Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón on Selena Gomez, lesbian chemistry and making trans history

When making her new musical crime thriller Emilia Pérez in early 2023, trans Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón took method acting to a near-perilous new level.

“I really immersed myself in the character to the point that my personal stability became a bit at risk,” she says, through a translator who is stifling laughter at the star’s choice of words. “I got so lost in my character that I started to lose sight of where I stopped and my character began.”

In fairness, Gascón is the film’s eponymous lead; a cartel boss who fakes her own death in order to get gender reassignment surgery and become Emilia.

She then sets up an organisation committed to identifying cartel victims, in an attempt to absolve herself of guilt about her violent past.

With Emilia Pérez, Gascón, known primarily until now for roles in Spanish TV dramas and telenovelas, suddenly finds herself with Hollywood heavyweights: Star Trek’s Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, the fastidious lawyer who helps her access surgery, and pop superstar Selena Gomez is Jessi, Emilia’s fiery wife and mother of her two children, left behind after her sudden disappearance.

It’s an explosive, all-singing, all-dancing comedy-crime-drama-musical that includes a number about vaginoplasty. It’s as big and as bonkers as it sounds, and, frankly, Gascón had little choice but to get lost in the madness.

It’s paid off, somewhat. She can now count Madonna among her fans, while her name has been thrown into the ring as a potential best actress nominee at the Oscars.

Even the film’s detractors – and there are quite a few – have praised Gascón’s performance. Last month, Empire bashed director Jacques Audiard for “indulging in some of the laziest tropes of trans stories from cis writers”. But the lead actress, they said, turned in “an extraordinary performance”.

In May, Gascón, Gomez, Saldaña and Adriana Paz, who plays Epifanía, a woman supported by Emilia’s organisation and her eventual love interest, jointly won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

“For me, this is one of my best moments in my life. I know that I represent a minority in the society… they need something like that,” Gascón says, sitting beside Paz.

Winning that gong made history, as she became the first trans woman to be so-honoured at the festival. On stage, she dedicated her triumph to trans people “who suffer”, urging them to “keep faith that changing is possible,” while issuing a warning to bigots: “If you have made us suffer, it is time for you also to change.”

Today though, draped in a similar black gown to the one she wore on stage at Cannes, Gascón’s mission statement is more reserved. “All people need freedom, need respect, need to be the things that they want,” she says softly.

She and her co-stars didn’t discuss the gravity of a film like Emilia Pérez, with a trans lead, being given a wide release in cinemas and picked up by streaming behemoth Netflix.

“I don’t think that is necessary to be a conversation because we read this script and we know the dimension of this film,” she says. “This is [an] amazing film that makes history and [can] change a lot of things in this world.”

The cast did, however, spend time mulling over the fact that the film is almost entirely women-led. Except for Édgar Ramírez, who plays Jessi’s old flame Gustavo, Gascón is the only star to play a male lead. “When Manitas said, ‘I want to be a woman’, that is the most important moment in the film,” explains Gascón of her insistence that she herself portray Emilia pre-transition.

Co-star Paz chips in, noting: “We were so happy to have these characters because it’s not common. It’s getting better and better, but it was a masculine world. It’s good to have important and powerful feminine roles on the screen.”

On the whole, the four leads are fleshed out characters: fearless, flawed and vulnerable in equal measure.

Gascón is full of praise for her co-stars – “the best actresses in the world” – and how they swept her into their world of big-budget blockbusters. “It’s easy to work with the people [who] put soul in the work that they do,” she says.

“I kind of had the same relationship with them in person as I did on the screen,” she adds. “For example, I remember that every time I spoke with Selena, she would not really know what I was thinking or what was going on in my mind. She would look at me like: ‘What’s going on with you? I can’t really work out what you’re thinking’.”

It’s difficult to believe that Gascón could maintain Emilia’s occasionally terrifying persona off screen – in one scene, she screams for her children with visceral fury. I’m greeted with a warm handshake on arrival, a warm hug on exit, and later, at the London premiere, she gasps in recognition when she spots me. But her kooky approach to the character worked, as far as she’s concerned. “It was difficult, because I had to be very strict about it. But it was actually really fun, and I think it gave wonderful results.”

Paz is only in a few scenes, and almost all of them are with Gascón. They meet at Emilia’s guilt-inspired charity venture. Epifanía’s violent husband is dead and Emilia is a protective presence.

The inclusion of a lesbian love affair has caused little fanfare, which could reflect recent strides made in LGBTQ+ representation, although it’s most likely that because the film is so left-field, it makes sapphic intimacy look like a Hugh Grant chat-up line. Let’s wait until the depths of social media get hold of it: a lesbian romp in the middle of a trans musical drama is likely to be the straw that breaks US right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro’s back, while there will be discourse around the use of the word “d*ke”.

Paz and Gascón met in Mexico and Paris a few months before filming began, to rehearse their first on-screen scene together.

“We did this scene like 20 times, and when I arrived [in] Paris, she invited me to her apartment to have dinner,” Paz reveals of how the pair built chemistry. “That was great because we drank, we took a little bit of wine, and we were like: ‘Oh yes’, and it broke the ice… we were lucky because we bonded so quickly, and now we are friends and I love her so much. That made things easier and it was good for the characters too.”

The masses have had a starkly mixed reaction to Emilia Pérez compared with the film-industry specialists who awarded it the jury prize at Cannes. On social media and in some critic reviews, it’s been dubbed “cis nonsense” for the way it underscores physical transition as a necessity to affirm Emilia’s gender identity. There’s a questionable reference to her being ‘half male’, and the story of transitioning to obscure a violent past sounds like catnip for the right-wing press. 

But Gascón, speaking at the London premiere, expressed her hope that the film is more empowering that othering. “This is the message,” she said, addressing the community. “Yes, we can.”

Emilia Pérez is streaming on Netflix now.

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