Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/A24
Before Raúl Castillo was an actor, he was a writer. At 18 years old, he wrote a script at Boston University that got him in trouble. The production featured an all-male cast, save one woman. And the woman? On stage for just five minutes. No lines. And the other characters treated her brutally.
“I got a lot of shit for it,” Castillo says with a soft grimace over Zoom. He pushes a few big, dark curls back onto his head and adds, “Rightfully so. I got a lot of shit for it because the portrayal of this particular specific character was really inhumane. I was 18 years old, and I didn’t know much about storytelling. It was an eye-opening experience. I realized I really had to think about the characters that I put on stage, and I had to be thoughtful about who I put on stage and how I put them on stage.”
The brutality wasn’t so much the issue. Brutality is often an ugly evil. It’s those ugly evils–and how we portray them–that define a story.