn't want to be perceived as not practical, which is why I never told anybody that I had auditioned…. You're just ingrained for this practicality.
I think if more of us just took risks and didn't care what people thought or didn't care, if we did well, we would find something in ourselves. And just taking that leap, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what your future is going to hold. My career path was so linear…and I think a lot of us are forced into that from a young age because of how the world works…. That really does work for some people, but it doesn't work for everybody. And we're taught that it probably should work for everybody. So I want people to feel like they have space to just be themselves and enjoy themselves and not feel stuck.
You have gone from the life of an academic to the, let’s say, more glam life of a Hollywood star. What’s the best thing you’ve bought for yourself since becoming an actor?
I have this Dior coat that I bought. After we finished filming, we went to Paris and I didn't have the intention of buying anything. I've never splurged ever in my life on anything…. It was just there on the mannequin. I think they said they had one or two of them in circulation. And I was just like, If you don't get it, it will never be there again. I tried it on and I'm like, I'm not going to spend $5,000 on a coat.
I put it on my body and I cried. I just thought about how the poverty rates are really high and the job rates are disastrously low [for my community]. For women with disabilities, they can't get work because they walk into a room and people judge them. Often it is a combination of gender and disability. It doesn't matter how smart you are, how confident you are, how beautiful you are, how well spoken—it doesn't matter. You still can't win. And I put it on and that's the first thing that went through my head. And every time I put it on…I feel that. I'm like, I broke free, everyone else didn’t. Nothing I will ever buy, ever will have meaning…nothing I ever buy will have that same significance. I finished this job and I knew somehow the world was opening up and hoped that it would not just open up for me. So that's a symbol of that whole thing
What a lovely reminder of all you have accomplished. You mentioned the coat is here with you right now, along with your assistant-slash-consultant, who is also your longtime best friend, Molly. How did you end up hiring your bestie?
Molly came out [to set] because Shawn and the team were like, “We want you to be comfortable.” So they flew her out. Not only did they fly her out, but she came to set and she was so, so good. So they hired her…she was an assistant-slash-consultant. Now she's juggling 20,000 things all the time. We travel together and she's just part of my representation team in the way that a personal assistant would be. And we write together as well.
You’ve said you haven’t ever seen someone portray a person with low vision on screen in a way that represents your lived experience. How does it feel to be that person now?
I never saw myself ever not once, not in a book, TV show, movie, nothing. What's really interesting is most, and I don't want to speak for the whole community, but most blind people I know will refuse to watch movies with blind characters because the stereotypes are so deeply offensive. [I’ve heard from] people who were like, “I wasn't planning on watching this….” And then they'll see an interview and they'll be like, “You're not a blind actress. You are an actress…you've changed how I look at film.”
That to me is all I need. It matters so much that people in this population feel like this is the right way to go, as much as it matters that people who've never been exposed to this population before…are learning something or watching it. They both matter to me a lot. And it's really extraordinary to hear that.
You have so many opportunities on the horizon now. What is your dream for your career, and for the careers of other blind or low-vision actors?
I've had this amazing stepping stone…. I also don't want to take an opportunity away from someone else. I know just based on this casting search, there are thousands and thousands of people—they have the training and the theater experience…. I want to make sure that they have the space.
I also think that we need to break past this mold of: You have to stay in your lane and you're going to put that person in a box and you're going to typecast them. Any person from any marginalized group doesn't deserve that. We're too strong, we're too talented to be able to be limited by someone else's expectations. I'm just really excited that I have amazing representatives, but also that casting directors, producers, directors don't seem to really care [about my low vision]….
I want the door to be open for the next girl or person to come through and feel like I'm going to take on this character. I'm going to do it authentically and truthfully, or the character's not really speaking to me, but that person who's written on the page is a sighted person. She speaks to me and I can go do a lot with her and not be limited by someone's expectations. I feel like I'm that person holding open the double doors of the cafeteria or recess waiting for everybody to come running. And I'm like, Come on, guys. Come on!
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
