Gender identity at core of two upcoming films
Eddie Redmayne and Elle Fanning are joining Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox in educating pop culture about gender identity. In director Tom Hooper’s The
Danish Girl (in theaters Nov. 27), Redmayne stars as Lili Elbe, an icon in the LGBT community and the first person known to receive gender-reassignment surgery, in 1930. In a more contemporary tale, Fanning plays a teenage girl whose family has trouble coming to grips with the fact that he identifies as a boy in About Ray, expected in theaters this fall. Both movies are featured at Toronto International Film Festival.
As with his Oscar-winning role as physicist Stephen Hawking in last year’s The Theory of Every
thing, Redmayne acknowledges feeling “great responsibility” depicting the transition of Einar Wegener, an artist uncomfortable in his skin, to the freer Lili.
The emotional story was the most complicated part of it, yet one key to understanding the character was a drawing of Lili when she was living as Einar, wearing a rigid suit with a huge, high starched collar.
“You can see her features, despite this masculine attire,” Redmayne says. “And you felt like she had constructed this exoskeleton on herself, and it was about finding out how to unravel that.”
But the actor also found talking to trans women a help in finding parallels to Lili’s journey. One described to Redmayne how Halloween was amazing for her because she could dress up, go out and feel as though she belonged.
“One night when she was dressed as a woman but before having come out, this man came up and started to talking to her,” Redmayne recalls. She experienced “fear mixed with exhilaration of blending mixed with ‘What if this man doesn’t realize, and what’s the danger?’ ”
Fanning found a wealth of knowledge in talking with transgender teen boys. They would tell the actress small details, like what brand of chest binder they wore, to help her performance.
“They were so brave to tell a complete stranger like me what they’ve gone through,” Fanning says. “You can’t imagine how painful it must be to not feel accepted. There’s no option in it — it’s just who they are.”
Jenner has opened up the conversation on gender identity to a mass audience, Fanning says. But with high suicide rates and continued discrimination and violence toward transgender people, society has a way to go, Redmayne says — even nearly 100 years on from Lili’s story.
The cisgender community — those who identify with their own sex — has a responsibility to understand and learn to be allies, Redmayne says.
“I was ignorant before,” he says. “It’s been several years of education, and my education continues.”