Two years after her film music courted controversy for misrepresenting people with autism, singer-songwriter Sia has revealed that she is on the spectrum and is in recovery mode. The Australian composer has been roped in to cast his frequent collaborator Maddie Ziegler, a neurotic actor, as a nonverbal autistic teenage girl in his 2021 directorial debut.
During a recent episode of the Rob Hayes podcast, Sia said that she’s only been able to become herself in the past two years. “I’m on the spectrum and I’m in recovery and whatever… For 45 years, I was like, I have to wear my humanitarian suit”. And only in the last two years have I become completely, completely myself.
She also said “Nobody can love you when you’re full of secrets and living in shame… And then we end up sitting in a room full of strangers and asking them to reveal our deepest, darkest, tell the most embarrassing secrets and everyone laughs with us and we don’t feel like pieces of garbage for the first time in our lives and we feel like we’ve been seen for who we really are for the first time in our lives, and Then we can start going out into the world and just being human beings and human beings at heart and not pretending to be anything,” she said.
The musical followed a new quiet woman named Zou, played by Kate Hudson, who becomes mentor to her half-sister Music (Ziegler), a teenage girl on the autism spectrum.
At the time of the controversy, Sia hit back at critics, saying that the story was inspired by her “neuro-atypical friend” who “found it very stressful being non-verbal, and I made this film out of love for her”. didn’t make anything.” Her mother”. She later offered an apology, adding that the scenes in question in the musical would be removed from future screenings.