20 Famous Neurodivergent People on Their Own Brains

Billie was diagnosed with Tourette’s at 11. Her all-day tics include wiggling an ear, raising an eyebrow and clicking her jaw. You’d never notice them in conversation, but she finds them exhausting. The lights in the studio set one off mid-interview, which is how this conversation started.

The most common reaction to her tics, she said, is people laughing because they think she’s doing a bit. It leaves her incredibly offended.

Florence has dyspraxia and dyslexia, both diagnosed when she was a child. She said the condition doesn’t get as much attention as it should, and that working in a creative industry probably helps: “We dyspraxics think in a different way.”

He went public with his diagnosis in 2022. At Glastonbury in 2023, his voice was giving out, and his tics became more frequent during “Someone You Loved”, so the crowd sang it for him, all the way to the end. He talks about his Tourette’s in his own words in the Netflix documentary How I’m Feeling Now.

Two years later, he went back, saying he wanted to “finish what I couldn’t finish the first time round”, and closed the set with the same song.

For 45 years, she said, she felt she had to go and put her “human suit” on, and only in the last two years had she become herself fully.

Before that, there was Music. When the trailer dropped in 2020, autistic people asked why an autistic actor hadn’t been cast as its autistic lead. Sia got hostile, telling one autistic actor who said she could have played the role, “Maybe you’re just a bad actor.” The film also showed its autistic character being held in a prone restraint, a practice autistic advocates call traumatising. Months later, Sia apologised, said “I listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility”, promised to cut the restraint scenes, and deleted her Twitter account.

AURORA has talked about being neurodivergent plenty of times. In late 2025, she talked about how it affects her career: with age, she said, she’s got better at managing it without overwhelming herself “until a point of no return”. Neurodivergence and artistry, she added, are “so meant for each other, but also so not”.

She didn’t believe the first doctor and had a whole theory that ADHD was invented to make people pay for medicine until a second doctor told her the same thing. She’s also said people think she’s high even when she’s sober, because of her energy and fast, sporadic speech.

Radcliffe is dyspraxic, which affects coordination and motor skills. He’s also talked about finding big events like the Baftas awkward, because quick small talk with strangers doesn’t come easily to him. And he’s spent years correcting the internet’s favourite Harry Potter “facts” about himself, in his own words.

The You and Haunting of Bly Manor star was diagnosed at age six or seven and told she might never read or write well. She’s since talked on the Podcrushed podcast about being labelled disruptive at school and about understanding people beyond their diagnoses.

Chloé was diagnosed autistic at 13 and ADHD at 22. Chloé plays Quinni in Netflix’s Heartbreak High, one of the first autistic characters actually played by an autistic person, and she helped shape the role. Playing Quinni won her the 2022 AACTA Audience Choice Award for Best Actress, and she’s said she loves playing an autistic character because she gets to stim freely.

She first went viral in 2020 with a YouTube video criticising Sia’s film Music for how it portrayed autism. Her memoir is called Different, Not Less, and she closed Australia’s first adaptive runway at Fashion Week in the jacket quoted above.

A crew member with an autistic daughter recognised it first, which led to a formal assessment. Bella described the heavy thermals for the Canadian shoot as “too much stuff on my body” and called the diagnosis freeing.

The Prison Break actor’s diagnosis came after a self-diagnosis, through a process he called long and flawed, and he acknowledged that access to a diagnosis is a privilege many don’t have. He didn’t want to be “a loud, ill-informed voice in the room”, he said, because the autistic community has historically been talked over. And it isn’t something he’d change.

You’ll know him as King Viserys in House of the Dragon. Considine was diagnosed with Asperger’s at 36, after his wife, Shelley, pushed for him to see a specialist. He’s described mimicking people as one of the ways he copes. Mid-interview, he pointed at the hotel room’s striped carpet and explained that the pattern pulled his focus so hard it was difficult to think about anything else. He went public, he said, because reading about someone like him at 17 or 18 might have helped him work it out much sooner.

At 12, he saw a therapist for what he’s described as Tourette’s and Asperger’s. By 14, the tics had mostly settled, but the Asperger’s side stayed, in his words, as a fascination with police. He studied criminology, then used it to write The Blues Brothers. He was also an original SNL cast member, which matters later.

While writing Abed for Community, Harmon researched autism for the character, then saw a doctor himself. He started the show seeing himself as a Jeff type. These days, he identifies more with Abed.

Gadsby was diagnosed with autism and ADHD in 2017. Gadsby’s show Douglas is named after their dog, who they say led them to get diagnosed. During a hard stretch, feeling the dog’s empathy made them ask, “How can this dog get me like no one else on earth?” and then Google women with autism.

Fern knew she was autistic as a teenager, but was told she couldn’t be. She was finally diagnosed in 2021, and wrote about it in her memoir Strong Female Character and has described Taskmaster as accidentally perfect for her brain because every day is nine tasks and one other person.

Simone was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. In 2016, hackers leaked Simone’s confidential medical records, trying to paint her ADHD medication as cheating. She’d been approved to take it and had broken no rules, and she said so herself.

Her memoir opens with her brain, which she writes “skipped and flickered” with ADHD from the time she was a toddler. She’s written about years of feeling punished for the way her brain worked and has called ADHD a superpower.