Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Pulse’ takes the audience into the chaos of a Maguire Medical Center in Miami, where the residents have to set aside their personal differences and focus on saving their patients. While there are a lot of characters that the story focuses on, the ones that get the most time in the spotlight are the Simms sisters. The older one, Danny, is a third-year resident and is on her way to becoming the next Chief Resident. However, her professional journey is heavily impacted by her personal one. The younger, Harper, has a bit more clarity when it comes to her personal and professional life and the boundaries between the two, but she has to face challenges of her own while helping Danny through hers. She is established as a rock, not just for Danny but also for her friends and, most importantly, her patients. She is played by an actress who has a lot in common with her.
Harper Simms is Brought to Life by Jessy Yates, Who Has Cerebral Palsy
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Jessy Yates is an actor, writer, and advocate. She has cerebral palsy and, like Harper, uses a wheelchair. She was eighteen when she moved to New York City to pursue her undergraduate studies and hasn’t looked back since. Before moving to TV and movies, she got her start in theatre, where she didn’t limit herself to acting on the stage but expanded her horizons to create original stories as a writer and a director. Her experience as a performance artist informed her later roles. At the same time, she also dipped her toes into the art of burlesque, performing under the name Cerebral Pussy.
Yates’ career took a turn for the better when she received a scholarship from the Ruderman Family Foundation and Yale School of Drama, becoming the first student to use a wheelchair in its history. She revealed that her presence allowed the school to look at its amenities from the point of view of a person with a disability, which led them to incorporate several changes in the infrastructure. She graduated from Yale’s Acting Class of 2022, getting her MFA and turning towards bigger and better projects, some of which she intended to create for herself. Over the years, Yates has appeared in different forms of media. Her stage work has brought her to places like The Kennedy Center, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, to name a few.
Apart from playing one of the main characters in Netflix’s ‘Pulse,’ she has also appeared in episodes of ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’ and ‘Speechless,’ and has worked as a voice-over artist for PBS. Additionally, she has remained a staunch advocate for the representation of people with disability in the media and continues to fight for disability justice and raise awareness about important issues related to her community. She has worked with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation as an Associate of Adult Projects and Community Engagement, where she worked with the medical and non-profit sectors to advocate for the community while also working as a spokesperson and coordinating community events and research projects. Additionally, she has written articles and guest columns for major publications like Variety, where she has shared her thoughts on the way Hollywood sees people with disability.
Jessy Yates Sees Her Condition as an Asset
For Jessy Yates, her wheelchair is an extension of herself, a part that she feels is either too focused on or completely ignored when capturing her on the screen. Unlike the non-disabled, she doesn’t see it as something that hampers her quality of life but elevates it. Initially, however, things were not presented to her as such. At one point, she was going through physical therapy and was warned by her doctors and parents to stick to the extensive regimen of therapy to keep herself from winding up in a wheelchair. She was in college when she got her first chair, and in the beginning, she said, she felt defeated. But that was the borrowed perception of a non-disabled person, as soon, Yates not only came to accept the wheelchair but also loved the way it made things easier for her.
“For the first time in my life, I could go to bars, clubs, and events without worrying about walking through crowds. I could carry my own groceries and trays of food and coffee,” she told US News Health, mentioning the many ways in which the chair made her life easier and better. It also elevated her career as a performer, as she could now completely focus on her performance rather than on her gait. As she leaned into this side of her life, she found new doors opening for her in terms of her career, as well as in terms of her own identity as a person with disability. She worked with Julie Atlas Muz and her husband, Mat Fraser, who is also a disabled actor. Through them, she got to learn about being an artist and a performer in her early 20s. She credits them for helping her get her foot through the door of places like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which she might not have been able to do without support and guidance at that point in her life.
Jessy Yates is Dedicated to Creating More Representation for Her Community
Early on in her career, Jessy Yates discovered that she needed to work twice as hard to prove herself as an actor while also breaking down people’s stigma and preconceptions about her through the lens of her disability. One of the major issues she has with Hollywood is the severe lack of representation of her community. She has noted that while, over the years, many actors have been lauded for playing characters with disability and have even won major awards for it, almost all of them have been non-disabled actors. She is a strong advocate for changing this trend and opening opportunities for disabled actors to get these roles. At the same time, as a disabled actor herself, she doesn’t want to wait around for these roles to come to her and is actively working to create them for herself.
She has felt the brunt of this lack of proper representation in the media and intends to change that for future generations. She is committed to rectifying that situation and preventing perpetuating stereotypes and unfaithful narratives surrounding disabilities. At the same time, Yates considers her art a priority. She calls herself “an artist first and a disabled person second.” She is currently focusing on working on TV shows, particularly sitcoms. She prefers the long form of storytelling and has shared a love for several series on streaming services. In her personal time, she loves spending time with her friends and family and going on adventures with them.
Read More: Is Pulse a True Story?
