Deep into an evening spent on the set of the Sundance series This Close, Shoshannah Stern and Marlee Matlin started chatting while waiting to resume filming on a long dinner scene. The pair had already bonded as deaf actors. Stern, who also served as the show’s cocreator and executive producer, had found great inspiration in her Oscar-winning costar. She can’t recall what they were talking about exactly, but at a certain point, she noticed Matlin staring at her.
“She’s looking at me and she says, ‘You need to direct,’” Stern says.
What was going on in Matlin’s head at that moment?
“It was late at night, and I kept thinking as I was watching her that she’s been around this industry for a while—and it just popped into my head,” she says. “She doesn’t give up easily when it comes to writing. She doesn’t give up easily when it comes to acting. She sets her mind to it. So why not go beyond that, and go up beyond to direct?”
Around this time, producers had approached Matlin interested in making a documentary about her life. She stipulated that she would participate only if Stern—who, again, had never directed before—helmed the film. Years later, Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is critically acclaimed, award-winning, and now playing in select theaters. (It is also available for digital rental or purchase.) The film offers a nuanced portrait of a Hollywood icon through Stern’s bold use of craft and narrative.
Still, that night on the This Close set, Stern didn’t feel remotely ready to take such a project on. She had built her own acting career, playing roles on major series, such as Weeds and Grey’s Anatomy, before finding her voice as a screenwriter. “I literally had never thought about [directing] before,” Stern says, speaking in American Sign Language beside an interpreter. “I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think I would be allowed to.”
When I later relay this Matlin over Zoom, her face falls. “I’m basically experiencing PTSD as a result of those words being used. A lot of kids who are deaf experience those same words,” Matlin says. “I’m glad that she was able to change her mind about feeling ‘not allowed’ to say, ‘Fuck off. Fuck off.’”
Stern grew up in the Bay Area to a fourth-generation deaf family. Her mother was a stage actor. As a kid, she wanted to follow in those footsteps. This was before the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, though. “There were almost no captions on TV—so you’re hungry for information, you’re hungry for stories. That makes you very curious,” Stern says. “I’m always asking my friends who can hear, ‘What’s the other table talking about?’ They’re usually like, ‘I don’t know, I’m not listening.’ I would never stop listening, if I could.”
We’re pretty much by ourselves on this warm July day, however, sitting in a quiet vegan restaurant near her Los Angeles home. After she orders her lunch, Stern tells me about the challenges she faced in chasing her dreams. While she planned to study theater at college, her education was supported by the Vocational Rehabilitation program, which helps many deaf people in the transition out of high school. It requires program approval for any major. “You don’t really have freedom. They said, ‘No, [theater] is not a reasonable major to have. You’re not going to be a contributing member of society if you major in theater,’” Stern says. She chose English, while still acting in plays at Gallaudet University whenever she could.
During the winter break before her final semester, she went home and told her parents she was going to quit acting for good. The next day, she got an email from Warner Bros. with an audition offer.
The secretary for Gallaudet’s theater department had recommended Stern to the casting agents on the sitcom Off Centre, created by the Weitz brothers of American Pie fame. “She gave them my email address. I didn’t have an agent—I didn’t have anything. I was a college student,” Stern says. She booked the cheapest flight she could down to LA and completed the audition. Then she booked the part, and has essentially been in Hollywood ever since.
Even when auditioning for deaf parts throughout the aughts, Stern was often the only deaf actor in the room. This was decades out from Children of a Lesser God, Randa Haines’s searing 1986 take on the romantic drama that made Matlin the first-ever deaf actor to win an Oscar. (Troy Kotsur became the second for CODA, which also starred Matlin, in 2022.) Stern bristles when hearing that movie called “groundbreaking,” to say nothing of other milestones achieved by her and her peers before and since. “Stories about deaf people can be groundbreaking. They can,” Stern says. “But I would like to think that it’s because they push perspective, they push the form, they push understanding, they push the nuance.”
Stern fits that bill. In conversation she’s playful, witty, and, as advertised, deeply curious—a decent chunk of our interview gets flipped on me, as she warmly grills me about my own career. She’s also reluctant to dig into the worst encounters she’s had in Hollywood, or to give herself too much credit for her big breaks. But the fact remains she made major industry strides. “She’s observing everything and finding little casual, easy ways to contribute and support,” says Jesse Williams, who directed and costarred with Stern on Grey’s Anatomy. “She anticipates things you might be wondering about, or needs you might have, and just breaks the ice.”
In Weeds, Stern gave a bracing performance as an overachieving teen thrust into a pregnancy scandal; the role was expanded in part on the advocacy of star Mary-Louise Parker, who encouraged Stern’s particular acting choices. Stern’s audition for a non-deaf character on the CBS drama Jericho, meanwhile, led to the producers creating a lead character for her, which then brought her into the writers’ room to help shape the storyline.
