ROSS THOMAS STARS IN “WHAT’S BUGGING SETH”

02/27/2005 - By Tom Pantera
Ross Thomas isn't a deaf person, but he plays one in a movie.

That movie, "What's Bugging Seth" is the winning narrative feature in this year's Fargo Film Festival.

A quirky story about a young deaf man who's trying to start his own business and find romance, the film features a closely observed performance by Thomas.

In a telephone interview from his Hollywood, Calif., home, Thomas notes that the showing at the festival here also will be the film's world premiere. It will run at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, the festival's last movie. The film finished post-production in late January.

It is the feature film debut for both Thomas and writer-director Eli Steele. Steele was born deaf and didn't hear until receiving a cochlear implant in 2000.

At 23, Thomas has done some commercial work - he currently can be seen in TV ads for Mastercard and Applebee's - but "What's Bugging Seth" required much more preparation than shooting those.

His character, Seth, is deaf and communicates by lip-reading. Thomas' performance is almost startlingly technically accurate; he captures both the guttural sound of a deaf person's speech and the often subtle mannerisms of those who read lips.

Thomas says Steele auditioned deaf actors for the role, even going to the well-known Deaf West Theater in Los Angeles in search of a lead. When Thomas first auditioned for the part, he asked the director for time to research the speech of the deaf before actually trying out.

Playing a deaf person for a deaf director "was terrifying for me," Thomas recalls. "It served as an inspiration for me and was terrifying at the same time."

Once he got the part, he continued his research, meeting every day with Steele for three hours to break down the script.

He based part of the character on a profoundly deaf college fraternity brother. But he also spent time at the Oralingua School for the Deaf in Whittier, Calif., where students in grades kindergarten through eight are taught to lip read and hear as much as they can (most have cochlear implants).

Like those students, Thomas' Seth character does not know sign language. "It's not a choice for a lot of deaf people because they think reading lips and using the cochlear implant will get you a lot farther in the world," Thomas says.

To get the deaf dialect down, Thomas fell back on dialect training he took as an acting student at the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California. The hardest part of that, he says, was keeping the dialect consistent throughout the shooting.

It was more difficult to get down the mannerisms of a deaf person, he says. For example, he had to learn not to turn around when someone he couldn't see spoke to him; a profoundly deaf person would not know someone was speaking unless he was in direct line of sight. He also had to learn to always position himself to see a speaker's lips, something hearing people don't have to do.

Once shooting started, he stayed in character virtually all the time. At the beginning, only the director knew Thomas wasn't actually deaf.

That changed during the first week of filming, Thomas and Steele got into a minor argument on the set. "He and I were talking and suddenly I snapped back into my regular speaking dialect," Thomas says. "Everyone on the set turned around; I swear, they look at me like I had four heads. They were absolutely floored."

Thomas will be among a large number of people at the Fargo Film Festival whose films are in the event.

"It really validated everything that I put into this film and everything the film meant to me by winning the very first festival we'd submitted to," he says. "That feels really good and this is going to be the first time that I see all that work on the big screen."