Visually impaired Dolly Lewis plays clinically blind ex-cop on ‘Sight Unseen’: ‘A gritty lone wolf’

nypost.com:

Daniel Gillies), why she’s leaving.Tess finds a visual assistance app in which a guide walks her through investigations via a small camera on her clothing (Tess wears an earpiece for audio).

That guide turns out to be Sunny Patel (Agam Darshi), an insistent, excitable agoraphobic who’s thousands of miles away in New York City; the two women quickly bond as Patel helps Avery solve cases and catch the bad guys, often assisting Campbell and the Vancouver PD.The crime procedural was created by Karen and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy.“[Karen] has had numerous operations and some severe loss in her eyes over the years, so she’s certainly bringing her own experience to developing the role of Tess,” said Lewis, a classically trained actress (the Esper Studio in Manhattan) who beat out hundreds of other actors to snare the part.“And they hired at least one other writer [Graham Isador] who experienced loss in his sight, so he was able to further advise into how Tess would actually physically be able to do something … things you wouldn’t normally know if you couldn’t navigate the world without your eyes.”Lewis said the show’s crew made it a bit easier for her to navigate the set due to her sight impairment.“I chose not to wear any kind of corrective eyewear on the set to help me physically embody the behavior of somebody who is trying to get their bearings when they can’t see what’s around them,” she said. “And that was actually quite tricky because the soundstage is dark so … it was hard for me to get around those interior shoots.“On the set, I benefited a lot from the wonderful crew putting up neon tape all over the place to give me symbols like, ‘That’s the bathroom, that’s the exit,'” she said. “And they had signs printed in.