Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Next week, Karla Sofia Gascón is very likely to be nominated for an Oscar in the best-actress category, which would guarantee her a spot in the Hollywood history books as the first openly trans actress to come anywhere close to that list. Gascón transitioned in 2018.
In Jacques Audiard’s mad, magnificent musical Emilia Perez , which this week took out the Golden Globes for best foreign language film and best comedy or musical, she plays both the imposingly glamorous title character and the man she used to be: a Mexican drug cartel supremo called Manitas del Monte. Who would have guessed? Lounging on a broken couch out in the desert with his fellow thugs, Manitas seems as macho as a bull. Gascón, on the other hand, is every inch a diva.
Born in Madrid, she spent 10 years starring in daytime soap operas in Mexico, where she started off playing men. “I want to be very clear,” says Audiard, whose gold-plated French arthouse career has included The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012). “If I had not found Karla Sofia, I would have had a hard time making this movie.
” Karla Sofia Gascón plays a Mexican drug lord undergoing gender affirming surgery. He was initially reluctant, he says, to ask her to pretend to be a man again. It was Gascón who insisted on playing Emilia as a dual role.
“As an actress, it would’ve been so ugly for me to say.
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