Millicent Simmonds

Millicent Simmonds, born March 6, 2003, in Bountiful, Utah, is a deaf American actress who made her Broadway debut in 2023. She has four siblings and lost her hearing permanently at two months old due to an accidental medication overdose. Her mother subsequently learned American Sign Language and taught it to the entire family. Simmonds also has a cochlear implant. At age three, she began attending the Jean Massieu School of the Deaf, where she joined the drama club around third grade and first performed as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. After completing sixth grade, she enrolled at Mueller Park Junior High School in the fall of 2015. She has also performed at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah. In the third quarter of 2020, her family relocated from Bountiful to a neighborhood north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Simmonds was twelve years old when she was cast in the 2017 drama film Wonderstruck, having read the source novel when it was published in 2011. A former drama teacher alerted her to the open casting call, and she auditioned against more than 250 other candidates. To film the project, she moved to New York City with her mother and younger siblings, using ASL interpreters on set and receiving a tutor to continue her schoolwork. Wonderstruck premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and the Associated Press described her screen debut as hailed as a breakthrough, also naming her one of eight Breakthrough Entertainers of 2017. She received nominations for several best youth performance awards for the role.

In 2018, Simmonds starred in the horror film A Quiet Place as the deaf daughter of a hearing couple played by John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. Krasinski, who directed the film, advocated specifically for casting a deaf actress in the role. Simmonds and her family answered his questions while he was writing a screenplay centered on a family with a deaf child, and the production hired an ASL interpreter so that signed and spoken language could be communicated fluently on set. Simmonds also taught her fellow cast members to sign. She received additional award nominations for best youth performance for this role. She reprised the character in A Quiet Place Part II, which filmed in mid-2019. Krasinski described his intention to make Simmonds the lead of the sequel, stating that her character opens the door to the themes he explored in the first film. The sequel had its world premiere in March 2020, but its commercial release was postponed to May 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August 2021, Variety included Simmonds on its Power of Young Hollywood Impact List of more than fifty talents aged 25 and under.

Alongside her film work, Simmonds appeared in a two-episode arc in the third season of the Disney Channel series Andi Mack in 2018, having first appeared as an extra in the series' first season. She taught the other actors ASL for her arc, and the showrunners chose to present her ASL scenes without subtitles. During one episode, she spoke audibly on camera for the first time, saying "I like you" in response to a character signing the same phrase to her. In 2019, she appeared in an episode of the second season of This Close. That same October, she was cast in a lead role in the pilot for the Freeform series Close Up, which filmed in Vancouver, though Freeform passed on the pilot by May 2020.

Simmonds starred in the short film Bumblebees, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 11, 2022. Her Broadway debut came with the play Grey House, a Broadway adaptation of Levi Holloway's work, which premiered on May 30, 2023. Simmonds noted that performing on Broadway requires more exaggerated expressions than film or television work due to the need for audience visibility, and she contrasted the repetitive nature of stage performance with the varying day-to-day scenes of screen work. Grey House closed on July 30, 2023, due to low ticket sales.

Several projects involving Simmonds remain in development. In July 2021, she partnered with Circle of Confusion Television Studios to star in and executive produce a TV adaptation of the 2022 book True Biz by Sara Nović. In October of that year, she was cast as Helen Keller in the film Helen & Teacher, with principal photography originally planned for mid-2022. In February 2023, she was cast in the action-thriller film Pretty Lethal. She has also been cast alongside Noomi Rapace in the horror thriller No Man's Land, which was set to begin filming in April 2026.

Beyond her acting career, Simmonds is an advocate for deaf representation and accessibility in entertainment. In 2019, she received the Greenwich International Film Festival's Make An Impact Award and participated in a panel on cinematic representation of people with disabilities. In 2020, she and a speech-language pathology clinical fellow designed a face mask featuring a transparent panel to allow lip-reading and the reading of facial expressions. She partnered with fair-trade fashion brand Rafi Nova to produce the masks, with net proceeds directed toward deaf and hard-of-hearing organizations.