Roughly 129 million Americans live with chronic disease stemming from major conditions like obesity, cancer, Alzheimer’s/dementia, diabetes, and atopic dermatitis (eczema). But you’d never guess it from watching popular entertainment.
A groundbreaking study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, sponsored by Lilly, finds characters experiencing those conditions are rarely depicted in the most widely seen films and television series – and when they are, the portrayals may be inaccurate, misleading or lacking context. For instance, the study reports only 2.8% of speaking characters across 2023’s most popular TV shows and films had obesity, despite 37% of the U.S. population living with obesity.
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Recognizing the critical role entertainment plays in shaping public understanding of disease, health and the lived experience of patients, Lilly came to the Sundance Film Festival to support an industrywide shift in narrative around disease representation in TV and film.
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“We’re a company that puts health above everything else,” explained Lina Polimeni, Lilly’s Chief Consumer Marketing Officer, as she stopped by Deadline’s Sundance Studio during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. “Health is the purpose of what we do and the medicine that we create, and patients and humanity is really at the center of our focus. And so, if you look at the way we approach not just the medicine development but also how we show up in the world… we think the conversations that we contribute to can have impact in how not only disease is perceived, but really health and how people pursue health.”
Joining the conversation in our studio was John Turturro, the Emmy-winning actor, writer, producer and director who launched his career in the early 1980s. Among his most notable credits is The Night Of, an Emmy-winning miniseries created by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian in which he played an attorney who suffers from debilitating eczema.
The condition “definitely exacerbated when he was under pressure,” Turturro said of his character, John Stone. “Steven Zaillian and Richard Price did their due research and you saw [Stone] trying many different remedies and how it would subside and then come back and rear its head. And so, I had a lot of time to talk to various lawyers and people who suffered from eczema and sometimes people who were lawyers who had eczema.”
The actor suggested making a chronic disease integral to a character can provide a richer depiction of a human being.
“When someone has a disease, that doesn’t define who they are. There’s a whole person there and a person who has hopes and dreams and ambitions and can be funny and can be manipulative and lustful and lonely, and that’s part of it. That’s an obstacle to their lives,” he observed. “I think when you see something in a movie or a story that gets it right … it’s part of life. And we all have to deal with these things, whatever it is, whether it’s mental illness, whether it’s cancer, whether it’s dementia or eczema.”
In the evolution of how chronic health conditions are portrayed on screen, Polimeni says, “there’s progress, but this is still a gap that exists in filmmaking.”
The Lilly executive also highlighted a toolkit for screenwriters created with the company’s support, and how Lilly is working with Chris Hemsworth’s production company on a sensitive depiction of Alzheimer’s. And Turturro cited two great writers – one of the 20th century and one of the 19th – who memorably depicted disease and medicine in their stories.
Watch the full conversation in the video above.