That is actor Eddie Redmayne in the photo above femulating in the film The Danish Girl in which he plays Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, a Danish artist who was an early sex reassignment surgery patient.
As in the past, whenever a non-transgender person gets the role of a transgender person, there is a hue and cry from the transgender community complaining that a transgender actor/actress should have gotten the role. And so it goes with the non-trans Redmayne portraying Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe.
I have no complaint about hiring a non-trans person to play a trans role. If I was casting a film, I would want the best actors/actresses to be in my film whether or not their personal life experience matched that of the film’s characters. If there was a match that would be icing on the cake, but if not, that’s where the ability of an actor to play a role takes over.
And as a member of the audience, I want my money’s worth; I want to see the best performances that money can buy up on the big screen, not an amateurish production featuring authentic transpeople or cowboys or cops or snipers. Have you ever sat through a film featuring any of Warhol’s trans trio, Candy, Holly, and Jackie? I rest my case.
My complaint about the casting of transgender roles is using females to play transwomen and vice versa, using males to play transmen. For the sake of authenticity, male actors should play transwomen and female actresses should play transmen.
Who is a more authentic transwoman: the pretty and petite Felicity Huffman in Transamerica or the large of frame, six-foot-one Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent? The audience has to suspend disbelief, i.e., that Huffman is a cisgender woman in order to accept her as a pre-op transsexual, whereas it is easy for the audience to buy into Tambor’s masculine roots.
On the other hand, if any film company decides to do Femulate: The Movie, then all bets are off!
Wearing Max Mara.
Actor Peter Sellers in the 1962 British film Lolita.
