For deaf actor, “Only Murders” saved a dark time

James Caverly’s acting career was zipping along neatly.
He’d done shows everywhere – Boston and Baltimore and Berkeley, Ithaca, NY, and Washington, D.C. and more. Now it was time to live in the center of the theater world.
And then? “I moved to New York City, believe it or not, two weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit …. All of a sudden, the entire industry just collapsed.”
He was deaf and unemployed … and somehow, it worked out. A key episode of “Only Murders in the Building” (shown here) – rerunning at 9 p.m. Jan. 16 on ABC – brought new life.
That episode has only one sentence of spoken dialog. In a show stuffed with stars – Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez – it put the focus on a near-unknown.
“I was told that the episode was going to be from my perspective,” Caverly said. “And I thought, ‘Oh boy, this could be a tall order.’”
This month, “Only Murders” – originally on Hulu – jumped to ABC to rerun its first season. On Jan. 16 (setting up the Jan. 23 finale) it stuffs three episodes into two hours, starting with Caverly’s
So lets go back to a Television Critics Association press conference that was held after that season. It was done by Zoom, with Caverly (through sign-language interpreter Monique Sarpy) and others.
Caverly grew up in comfortable Detroit suburbia. He was born deaf (as was his older sister, according to a Salon profile), but the rest of his world – parents, two younger brothers, classmates – were not.
His high school (in Bloomfield Hills) had a Deaf and Hard of Hearing program, but mostly, he said, he was “a deaf kid in a hearing environment environment, … mainstreamed into the public-school setting. I was looking for people to pay attention to me, like, ‘Look at me. Look at me. Don’t ignore me.’ And I was just being silly and stupid for 15 minutes.”
Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was helpful. In a class reading, he savored beeing Lord Capulet. Much later, he directed the show in sign-language and spoken versions.
Caverly skipped the school’s theater program, which focused on musicals, but did the DHH shows. “I realized, like, ‘Do you know what? I’m really pretty good at this.’”
So he majored in theater at Gallaudet University, which began 168 years ago as the National College for the Deaf and Dumb and now has more than 1,500 students.
Afterward, he traveled the country as a director, a set carpenter and an actor. He had the lead role in “Tribes” and “Music Man” (winning the Helen Hayes Award for Washingion-area theater) and more. When “Children of a Lesser God” had a Broadway revival in 2018, he understudied the role of an angry young man.
Two years later, he moved to New York … and the world closed down.
One exception was “Only Murders,” with a podcast probing a murder in a New York apartment building. Nathan Lane played a deli-owner who sponsored the podcast and had some shaky business dealings.
Caverly played the son, angry at his dad. “He’s a really gifted young actor,” Lane said.
And Lane is an earnes one, Caverly said. “Nathan only had two or three months of very intensive, ASL(American sigh language) instruction.”
Lane won an Emmy for the role. Caverly wasn’t nominated, but did get notice (two wins and two nominations) from other award sources. He repeated the role briefly in the next episode, plus twice in the second season and once in the third.