TRANSPARENT
AMAZON, FRIDAY
The fourth season of the acclaimed series finds the Pfeffermans taking a spiritual and political journey into their family history. Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) travels to Israel to speak at a conference, makes a surprising discovery and is quickly followed by the rest of the family.
Four years ago, Jeffrey Tambor couldn’t have imagined he’d be getting his nails done with his daughter.
But that became his reality when he landed the “role of a lifetime” as transgender Maura Pfefferman in Amazon’s signature series Transparent, which returns Friday for a fourth season.
Tambor, 73, remembers his daughter, Evie, now 10, visiting the dramedy’s Los Angeles set. At first, he struggled to explain that his character — a retired professor formerly named Mort — came out as a woman to her wife (Judith Light) and three grown children in the show’s first season. But any uncertainty was short-lived.
“I remember her saying, ‘ Daddy, I get it. Your character is just more comfortable being a woman,’ ” Tambor says. “So there it is, from the mouth of babes. We had a mani-pedi together in the makeup room and she just loves it.”
That proud parenting moment is one example of how Transparent has helped spark conversation about trans stories and representation since its 2014 premiere. It has won eight Emmy Awards including outstanding lead actor (Tambor) and director (creator Jill Soloway). Season 4 shines a spotlight on Maura’s best trans friend, Davina (Alexandra Billings), and delves further into the Pfeffermans’ lineage, as Maura learns that she isn’t the only transgender member of her family.
In one of the season’s most emotional scenes, Maura says, “Why weren’t people more honest with me about the history in our family? Why didn’t people tell me? I could’ve lived a different life,” Tambor says. “That, to me, is interesting.”
But Maura is also at her most comfortable, and confident, in the latest batch of 10 half-hour episodes. After exclusively dating women, she is now in a satisfying relationship with a man, Donald (John Getz). She resumes teaching and accepts an invitation to lecture in Israel, where she’s joined by her daughter, Ali (Gaby Hoffman), whose own complicated relationship with gender is explored.
Ali goes on a journey of “experimentation in this search for identity, and some of it just trying to get to some truth that is underneath all of these biological and cultural labels that have defined her for so long,” Hoffmann says. The actress is continually in awe of Tambor, whose embrace of Maura with “such humanity, beauty, care and respect is the greatest gesture of advocacy.”
Tambor is now shooting the fifth season of cult comedy Arrested Development for Netflix, and appears in Fox’s The Orville, but carves out time to teach acting classes at an LGBTQ center in Los Angeles when he can. It’s part of his ongoing effort to foster and champion trans talent in Hollywood, after saying in last year’s Emmy acceptance speech that he “would not be unhappy if I was the last cisgendered man to play a transgendered woman.”
Soloway took it a step further, telling CNN last fall that she wouldn’t cast Tambor as Maura if she were to “start all over today.” But there are no hard feelings.
“I agree with that, absolutely,” Tambor says. “By virtue of Transparent itself, (the landscape) has changed. The timing of what we did was exactly right and I think ethically correct, and right now, we’d have to go a different way.”
Thanks in part to new dramas such as Fox’s Star, OWN’s Queen Sugar and TNT’s Claws, transgender characters now account for 16 (or 6%) of all regularly occurring LGBTQ characters on broadcast, cable and streaming, up from seven last year, according to GLAAD’s most recent “Where We Are Now” report. But Tambor would still like to see more trans storytellers behind the camera.
“It has to come from the studio on down,” Tambor says. “We need more Jill Soloways and people who say, ‘It goes like this.’ It’s happening, but it needs to happen faster.”