From Barbie to Talk to Me, trans actors’ visibility is at a tipping point – and about time too
The last few weeks have quietly seen a significant and mostly unremarked flowering of onscreen trans visibility, to the extent we might consider cinema is at a tipping point for trans acting. In Barbie, Talk to Me and Red, White and Royal Blue, three films on worldwide release at the same time offer vastly different declensions of trans representation at a time when trans rights are being rolled back around the world. This variety of depictions, from billion-banking blockbusters to breakout hits and cult concerns, has raised few eyebrows from audiences, giving a few clues as to cinema’s ability to provide hope as to public views on trans people.
That hope is needed. Just last week it was reported that the A24 horror film Talk to Me, in which a crucial supporting role is taken – and brilliantly performed – by transmasculine actor Zoe Terakes, had been banned in Kuwait because of Terakes’ gender identity. In an Instagram post, the actor hit out at the decision, saying: “Our film doesn’t actually ever mention my transness, or my queerness. I am a trans actor who happened to get the role. I’m not a theme. I am a person.”
This is true, although it possibly undersells the canny and exciting ways in which Talk to Me plays with gender through Terakes’ character Hayley. In the film, Hayley is a brat and a bully, inciting the main character (a teenage girl, Mia, played by Sophie Wilde) to undergo a dangerous supernatural experience. What’s fascinating is that this character is a stock horror film character, typically played by a young man – for instance, Matthew Lillard’s loud and boorish character in Scream. In Talk to Me, Hayley’s gender identity is not commented on by other characters and is not immediately obvious, leading to a pleasing displacement of expectations and a subtle rewiring of this horror movie’s configuration. In a film about young female trauma, Hayley is a complicating factor, a free agent whose motives and behaviour are coded as male but who refuses to be so easily categorised.
Interestingly, although Barbie has also been banned in Kuwait, apparently for its promotion of “ideas and beliefs that are alien to the Kuwaiti society and public order”, the country’s head of the committee for cinematic