TRANS CHARACTER IN MAINSTREAM
Actress Laverne Cox co-stars in ‘Doubt.’
Laverne Cox always wanted to be a TV lawyer.
Cox finally gets her days in court with CBS’s “Doubt,” which premiered on Wednesday.
“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 defense 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.
Where Caitlyn Jenner’s now-canceled E! docu-series “I Am Cait” and Amazon’s dramedy “Transparent” have featured their trans characters, real and imagined, as the disruptive centers of their universes, Fox’s musicdriven drama “Star,” created by Lee Daniels and Tom Donaghy, includes a character, Cotton (Amiyah Scott), whose transition-based conflict with her mother, Carlotta (Queen Latifah), is only one of many storylines.
The second season of Showtime’s “Billions,” which began on Sunday, Feb. 19, features Asia Kate Dillon (“Orange Is the New Black”) as Taylor, a brilliant intern at Axe Capital whose money-crunching abilities catch the attention of hedge fund founder Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis). Taylor, like Dillon, identifies as neither a man nor a woman. Which requires some linguistic gymnastics.
“My pronouns are they, theirs, and them,” Taylor tells Axe in their first meeting.
Of “Doubt,” Rater said, “We wanted to create a character who is transgender on TV, but it wasn’t about their transition, or their coming out. 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.”
Scott, who plays Cotton, Carlotta’s trans daughter on “Star,” and who is trans herself, is a newcomer to acting, though she did appear briefly on Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Atlanta.”
“We found Amiyah on Instagram,” said “Star” cocreator Donaghy.
“Lee (Daniels) said, ‘I want to bring her out to L.A. and audition her.’ And I think it was her first audition, and she walked in, and . Lee’s spirit and her spirit connected immediately, and he knew she was the one,” said Pamela Oas Williams, another of the show’s executive producers.
Making Cotton relatable wasn’t the priority, Donagh said.
Daniels, he said, “grew up with trans people. This is to some extent based on his cousin’s beauty shop in West Philadelphia,” where some of the stylists were trans and gay people.
“So we’re not here to represent so much as to try and tell a unique story, especially about a black trans woman who comes from poverty. How does such a person complete their transition when they don’t have the means?”