How 'All the Light We Cannot See' Brings an Authentic Blind Heroine to TV

Upon its release in 2014, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and landed on The New York Times best-seller list for 200 weeks. With such high expectations, adapting the novel for the screen was never going to be an easy feat, especially when it came to casting the lead role of Marie-Laure LeBlanc.

Set in Nazi-occupied France in 1943, All the Light We Cannot See explores the unlikely connection between Marie-Laure—a blind French girl hiding out in her reclusive uncle's home—and Werner Pfennig, a young German soldier fascinated with radio technology. Newsweek has an exclusive look behind the scenes of Netflix's four-part adaptation, which you can watch above.

To authentically fill the role of Marie-Laure, 21 Laps Entertainment put out a casting call for blind and low-vision actors to play her as a child and as a young woman, ultimately casting Nell Sutton for the younger role and Aria Mia Loberti for the older version of Marie-Laure. Both were newcomers to acting.

"I don't think there was a day of filming this that I didn't learn something from Nell or Aria. Certainly I had to teach them how to act for the camera, but they taught me every day about the reality of navigating the world without sight, and that is why I cast them, not just because I thought it was the right thing to do, but I thought it was the better thing to do because it would give this story an authenticity that a sighted actor pretending could not estimate," director and executive producer Shawn Levy told Newsweek.

In a conversation with Newsweek, Levy and screenwriter Steven Knight share how they brought an authentic blind literary heroine to life for the screen.

Who Is Aria Mia Loberti?

Aria Mia Loberti, a PhD student at Pennsylvania State University, tried out for the role of Marie-Laure after a childhood teacher informed her of the search. All the Light We Cannot See was her first audition, and despite having no prior acting experience, she beat out thousands for the role.

"It was her fierce intelligence, [but] she also had a luminous quality on camera," Levy said on discovering Loberti.

"She was so clearly smart, and even though she didn't know how to act yet, I knew that with that intelligence and that level of thirst for excellence, she wanted to work hard, she wanted to learn hard."

The Rhode Island native is legally blind due to suffering from a severe form of achromatopsia, a condition defined by a partial or total loss of color vision. However, she hasn't let her disability hold her back.

Alongside her budding acting career, Loberti has a BA in Philosophy, Communication Studies, and Political Science from the University of Rhode Island—where she graduated summa cum laude—and an MA in Ancient Rhetoric from the University of London, which she attended on a Fullbright Scholarship.

As a fan of the novel, Loberti said she wanted the character to be "an authentic portrayal of a young girl growing up to be a young woman who is blind."

"That's important to bring to the screen," she explained in Netflix's All the Light We Cannot See featurette.

A passionate advocate for blind and visually-impaired people, in 2018 Loberti delivered a TED talk on her experiences growing up with a disability and has acted as a youth delegate to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (U.N. Women).

Who Is Nell Sutton?

A similar search was launched to find Nell Sutton, who plays the child version of Marie-Laure. The 7-year-old from Gwynedd, Wales, suffers from congenital glaucoma and had previously starred in a nationwide campaign for the Guide Dogs charity.

Sutton was the first actor cast in All the Light We Cannot See, thanks to what Levy calls her "irresistible effervescence."

"For Nell, that little girl was magic, she was unbearably adorable, smart, funny, and she just had a sparkle to her that I was smitten by instantly," he said.

Why Was It Important To Find a Blind Actor To Play Marie-Laure LeBlanc?

According to Knight—who adapted the novel for the screen—the hunt for two visually impaired actors to play Marie-Laure was both a moral decision and a creative one.

"I think the fact that both of those actresses were visually impaired removes a barrier between the audience and the character, because as an audience you're not looking for that little clue that this is just an act, this is just a trick, you know it's for real," he told Newsweek.

"It's not just like it's virtuous to do this, it's actually more efficient and better to do this."

Producer and blindness consultant Joe Strechay advised on All the Light We Cannot See and said the production was "committed to creating an atmosphere of respect around persons who are blind [and] persons with disabilities."

"Right from the start, working with Aria to figure out what she needs coming to a film set, I got to have conversations with our production designer, our costume designer, and our props department as we were figuring out what we might have on set in particular scenes," he said in the Netflix featurette.

"Making sure that we're doing it the right way but also in a way that's authentic to Aria as an individual who's blind."

For Levy, the production was as much of a learning curve for him as it was for Loberti and Sutton, with the Stranger Things executive producer describing the actresses as "a daily influence on me and how I presented and staged this story."

Levy felt Loberti and Sutton brought certain complexities to the portrayal of Marie-Laure that sighted actors would not think to include.

"Whether it was the way that Aria moves from the doorway to her radio broadcasting desk, or the way that Nell uses her cane on the sidewalks of Paris as her dad is taking her for a crepe on her birthday, these are nuanced bits of behavior that they have earned through years of real life, that they would tell me about," he said.

"Or sometimes they would just show me, and I would realize, 'oh, you know what, the way we imagined it as sighted creatives, that's not the real thing—we're gonna use the real thing instead.'"