“There was one script I got that was really hard because all I saw was their own perception about what they felt like my experience, my life was like,” Stern says. “[Showrunner Carol Barbee] gave me a paper and a pen and she said, ‘Here, write what you would say.’ I crossed out what I was supposed to say in the script and wrote in pencil what I wanted to say, and she’s like, ‘Okay, we’re shooting this.’”
Stern got excited after Jericho. She’d nabbed a juicy part in a big network series. She had established herself on other hits. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is going to keep happening. I will just keep on going in and reading for roles that are not for deaf people, and then they’re going to cast me,’” Stern says. “And that never happened again.”
It’s a lesson learned by many deaf actors for as long as Stern has been in the industry. “The increased amount of opportunities that there are for each individual deaf actor out there now, it leads to the perception that there are more deaf actors that are working—and there really aren’t,” Stern says. “Even for Marlee, she hasn’t worked since CODA. The media still keeps asking her like, ‘Isn’t it great to be a deaf actor today?’ For her, no, it kind of hasn’t, but she’s been put in a position to speak for all of us. She has to say, ‘Yeah, it’s great.’” The period since CODA, which starred a largely deaf cast and won the best-picture Oscar, is more broadly instructive, Stern says: “There were so many projects in development as a result of CODA, which was great, but none of them ended up going forward.”
Stern continued to take small recurring jobs on shows like Supernatural and Lie to Me while cultivating an entirely new path for herself. She became a professor, teaching deaf studies for seven years; she worked on the creative team for Deaf West Theatre’s Spring Awakening revival that made it to Broadway and received major Tony nominations. She started writing for TV, including on Marvel’s Echo, and most significantly co-created This Close, a terrific indie series that also happened to showcase Stern’s richest screen role to date. In its review, The Hollywood Reporter called the series “a worthy reminder that Stern…probably would have been a star long ago if Hollywood were more creative when it comes to utilizing deaf actors.”
Even on that show, the directors (including The Wedding Banquet’s Andrew Ahn) and crew were not deaf. It’s but one reason why, when Matlin brought directing up to Stern out of nowhere, the notion was hard to fathom. “My first thought was so stupid, it was like, ‘But wait, directors communicate through comms, through headsets’—why did I think that?” Stern says. “The form of documentaries itself, I didn’t consider. I just accepted it the way it was. The way they cut away from people’s faces, but you still hear their voices and then you go back to their faces—you don’t think about things until you have to.”
So when Stern got the gig, there was only one way to make a movie about Marlee Matlin: Blow the form wide open.
Jon Shenk is an Oscar-nominated director, producer, and cinematographer, known for helming major docs over decades alongside his partner Bonni Cohen like An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Their company backed Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, and he also served as director of photography. He was amazed by the way Stern, a first-time filmmaker, made him rethink his entire craft. “We were going to have to develop a way of shooting that was certainly new to us, and may now make a contribution to how films about people who sign instead of speak English are made,” he says. “That was a cool opportunity as a filmmaker, in my mid 50s now, to be forced to rethink literally how we film.”
Shenk and Stern mounted an original multi-camera style wherein observational scenes, tracking Matlin in private and public moments alike, would ensure that the hands and upper body were always visible—so that any signing could be always communicated in the frame. Interviews were set up so as to seamlessly depict, in splitscreen, fluid conversations in ASL between Stern and Matlin, or whoever else was featured. Then there’s the sound design, which brings viewers directly into Matlin’s audiovisual world. It’s not silent, as someone unfamiliar with a deaf person’s experience might assume, but authentically complex. These elements together create a personal intimacy that’s all too rare in the celeb-doc landscape, with Stern’s particular artistry informing her reframing of Matlin’s legacy—down to the color-coded closed captioning.
“The film has a special quality when you’re watching it, that you’ve entered a different world as a hearing person, and it’s incredibly privileged and special once you kind of sink into it,” Shenk says. “Shoshannah was really driven to make the language itself at the forefront of the film. She reminded us that pretty much every time we went out to shoot, every time we talked about the story of the film.”
Matlin adds, “I really, finally saw a movie that made sense to me. I didn’t feel excluded. I didn’t feel like this was made by a hearing person who was looking for a way to tell my story…. She’s made history as a director who happens to be deaf, to portray in film the way that deaf people should be portrayed.”
Stern looks back on the way she made the movie, which earned raves out of its Sundance premiere and is now set for an Oscar campaign this fall, as an affirmation of her instincts. “Growing up there were always people who believed that I couldn’t do something,” she says. “[Only] certain people are allowed to be nervous…. I knew there were a lot of people that thought, ‘Wow, this is her first time,’ and if I showed my nervousness, that would be fuel for them to think, ‘Oh no, she can’t do this. We made a mistake.’”
“I usually get nervous after it’s over,” Stern says later. So is she nervous now? “It’s not over,” she says quickly. Indeed, it feels like a new beginning.
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