I’ve literally seen Riker do all of these
The man is just tall enough that he doesn’t have to move chairs.
Fun fact! He did this because Jonathan Frakes had a back problem. It was easier for him to do this
Fascinating! I did not know that!
it’s why he’s always doing the riker lean, too! where he puts one foot up on something and rests an arm on his own leg! he fucked up his back moving furniture when he was younger.
Disability accommodations do not have to be made into a big deal. He just… did that. And it became part of the physicality of the character. And we all joked about it, because without the context of the actor’s physical discomfort/pain, that is an objectively funny way to approach a chair. But Jonathan Frakes has the raw charisma to make it work, and by Gd he worked the hell out of it.
Yeah, not to get, just, TOTALLY off on a tangent, but it reminds me of the classic “Bartlet Jacket Maneuver” from The West Wing.
This is how Martin Sheen puts on a jacket, and he does it that way because of an injury done to his arm when he was born. His left arm was crushed by forceps as they were removing him from the birth canal, which made that arm shorter than the other and also limited his overall movement. So, he puts on a jacket like this–because he has to. He just doesn’t have the movement and flexibility necessary to slip his arm into the sleeves another way.
But, on the show…he just did it, and did it with such panache and confidence that no one dared even question it. He played President Bartlet on TV for, like, 6 years, and so for 6 years that was just how Fictional President of the United States put his jacket on. And, yeah, it was a bit odd maybe, people definitely noticed, but mostly all anyone actually thought about it was “Damn, that looks cool and badass as fuck.”
It became a signature for the character, not in any kind of negative or “that’s weird” way, but just, like…something unique and special that people recognized and had really positive associations with. You’d see that jacket flip and it would trigger this little bright smiley “Fuck yeah, you go get’em!” feeling inside.
There’s even this bit, in one of the show’s most acclaimed episodes, that includes flashbacks to when the character is much younger, and they had the younger actor do this move when he puts on a jacket (which he had to learn how to do of course) and then used it as a transition cut to the present day character finishing the motion–a way of linking them together, making them feel more like one person with one continuing story to the audience. And like, I remember, seeing it when it first aired, and fuck, I got chills, it was just such great moment! They were literally using this little detail, that was entirely due to the actor adapting to his disability, as a way to ground their flashback sequences with the present storyline and make those scenes feel more real and present to the audience and it worked. Because nobody working on the show saw Sheen’s funky jacket move as problem, they actually found a way for it to actively make the story better.
Anyway, blah blah blah, characters being interesting and having unique elements informed by their actors doesn’t take anything away from the work but actually adds to it, yadda yadda yadda.
