In 2015, Eddie Redmayne played Lili Ebe in The Danish Girl by Tom Hooper. This Danish artist is a trans woman who went down in history for having been the first to benefit from a sexual reassignment operation, in 1930.
This role had at the time earned the Briton an Oscar nomination for best actor. But, looking back, six years later, he says he would refuse to join the cast.
“No, I won’t accept the role,” he told the Sunday Times. I did it with the best of intentions but I believe it was a mistake. The 39-year-old comedian explains: “The wider discussions about the tensions surrounding the casting are due to the fact that a lot of people do not have a voice in the discussion. We have to get up to speed, otherwise we will continue to have these debates. “
Trans actors and actresses for trans characters
The debate in question is that of recruiting trans actors and actresses to play trans characters. Actress Noémie Merlant has thus been accused of playing a trans man in A Good Man, recently released in theaters.
“I understand this point of view, assured Noémie Merlant at Parisian. In order for there to be experienced trans actors, you have to give transgender people a chance to act, moreover in films that tell them. As the 50/50 movement is fighting for greater visibility for women via quotas, I think that we must also put pressure here to rebalance things. She also confided to our colleagues her embarrassment at seeing her physical transformation hailed as a feat in some critics. This “unconsciously perpetuates the idea that transidentity is a joke,” she argued. However, trans people do not disguise not. “