Is Emilia Perez’ trans star about to make Oscars history?

Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Next week, Karla Sofia Gascón is very likely to be nominated for an Oscar in the best-actress category, which would guarantee her a spot in the Hollywood history books as the first openly trans actress to come anywhere close to that list. Gascón transitioned in 2018.

In Jacques Audiard’s mad, magnificent musical Emilia Perez , which this week took out the Golden Globes for best foreign language film and best comedy or musical, she plays both the imposingly glamorous title character and the man she used to be: a Mexican drug cartel supremo called Manitas del Monte. Who would have guessed? Lounging on a broken couch out in the desert with his fellow thugs, Manitas seems as macho as a bull. Gascón, on the other hand, is every inch a diva.



Born in Madrid, she spent 10 years starring in daytime soap operas in Mexico, where she started off playing men. “I want to be very clear,” says Audiard, whose gold-plated French arthouse career has included The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012). “If I had not found Karla Sofia, I would have had a hard time making this movie.

” Karla Sofia Gascón plays a Mexican drug lord undergoing gender affirming surgery. He was initially reluctant, he says, to ask her to pretend to be a man again. It was Gascón who insisted on playing Emilia as a dual role.

“As an actress, it would’ve been so ugly for me to say, ‘Give that character to someone else,’ no? I don’t think I would’ve forgiven myself,” she told Harper’s Bazaar . “Also, I think the film wouldn’t have made sense.” For her, it was crucial to see that Emilia was already in Manitas and, later, that the shadow of monstrous Manitas remained within Emilia.

“The difficulty wasn’t playing male and female, but creating one single character that has two sides, an A side and a B side, then working from each side to incorporate them into a single one,” she says now. That included finding two distinct voices. “And singing in two different ranges that are unlike my own.

” As Audiard puts it, “she did great”. When Emilia Perez was unveiled at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the reviews were rapturous. Gascón and her co-stars Zoe Saldana (who went on to win the Golden Globe for best supporting actress), Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz, as an ensemble, won the festival’s best actress award.

Saldana, best known as a graceful blue alien in James Cameron’s Avatar films, plays an underpaid, under-appreciated lawyer, Rita. Gomez plays Manitas’ abandoned wife Jessi – “She’s very fierce and not at all likable,” says Gomez, with relish – while Paz plays Epifania, a younger woman who falls for the resurgent Emilia. The story moves at a cracking pace.

When Manitas decides to offer Rita a job as his fixer, organising his disappearance and surgery, he has her kidnapped and brought to him with a bag over her head: that’s how he rolls. After the operation, the newly minted Emilia becomes a philanthropist, helping the families of people killed by the trade that made her rich; her transition is not only between genders, but between worlds. The roots of the project, which everyone acknowledges sounds completely crazy, go back 30 years, when Audiard – now 72 – had made his second feature, A Self-Made Hero .

He and renowned film composer Alexandre Desplat then started nutting out an idea for an opera. “I had the idea of making something in the genre of Brecht and Weill, but we ended up being too lazy to actually finish it or go further with it,” he says. “But it is something that has been on my mind for a long time.

” Music is always central to his films, he says. “And my last three or four films were not written in the French language.” Dheepan , which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015, was mostly in Tamil; The Sisters Brothers (2018) was an American western.

He doesn’t speak Tamil, English or Spanish. “What attracts me there is the musicality I hear in the dialogue, when I hear it in a foreign language. And that led me to the musical.

” The plot of Emilia Perez began to crystallise when he read Ecoute (Listen), a novel by Boris Razon, in 2018. “In that case the cartel boss was trying to escape from his life, not his gender,” Audiard has said. “But I’m fascinated by the paradox of this idea of the hyper-violent and hyper-masculine world, and the idea of wanting to transition.

” The characters were not psychologically developed, however, while his own first script, written as an opera libretto, was just a series of stylised set-pieces with characters who were “archetypal and one-dimensional”. That changed when he met the women who would embody those characters. He had imagined them as much younger: Manitas as 30, Rita as 25.

“But when I met Karla and then Zoe, I saw I had it all wrong,” he says. “What I needed were characters who had a past, who had things they needed to work through. So what was special, that came out of that, was that the actresses dictated what the characters would be.

” Zoe Saldana, as frustrated lawyer Rita, won this week’s Golden Globe award for best supporting actress. Gascón is 52, Saldana 46. Gascón also became Audiard’s adviser on matters trans.

“She helped me to a great extent in terms of the psychological component, but also with practical elements, such as, ‘What is an operation like?’ and ‘What is the recovery period like?’ ‘What kind of pain is it,’ and ‘What kind of joy is it as well?’” Gascón’s own transition followed a period of desperation. “I had to choose to live my own life,” she says. “And in order to do that, I had to get out of the darkness.

” After a role of Emilia’s intensity, she says she would happily play a Ninja Turtle; she doesn’t like to take herself too seriously. Not that Emilia Perez is short on fun; after several visits to Mexico, Audiard decided to shoot in Paris on sound stages where he could play with crazy lighting and decorative worlds that dissolve into each other, giving it the look of a carnival with songs woven through it. Selena Gomez in Emilia Perez: “I don’t know if anything would have prepared me for this.

” Credit: AP The songs themselves, by Clement Ducol and Camille, are eccentricities: in one particularly spectacular scene, the doctors and nurses in a Thai plastic surgery clinic abandon their scalpels to sing a paean to rhinoplasty. Gomez, mistress of dance pop, says she grew up on musicals. “But I don’t know if anything would have prepared me for this.

Even the choreography was stuff I’d never done before,” she says. Audiard says he could not have made this film 10 years ago. “Because it’s a movie that tackles contemporary issues.

And because, along with Emilia, the movie transitions. It switches forms. It goes from a narco movie to a telenovela to a musical.

” Within that surreal cinematic journey, all the characters are undergoing some kind of transformation. Rita gives up being an office doormat to join the criminal underworld; Jessi has to come to terms with losing her mob-wife status. “There is a principal question in the film and it is, How many lives do we have the right to live – and what is the price?’” says Audiard.

“We all know what life we have right now and we probably know the price of the life that we’re leading, but what if we completely change our life?” Ever the optimist, Gascón is convinced we can all change for the better. “Not necessarily to repair what had been done before because that’s really hard,” she says. “But we can do things differently.

We can live a good life.” Emilia Perez is in cinemas from January 16. The Academy Award nominations are announced on January 17.

.