Giving wings:
A ground-breaking British drama about a boy who wants to live life as a girl starts on TVNZ 1 this week. Actress Anna Friel (right) talks about what attracted her to the role. James Rampton reports.
Ground-breaking drama tackles transgender issues.
Anna Friel freely admits that when she took it on, she did not know that much about the subject at the core of her new British drama Butterfly.
Penned by Bafta Award-winning writer Tony Marchant, the series centres on the different ways two parents – Vicky (played by Friel) and Stephen (Emmett J. Scanlan) – react when their 11 year old, Max (Callum Booth-Ford), starts to identify as a girl.
The actress, who is herself mother to 13-year-old Gracie, reflects that the idea of learning more about this topic was one of her main motivations in accepting the role.
“I said, ‘This story is going to teach me something’. Because if this was my daughter Gracie, I don’t know how I would deal with it.
“The debate starts, ‘At what age should one listen to the child?’
“But when it comes to a point of self-harming and they’re saying, ‘I’m born in the wrong body’, you have to listen.”
And, she confesses, “I don’t know what my views are because I’m so ill-informed. The production company said, ‘Well, surely that’s the reason to do this. That’s what we want. We want people to question, open their eyes and not be ignorant’.”
Friel has form in pioneering TV drama. In 1994, on the soap Brookside, she and Nicola Stephenson grabbed headlines with the first lesbian kiss to be aired in the UK before 9pm.
The actress expresses the hope that Butterfly might have a similar effect and help alter certain preconceptions.
“I keep going back to 25 years ago when I was on Brookside and people talked about ‘dyke, lezzer’. Now no one would blink an eyelid about that scene. No one would even think about that at all. It’s the norm.
“With any new topic that you’re dealing with, you’ve got to think time changes everything. We all talk more, we discuss things.”
Friel, who has also starred in Pushing Daisies and Marcella, reveals that she felt under some
pressure approaching Butterfly, especially as this issue hasn’t been addressed yet in a mainstream British TV drama.
So the actress went for advice to the charity Mermaids, which helps counsel transgender children and their families. Friel recalls that, “We met all these wonderful families, who were saying, ‘Please tell our story and tell it properly’.
“I said, ‘Do you not feel represented?’ And they said, ‘No’. People have so many comments and opinions, but they actually can be somewhat ill-informed.”
Friel carries on by underlining that, “To tackle something like this is a great responsibility. But I think the producers of Butterfly have gone at the script really cleverly because it’s looking at it from every single person’s side of it. “Butterfly explores what would happen to a regular, normal, working, middle-class family that are just thrown into absolute disarray because they don’t know what to do. And most people wouldn’t know what to do.”
The drama will certainly help to clarify some aspects of this issue, particularly in the complex field of language. Friel muses that, “What we’ve got to be really clear about and educate, is that a sex change is something very, very different to transitioning, and we shouldn’t misuse that. The language surrounding this is really complex and difficult. It’s ever-changing and it’s quite complicated.”
The actress proceeds to consider what sort of audience might watch Butterfly.
“I think a younger demographic will appreciate it. There are certain older generations who are going to have an opinion and they don’t want it changed, but this isn’t about changing people’s opinions.
“It’s a drama. It’s not an issue drama just about transgender. It’s about a family. It’s a love story. It’s about a normal family getting through life and what happens when this is thrown into the mix. It’s not, ‘You must think this’. It’s about opening debate and asking questions and educating.”
Friel has been acting since she made her debut in 1991 as the 13-year-old daughter of Michael Palin’s character in GBH. Ageism still stalks the industry, but Friel says as she has grown older, she has come to fear it less and less. “There was a time when you’d think that, in your 40s, there would be fewer women’s roles available. But we’ve seen that you don’t just become boring and uninteresting because you turn 40.
“In fact, you actually become more interesting. You’ve got more life and story to tell.”