A Fantastic Woman, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s best foreign language Oscar nominee, is not the first film about a trans woman to be in contention for an Academy Award. Some argue that playing a trans character is a sure-fire way to contend for a statuette – look at the nominations for John Lithgow for The World According to Garp (1982); Jaye Davidson for The Crying Game (1992); Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry (1999); Felicity Huffman for Transamerica (2005); Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl (2015). What is new is that Lelio’s lead actor, Chilean actor/singer Daniela Vega, is herself trans, and was briefly in the running to become the first trans person to be nominated for best actor. Vega missed out, but her performance as trans woman Marina, whose older lover Orlando dies in her arms, leading to her being ostracised by his family and suspected of murder, was integral to the film’s Oscars recognition.
Those interested in trans representation did have something to celebrate with Yance Ford’s nomination for Strong Island, which made Ford the first trans director to be considered for an Academy Award – for best documentary. That Ford’s film does not directly deal with LGBT issues, but with his brother’s murder by a white man who was never brought to trial is significant for a community so often typecast. However, Vega’s prominence has raised another question, which has become more prominent as advocates have broken into mainstream media in the last decade: should trans characters in feature films be played by trans actors?
Historically, there has been a divide: underground films in which trans people play themselves, often with improvised dialogue that uses their own experiences; and mainstream films in which A-list, cisgender actors portray a trans character. The latter doesn’t have to be worse than the former, or bad in itself – a talented actor can produce an interesting and intelligent performance, given a well-researched and sensitively written script. As a trans teenager, I found films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) or I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) helpful, as they showed the difficulties of cross-gender existence with nuance and wit, never degenerating into cliche or melodrama.
Leto’s Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club met with hostility not just because it embodied so many stereotypes (“a sad-sack, clothes-obsessed, constantly flirting … drug-addict prostitute” as Steve Friess wrote in Time) but also because no trans consultants were enlisted, and because Leto used his speech on winning the Golden Globe for best supporting actor to talk about how that “tiny little Brazilian bubble butt was all mine” rather than anything he had learned about the realities of trans living.
The Crying Game was notable for not using a big-name actor, unlike Priscilla with Terence Stamp or Myra Breckinridge (1970) with Raquel Welch. The film’s twist, zealously protected by its US marketers (just before the internet made this impossible) relied on Jaye Davidson, who played Dil, the main romantic interest, being unknown. This meant the viewer realised Dil was trans at the same time as protagonist Fergus – played by the more established Stephen Rea. The Danish Girl is a strange case. Adapted from David Ebershoff’s novel, it is loosely based on the life of Lili Elbe, who died in 1933 after one of the first sex- reassignment surgeries. The film took10 years to get from a script to the screen. It was long delayed by financiers pulling out, worried that the story was not commercially viable, and the inability to secure a big name to play Elbe. Originally, Nicole Kidman was lined up to star and produce, but the film went through three false starts and six directors before its eventual release with Eddie Redmayne as its lead.
During the 15-year lag between Ebershoff’s novel being optioned and Redmayne receiving his best actor nomination in 2016, much had changed. Telling the story through a cisgender woman (Alicia Vikander, who won in 2016 for best supporting actor) struggling to accept her lover’s trans identity, felt old-fashioned, the reverse-mirror shots of Elbe modelling for her painting utterly cliched. The scene where Elbe gets beaten up by people who ask: “Are you a girl or a boy” felt heavy-handed, plastering a familiar transphobic trope over a situation that was far more nuanced. Again, though, the problem was not so much Redmayne’s interpretation of the role as the hackneyed script and ponderous direction, and for me, the film’s worst crime was being boring.
During that interregnum, there had been one other significant Hollywood portrayal of a trans woman: Transamerica. When I saw it in 2005, Transamerica felt like an exercise in compromise, written in the awareness that studios would not cast a trans actor as a lead, but trying to make space by using trans people in supporting roles. The first person on screen was trans woman Andrea James, teaching Bree (Felicity Huffman) how to feminise her voice. Despite this, and a scene where Bree attends at a party for trans women, played by trans women, Huffman could not escape the need to establish her character’s transsexuality through a series of clichés: putting inserts in her bra; applying make-up in the mirror (while dressed all in pink); seeing a psychiatrist who praises her “authenticity”. Even this timidity, though, outdid The Danish Girl.
