Mile 22: This is why the gender of Emily Skeggs' character M.I.T was changed

'Mile 22' follows an American elite intelligence agency that tries to smuggle a mysterious lone officer with sensitive information out of the country. The Mark Wahlberg film also stars Emily Skeggs in a pivotal role. Little do we know that her role was actually meant for a male.

Emily plays the role of M.I.T, a coding prodigy. She describes her character as “a self-taught prodigy coder who’s sort of tech brain of the team. She approaches everything from the tech perspective.”

Although the role of M.I.T. was originally written to be a male, the decision was made to switch the character’s gender, a challenge that intrigued Skeggs. “I think there’s a stereotype, an idea of what we think a coder looks like — and that stereotype is totally wrong,” she says. “I was excited to take on the role from a female perspective, bring gender into play, and crack that stereotype open.”
Emily also learned that the tech world has gender disparity.

She said “I watched this awesome documentary called Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, and the main thing I took away from it is that a lot of young women and girls are taught in school that they’re not good at math or science — so they don’t perform at the level they should”.

It made her realize she’d doubted her own abilities and encouraged some self-reflection. Emily further added “I took a step back and said, ‘I’m good at language, logic, and puzzles. I can do that. That’s all that coding is, so let me try.’ I learned really basic code, and now I’m hooked!”

Directed by Peter Berg, the film stars Mark Wahlberg in the lead and 'Mile 22' is all set to hit the screens on 24th August 2018.