Laverne Cox plays trans lawyer in new CBS show
‘But now what?’ actress says of the character on Doubt inspired by producers’ lives
PASADENA, CALIF.— Laverne Cox always wanted to be a TV lawyer.
Cox, who this season also starred as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Fox’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, finally gets her days in court with the premiere on Wednesday of CBS’s Doubt.
“I think there’s inherent drama in the adversarial nature of the courtrooms . . . It’s very theatrical. And I’m a drama queen,” said the transgender actress, who made her mark in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black as trans inmate Sophia Burset.
A legal drama from former Grey’s Anatomy producers Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, Doubt stars Grey’s veteran Katherine Heigl as a criminal defence lawyer who falls for her client (Steven Pasquale, Rescue Me), a pediatric surgeon who may or may not have killed his girlfriend 24 years earlier.
Beyond that smart-woman/foolish-choices scenario lies a show about a firm in which Cox’s character, Cameron Wirth, is just another Ivy League-educated lawyer.
“Yes, she’s trans. But now what?” Cox told a small group of reporters last month during the Television Critics Association’s winter meetings.
“It’s sort of like a ‘who cares,’ really. And I think having something like that on television, it helps the public to become familiar with that, to become comfortable with that . . . Years before we saw a black president in real life, we saw black presidents on television.”
Cox’s character, who grew out of the married Phelan and Rater’s experiences as parents of a transgender son — actor Tom Phelan has played a trans teen on Freeform’s The Fosters — is just one sign that television is transitioning in its treatment of people who don’t conform to gender norms.
The second season of Showtime’s Billions, which begins Sunday, features Asia Kate Dillon ( Orange Is the New Black) as Taylor, a brilliant in- tern at Axe Capital whose moneycrunching abilities catch the attention of hedge-fund founder Bobby (Axe) Axelrod (Damian Lewis). Taylor, like Dillon, identifies as neither a man nor a woman.
When auditions were held for the character, executive producer David Levien and fellow showrunner Brian Koppelman didn’t know “that that’s the life Asia leads as well,” Levien said.
Doubt’s Cox, who appeared on the cover of Time in 2014 beside the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point,” was better known to producers Phelan and Rater.
“When we conceived of the part,” Phelan said, “we knew that Laverne was on Orange” and expected to have to do a nationwide talent search to cast Cameron, only to get a call from Cox’s agent, who said, ‘This is Laverne’s part.’ ”
Cox, he said, “flew herself to L.A. and said, ‘I want to read for you guys to prove to you that this is my part.’ ”
“We wanted to create a character who is transgender on TV, but it wasn’t about their transition or their coming out,” Rater said.
“I always say, our son is transgender, but . . . he’s still funny and smart and sloppy, all the things he was before he came out as transgender.”
Cameron Wirth will have a love life, something that delights Cox, who’s played more than her share of sex workers.
“What was fun about it was that we were shooting and, oh, my God, I’m flirting with a man and I’m not trying to get him to pay me. On TV,” she said, laughing.
“I’m a huge flirt in real life.”