For now, trans actors still aren’t cast in those roles, partly because producers feel there aren’t any qualified to play them. But trans people are seldom given other parts (and if they are, don’t get nominated for awards for their “brave” portrayals of cisgender characters) so the problem persists. Technological advances have offered ways around this: Netflix made space not just for Ford’s Strong Island, but also Laverne Cox’s rise to prominence as trans inmate Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black, which led to her cover appearance on Time ’s Transgender Tipping Point issue in May 2014.
Cox’s success showed the film industry that it wasn’t just a handful of activists who wanted to see trans actors playing trans characters. The following year, a surprise, low-budget hit confirmed this: Sean Baker’s Tangerine, which also relied on digital advances to get around traditional barriers. It was shot in Hollywood on an iPhone 5, a process that, unlike traditional films, did not require a permit. Baker used two trans actors, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, from a Los Angeles LGBT centre, who brought their own experiences of sex work, poverty and transphobia into the script.
This way of working has a long underground tradition. Several of the New American Cinema film-makers, including Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs and Ron Rice, assembled groups of outsiders, including gender-variant individuals such as Mario Montez and Francis Francine, pointed a camera at them and turned the results into a film. Plot wasn’t usually their main concern – the films were more about celebrating their own survival, and creating spaces away from straight society where they could express themselves without restraint. This movement arose in the early 1960s: Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness, Rice’s Chumlum and Smith’s Flaming Creatures were all made between 1959-1963, with Smith’s film confiscated by police and censored by the Supreme Court.
Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol took a slightly more structured approach, in their films with the Factory’s trio of transgender superstars, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. The point wasn’t so much that they were trans, but that being so placed them on the margins, where Trash (1970), featuring Joe Dallesandro as a heroin-addicted hustler and Woodlawn as “Holly” was set.
In Europe, two notable directors followed this lead. The first was German film-maker Rosa von Praunheim, whose films are more intelligent and interesting than (heterosexual or cisgender) critics realised. City of Lost Souls (1983) was badly received on its release for its minimal plot; certainly, its scripted parts are its weakest. Like Warhol, Von Praunheim brought misfits – specifically, queer Americans in West Berlin – together, and let them improvise dialogue. The film’s best scene, has transsexual performer Angie Stardust and transvestite Tara O’Hara, playing themselves, arguing about whether surgery is necessary to be a woman. Angie’s passionate explanation that “it’s because of the old school that you can be what you are” wins the debate. Maybe someone with no direct experience could have performed their heated but humane conversation with similar clarity and conviction – but it’s unlikely.
It’s not impossible, though. The greatest film about trans living is Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, which won the foreign language Oscar in 2000. Antonia San Juan’s performance as Agrado, peaking in a brilliantly-observed monologue on being an “authentic” transsexual woman, was so good that speculation about her gender was intense: she later said “I’m not a transvestite or transsexual, and that’s all there is to say about that”, but the rumours did not go away.
Whatever San Juan’s history, those who maintain that the only criteria for trans casting should be good acting should consider Stanislavsky’s “system”, which made “emotional memory” of a real-life situation central to its realistic depiction. Given this, it is far more likely that a trans person would be best placed to portray trans life, and the performance of non-professional trans actor Stéphanie Michelini in Sebastian Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2004), where she plays a transsexual woman trying to reconcile with her dying mother, is more subtle and less predictable than the ones recognised by the Academy.
Likewise, I found Daniela Vega’s stoic responses to endless micro-aggressions far more convincing than they might have been if played by an outsider. It helped that Lelio wrote A Fantastic Woman after extensive consultation with Vega, letting her draw on her experiences without crossing the line between feature and documentary, and letting him take his storyline beyond the basics of transgender living. The result is a vibrant combination of romance, fantasy and detective story, unlike any of its predecessors. Whether or not it tears down the barriers for trans actors is yet be seen – but it’s certainly a huge step forward.
•A Fantastic Woman is released on 2 February in the US, 22 February in Australia and 2 March in the UK.
