'Wicked' Star Marissa Bode Calls Out 'Gross And Harmful' Ableist Comments About Her Character

The actor called the jokes "low-hanging fruit" that "too many" people are "comfortable taking."

“Wicked” actor Marissa Bode is shutting down the “very gross and harmful” jokes about her character’s disability following the release of the Jon M. Chu musical movie adaptation.

Bode, who uses a wheelchair in real life, plays Nessarose, a paraplegic and the sister to Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, in the film, which was released on Nov. 22.

“There’s something that’s made me a bit uncomfortable, and as somebody who’s disabled with a platform, I just wanted to talk about it really quick,” the actor began in a five-minute TikTok video posted on Friday.

She then told her 69,000-plus followers that it “is absolutely OK to not like a fictional character,” before going on to say that she found the “aggressive comments and jokes about Nessa’s disability itself” to be “deeply uncomfortable because disability is not fictional.”

“When these jokes are being made by nondisabled strangers with a punchline of not being able to walk, it very much feels like laughing at rather than laughing with,” she said, adding, “Aggressive comments of wanting to cause harm and ‘push Nessa out of her wheelchair’ or that she ‘deserves her disability’ are two very gross and harmful comments that real disabled people, including myself, have heard before.”