By Wonderwall.com Editors
1:00pm PDT, Mar 18, 2024
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According to the CDC, one in 36 children in America has some form of autism spectrum disorder, an umbrella term for a wide-ranging group of neurodevelopmental disorders including Asperger's syndrome. These can alter how people interact socially, communicate, learn and behave. But new research has shown the same differences in brain function often help people excel in creative fields. It should come as no surprise, then, that the entertainment world is full of folks who've been diagnosed with some form of autism.
Tallulah Willis — one of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's three daughters — has autism and was diagnosed at 29, she revealed in a March 2024 social media post.
She shared a video of herself on Instagram as a young girl at a red carpet event with her movie star father. In the clip, Tallulah can be seen rubbing his head and playing with his ear as Bruce does an interview. "Tell me you're autistic without telling me you're autistic " she captioned the post.
A commenter asked if she was diagnosed as a kid. "Actually this is the first time I've ever publicly shared my diagnosis. Found out this summer and it's changed my life," Tallulah — who called herself "neurospicy" in another comment — replied.
Read through to see what other stars who've been diagnosed with different forms of autism have said about their experiences…
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Sir Anthony Hopkins, a two-time Oscar winner whose accolades also include four BAFTA Awards and two Emmys, told the CBC's Tom Power in 2020 that he sees his Asperger's syndrome as "a gift."
Asked about the impact his diagnosis has had on his acting, Anthony replied: "It doesn't affect me — I am obsessive. It's a great gift, actually. I was a bit slow as a school kid, and so I made up for it by working hard, and I became, you know, a successful actor."
He said his "obsessiveness about the details" leads him to "work and work and work on the script and I learn every single line," later adding, "… I'm an absent-minded professor. I forget things, and I get obsessed with stupid details."
The actor, producer and director first went public with his diagnosis in a 2017 interview with The Desert Sun.
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While hosting "Saturday Night Live" in 2021, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was "the first person with Asperger's to host 'SNL' … or at least the first to admit it." Viewers on social media later noted Dan Aykroyd had shared that he was diagnosed with Asperger's in the '80s and hosted the show in 2003. But it was among Elon's first open discussions about his diagnosis, which he delved into in more detail in a 2022 TED Talk.
In the TED chat, the billionaire owner of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, recalled being bullied as a child for what seemed to be odd behavior.
"Social cues were not intuitive, so I was just very bookish," he explained. "Others could intuitively understand what was meant by something. I would take something very literally, as if the words that were spoken were exactly what they meant. But that turned out to be wrong." Elon added, "[People are] not simply saying exactly what they mean. There are all sorts of other things that are meant. It took me a while to figure that out."
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Singer Susan Boyle, who rose to fame on "Britain's Got Talent" in 2009, revealed in 2013 that she'd been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome one year earlier.
Having felt isolated as a child and aware she was somehow different than her peers, she told The Guardian her diagnosis came as "a relief."
Now, she sees how it's helped motivate her to succeed.
"Asperger's doesn't define me," said the star. "It's a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself. People will have a greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do."
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Author, entrepreneur and former Playboy model Holly Madison opened up about her autism diagnosis on a December 2023 episode of the "Talking to Death" podcast.
"The doctor told me that I have high executive functioning, which means I can pretty much go about my life and do things 'normally,'" Holly said. "I think because I'm more quiet, I've only recently learned to make eye contact. I'm often in my own thoughts, things like that, so people take that as offensive. … I'm just not on the same social wavelength as other people but don't take it personally. So I like being able to explain that."
Holly added, "I also don't really have a gauge for when other people are gonna be done speaking so I tend to interrupt a lot, which p***** people off."
So what's Holly's message for others about living with autism?
"That everybody operates differently and [when] interacting with anybody," she said. "Just have a little bit of patience because you don't know what they're dealing with or what their level of social function is."
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Daryl Hannah has said she sees her Asperger's syndrome as simply part of "the way I have always been," telling Australia's Women's Weekly in 2015 that she was diagnosed as a child.
"I was a little odd and incredibly introverted and withdrawn when I was young," the "Splash" star recalled. "My shyness was probably made worse because of my condition. I'd come home from school and cry myself to sleep. Right from an early age, I'd rock myself back and forth because it helped calm me down."
Even after her acting career took off in the '80s, Daryl continued to struggle with the public-facing aspects of her work.
"I'm fine one-on-one but in larger groups I lose my sense of self," she explained. "Big events are always uncomfortable for me and I don't know if I will ever grow out of it. I try to keep those feelings under control but it takes a lot of focus and concentration, and energy." Added the star, "These days I have little tricks that I do to help me cope. As long as I remember to do them, then I am OK."
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"Ghostbusters" star Dan Aykroyd has credited his idea for the now-iconic '80s ghost-hunting flick with his Asperger's diagnosis.
