Film and TV characters with more realistic depictions of health issues like cancer, dementia, obesity, and more could be the inspiration for real-world prevention.
In conversation with TheWrap CEO Sharon Waxman at the Power Women Summit 2025, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Lilly CMO Lina Polimeni and Wild State Head of Brand Fara Taylor all explained that the way illness and health scares are portrayed onscreen has an effect on how viewers handle or think about their own health.
“The short answer is because entertainment shapes culture, and culture shapes action of people,” Polimeni said. “So we shouldn’t wait to talk about health when we’re sick. We should talk about health when, you know, we talk about life.”
UTA and Lilly went to Smith – the founder of USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative – and asked them to look into how inclusionary a number of health issues were shown onscreen. The group looked at 200 of the most popular film and TV shows and more than 8,600 speaking characters across them and found staggeringly low numbers.
Only about 3% of characters suffered from obesity while 37% of the US identifies as obese. When it came to cancer, Dr. Smith said only 14 characters of the 8,676 suffered and 7 of those 14 died of the disease – something she said was harmful for the stigma of the very tough but fightable illness. Nine characters struggled with dementia and only two of them were shown through the context of medical professionals, and only one character in one film – “Killers of the Flower Moon” – portrayed a character struggling with diabetes. Lilly’s work with Dr. Smith is hoping to have inclusionary storytelling of these illnesses portrayed realistically will lead toward real preventative measures from viewers.
“I want great entertainment ideas, great film ideas, stories that you would tell as a film writer or as a showrunner, or as somebody that works in storytelling that also have a component of life, which includes health,” Polimeni said. “So actually, it’s interesting this question, because this basically has been the ‘so what’ after the study, which is now we know what the problem is – we change the narrative.”
One of the ways they’ve developed doing that is by partnering with people like Dr. Smith and production companies like Wild State to develop a toolkit for writers to utilize to write accurately about health issues.
“I think my team who worked on this in exhaustion, really asking questions and giving information to create authentic portrayals as clearly as possible, and to send people to sources to ask those questions and to get answers,” Dr. Smith said. “Lilly has a whole cadre of folks that are interested in answering these questions. Of course, we can field them but the toolkit is really that first line of defense to start answering everything that you can think of in those five key areas.”
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