Actor and advocate RJ Mitte visited Dickinson on Wednesday Dec. 9 to give a lecture on overcoming adversity from his own experience with cerebral palsy.

Mitte’s lecture discussed many childhood stories, to show that despite his condition, he always made the best of his situation. He lives life with the mindset of: “Everyone was born a leader. Try not to let other people influence you into joining the herd when you can form your own path instead.”

With what many would see as a struggle of wearing bulky casts on his legs throughout his childhood, Mitte instead embraced it by using those big legs to help him be an efficient soccer goalie, saying that “no one wanted to come near me” in goal.

During his talk, Mitte provided many motivational stories. One was how he moved to LA on his sister’s behalf and got lucky in his Breaking Bad audition, which finally occurred after a plethora of roles as extras. His condition helped him in his audition because it distinguished him from the other 400,000 people that go to LA each year to try to turn their dreams into a reality.

Mitte moved on to discuss life since Breaking Bad. He has been working on other projects, often ones that don’t hit the big screen. He receives many propositions for characters that directors would like Mitte to play, but he takes his morals into consideration with every part.

When someone wants him to play a character in which the disability is exaggerated and/or exploited for emotional appeal, he turns it down. He doesn’t choose roles that go against what he advocates for: equality for disabled persons, especially in the film industry.

It irks Mitte that directors will seek him, a mildly disabled man, to play the role of someone very disabled, even though there are other disabled actors who are still not receiving callbacks. According to Mitte, he usually tells those directors that “there’s a huge pool of people that would love this role, you should ask them if they want it.”

In addition to his commitment to breaking the misconceptions about disabled actors, Mitte is also ambassador of an anti-bullying program, Cut the Bull. He personally likes it because it doesn’t incorporate the words “stop” or “prevent,” which Mitte claims are too far-reaching, because bullying is unfortunately something that seems inevitable in our society. Instead, he wants to change people’s perspectives, in a shift towards the idea that being different is a gift, not something that people should be bullied for.

There was an overwhelming amount of support for Mitte. He was swarmed with people wanting to talk or get pictures with him at the meet and greet after his talk.