"I also have Asperger's but I can manage it," he told DailyMail.com in 2013. "It wasn't diagnosed until the early '80s when my wife persuaded me to see a doctor. One of my symptoms included my obsession with ghosts and law enforcement — I carry around a police badge with me, for example. I became obsessed by Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever. That's when the idea of my film 'Ghostbusters' was born."
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In her 2019 Netflix special "Growing," Amy Schumer revealed that husband Chris Fischer, a chef, had recently been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. As Amy said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in April 2022, the diagnosis was like Chris had been given "a superpower."
"All of his behavior is kind of excused now. If someone's telling a long, boring story, he will straight up just walk away. He'll just wander away, and I'm just still stuck there," she joked on the show.
In the wake of his diagnosis, Amy has often encouraged fans to get tested if they suspect they could benefit from knowing.
"It's really given us so many helpful tools," she told Ellen. "I think it's a good thing for people to check it out and get tested so you don't spend your whole life feeling like you're bad or wrong…"
According to researchers at UCLA Health, "autism is highly inheritable." Amy believes son Gene could be like his dad.
"I think the statistics are pretty strong toward he will most likely have autism," the comic told Chelsea Handler in a 2022 appearance on the "Dear Chelsea" podcast. "Parents have different journeys with this. Having a child with severe autism is beyond my imagination difficult. But if Gene does wind up having ASD, I'm not looking for the signs in a way that are upsetting, I'm not hoping either way. … You just want your kids to be healthy and happy."
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Comedian Hannah Gadsby wrote extensively about their autism spectrum disorder diagnosis in the New York Times bestseller "Ten Steps to Nannette: A Memoir Situation."
"For a long time, I worried that I'd been misdiagnosed," Hannah recalls in the book. "It was difficult to believe that I wasn't entirely to blame for my life being such a painful struggle, because I was so used to assuming I was a bad person. It took me a long time to get brave enough to simply share my diagnosis."
Elsewhere in the memoir, Hannah writes: "Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me."
The author goes on to detail how autism affects the way thoughts get processed. "I have never managed to develop a reliable system to file and separate my thoughts into individual think pieces, and so I am utterly incapable of having one thought without at least another hundred coming along for the ride."
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"I'm on the spectrum and I'm in recovery or whatever…," singer-songwriter Sia said on a May 2023 episode of "Rob Has a Podcast." She went on to emphasize the importance of sharing "our deepest, darkest, most shameful secrets" so we can finally "go out in the world" and operate "as humans."
Though she didn't elaborate on her diagnosis, Sia, who was 47 at the time of the interview, suggested she'd recently been diagnosed.
"For 45 years, I was like, 'I've got to go put my human suit on,' and only in the last two years have I become fully, fully myself," she said.
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Climate activist Greta Thunberg has also spoken out about the positive aspects of living with Asperger's syndrome.
"When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you're winning!" the Swedish star wrote on Twitter in 2019. "I have Aspergers and that means I'm sometimes a bit different from the norm. And — given the right circumstances — being different is a superpower."
Greta has also said her differences contributed to the severe depression and eating disorder she developed at age 11.
Asked by The Guardian in 2019 why she was so unhappy as a child, Greta replied: "I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that people didn't seem to care about anything, that everyone just cared about themselves rather than everything that was happening with the world. And being an oversensitive child with autism, it was definitely something I thought about a lot, and it made me sad."
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Courtney Love has said she was diagnosed with autism as a child after struggling with speech from an early age.
"My first visit to a psychiatrist was when I was, like, 3. Observational therapy. You name it, I've been there," she told Rolling Stone in 1994.
The Hole frontwoman also wrote about her diagnosis at age 9 in her autobiography, "Courtney Love: The Real Story."
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"Community" creator Dan Harmon was researching his TV character Abed when he recognized some of Abed's Asperger's symptoms were more than a little familiar. "I started looking up these symptoms just to know what they are," he said on Kevin Pollack's podcast in 2011. "And the more I looked them up, the more familiar they started to seem."
Eventually, Dan went to see a doctor, he said, and learned that there's a whole spectrum of disorders related to autism. He has said he concluded he has Asperger's syndrome, though it's unclear if he was formally diagnosed by the doctor he met with.
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The British model and TV personality Christine McGuinness was diagnosed with autism in 2021 at 33. By that time, she'd long struggled with issues ranging from an eating disorder to hypersensitivity to sound and smell to sexual assault.
"It's helped me understand myself a lot more. I'm trying to not be so hard on myself," she said of her diagnosis in the 2023 BBC documentary "Unmasking My Autism," which focuses on how and why autistic women and girls have historically been under-diagnosed.
"I experienced [sexual assault] and I didn't speak up, and I wonder if I never said it because I was autistic," she said in the documentary. "Was it me? Would a neurotypical woman have said something? Is it my fault? How did I find myself there? All of those questions."
Christine's three children have also been diagnosed with autism.
