Best Foot Forward Logan Marmino / Matt Fleckenstein / Josh Sundquis Interview

Automatically transcribed; may contain errors.

hi i'm allison with FlickDirect and i'm talking to the cast and creators of best foot forward hello how are all of you today i'm good how are you good thanks you are a fellow new jerseyan aren't you yes i am where jersey are you from i'm from south jersey i'm from central so we have that in common anyway i want to start with you logan so this is your ever first acting career job um what was this experience like for you what have you learned do you want to continue doing this i think it the it was it was a really great experience just the crew and the cast everybody was great and i think that that just made it so much easier like for especially for the first time doing it um for doing it again uh i'm very set on like baseball and i think that it was a lot of fun and i'm hoping like to keep from keep making more of this show yeah making more for this show but for doing other like projects i don't know um maybe but i don't i don't think so that's an amazing attitude that's good for you yeah go play baseball yeah yeah be a kid have fun serve you well in the acting community just so yeah you'll find many child actors who will say yeah this is a very important show with a lot of meaning to it so i think that was the one reason why i really looked for doing like wanted to do this josh it is an important show there's humor involved with it as well how much of you is in the show itself i think that uh you know not only are many of our episodes and storylines and anecdotes taken from real anecdotes in my life um i think the the more significant maybe contribution uh of me and my life to the show is like the tone of the show right of of the approach that we take to uh to disability and towards josh's prosthetic leg um which is uh that it's not um it's not sad it's not maudlin it's not inspirational it's not cloying um it is here's a kid he happens to have a prosthetic leg um sometimes that's hard and sometimes that's funny uh and and we especially try to lean into the funny uh as i do in my real life do you find that over the years from when you first uh became uh uh disabled to now has the attitude changed in society towards people with disabilities or do you feel there's still struggles that a show like this is going to help to dispel those stereotypes i definitely feel like people are becoming more aware and and we definitely do increasingly uh have occasions in which we see people with disabilities uh in the media and i think that's great and i hope that we are part of a trend in that sense and specifically um a leader in in not just having maybe a character who has some sort of disability in the background but putting a lead uh character uh and not just the character that the actor who also has the disability uh and and hopefully we can be a trend in in doing that and in uh then when people see that that it um it normalizes different or in a phrase that i heard recently that i i like quite well it normalizes normal um because why why why is there an abnormality or a problem to to someone maybe having one leg versus two some people have one leg some people have two legs uh they're both humans yeah and i was gonna say not just like the awareness of oh there's so many like more people with disabilities like seeing that there are more people like with disabilities and that there always has been not just that but also to show that they're just like us and not just that like seeing those people but seeing those people as being normal i think like that's taken like this show will create a leap like into that yeah absolutely that's a great phrase i love that phrase i saw it on instagram the other day that's amazing matt i just want to touch on you for a minute because you worked in this industry for you know two decades what did you bring to the show what did you have to change from what you're used to because of the show itself what i brought to the show was yeah was was those two decades of experience i mean my job you know was to take josh's story work with him to adapt it you know to this medium of tv so uh you know i've adapted a number of things in people's stories so yeah just you know the experience and just you know knowing the motions and mechanisms of doing that uh what i had to what did i have to change to bring to this this show i would say not as much change but for me there was a ton of personal growth in just talking to josh about his story um and to what uh logan and josh were just saying saying uh you know a huge shift in perspective on things um you know normalizing normal is i've now stolen that phrase but i mean the main goal of the show is that you know when people will see you know the picture of the show on apple tv plus you know they might say kid with a prosthetic leg i don't have anything in common with him right but then when they watch the show they'll realize he's not a prosthetic leg with a kid he's a kid who's going through middle school the ups and downs the goods and bags etc who also happens to have a prosthetic leg so um yeah for all of us and you know for me in terms of writing really wanted to you know tell a story that had more meaning to it and more potential impact and this was a great a great way to do that and i think doing it in a funny manner also helps disarm people one of the things that really drew me to this and one of the things that again having the mindset of you know an able-bodied person you know we gravitate towards the inspiration we talk about all the time of you know a kid with a prosthetic leg becoming a professional a paralympian skier but realizing because you know josh real josh grew up he was a kid who did kid stuff like sneak soda into a movie theater in his empty pan leg so you know for me it was a great experience to see the comedy that comes out of his unique experience and how he you know how he lived that throughout his life so it was it was great so surprising and and great well thank you all so much for your time i really hope that this continues to help all of us grow as human beings not just you matt and thank you guys again good luck with the baseball thank you