HIGHLIGHTS Tackling a story about transgender kids is a great responsibility

Butterfly follows separated parents divided over how to support their child, who was gender assigned male at birth but has identified as a girl from a young age. Star Anna Friel talks to about the sensitive subject matter, her experience of filming and getting to know the trans community into absolute disarray because they from casting, to working the scripts, and don’t know what to do. And most people deciding how it was going to be shot. don’t know what to do.” “My first thing was, ‘Well, why can’t Anna is a mum herself, to 13-year-old we get a real transgender child (to play Gracie, who she had with her ex, Harry Max/Maxine)?”’ she says. Potter actor David Thewlis. “I was educated on the fact that it “I said, ‘This story is going to teach me would really damage them, because in something,”’ she recalls of reading the our story you’ve got to go from boy to script. “Because if this was my daughter girl and you’d be asking a transgender Gracie, I don’t know how I would deal girl to go back to being a boy.” with it. And I don’t know what my Discussing the challenges of the views are because I’m so illinformed. casting process, Anna adds: “Being a child actress myself, I wanted to make “They (the production company) them feel as comfortable in the room as said, ‘Well surely that’s the possible because I know they (auditions) reason to do this? That’s what we are daunting even at this age. want. We want people to “We’d go out and meet their parents, question, open their eyes and and think, ‘What effect is that going to not be ignorant’.” have on them, and are you ready to take Filming the show was this on?”’ certainly an intense Anna’s first professional acting job experience for both Anna and came aged 13, in Channel 4’s GBH (she her co-star Emmett, as they played the daughter of Michael Palin’s immersed themselves in the character), and she’s positive about what trans community. roles are yet to come. It was upsetting visiting “There was a time of thinking in your Mermaids – a charity that head that, in your 40s, there’s less helps children and women’s roles available,” she says. “But families who are dealing we’ve seen in the face of media that you with transgender issues don’t just become boring and – where they heard uninteresting because you turn 40. shocking stories of bullying.

“To be called a ‘tranny’ and a ‘manboy’ or ‘boy-girl’, it’s just awful, for any child. But it’s more about the parents of some of the other children: ‘We don’t want them in our class, they might do something to our child’,” says Anna.

“Adults were being spat at and having death threats and you think, ‘They’re already going through utter trauma and you’re just making this 10 times worse’.”

The star was asked if she wanted to be a co-producer on Butterfly, meaning she was involved from the very beginning,