How the Unknown Trans Star of ‘Emilia Pérez’ Became a Controversial Oscar Favorite

Karla Sofía Gascón reads the hate. All of it. Alongside the flood of praise for her lead performance in the late-breaking Oscar favorite Emilia Pérez, a steady trickle of vitriol has flowed in the gutters of social media. When we meet in her native Madrid, Gascón takes out her phone to show me messages she has screenshotted and marked up. “I hope you die before you make another movie,” spewed one X user. After beloved Spanish actress Marisa Paredes passed away a few days before our interview, another anonymous online wit mused, “I wish you could have died instead of her.” She’s also received death threats in Mexico, where Emilia Pérez is set and where she has spent much of her professional life: “I was told I would be found dismembered in a bag.” 

Should she be nominated for an Oscar, which most pundits expect, Gascón is poised to become the first transgender performer to win. (Only one has been nominated, Juno’s Elliot Page, who revealed his gender identity only afterward.) Not since 2017’s Moonlight has an Academy Award front-runner been so well suited to trigger Donald Trump’s base: A Mexican cartel kingpin named Manitas (Gascón) hires a careerist corporate lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help him transition to a new life as a woman, fake his death and resettle his wife (Selena Gomez) and kids in Switzerland. And it’s a musical. 

The undisguised transphobia that became a pillar of Trump’s second presidential campaign (we all remember the ads) is a global phenomenon, Gascón hastens to note, one that has grown in proportion to the cultural progress of trans issues. “There is a part of society that lives off hate, that lives off selling hate, and there is another part that wants to live in hope, with the same rights, all of us in peace and respect,” she says. “I always see it as a struggle between light and dark.” (A practicing Buddhist for more than a decade, Gascón would hit on similar themes in an emotional speech from the Golden Globes stage on Jan. 5, after Emilia Pérez won the last prize of the night.) “The brighter the light is, the darker the shadows are. And I am public enemy number one right now in the world for many people.” 

I ask why she bothers to read all the filth, to keep it on her phone?

“I’ve gotten used to it,” she says in Castilian Spanish, distinct from the Mexican accent she puts on in the film. “In fact, I love it. It’s my gasoline to then tell the people of the light: ‘You have won.’ The more people hate me, the more insulting messages they send, the more I say, ‘Thank you,’ and the more I’m going to enjoy this moment.” The bigotry, she says, has only fired up her competitive instinct: “I’ve developed a taste for revenge.”

Gasoline is an apt metaphor. The 52-year-old actress arrived on a high-octane Yamaha MT-07 motorcycle from Alcobendas, the Madrid suburb where she lives with her wife of 30 years, Marisa Gutierrez, and their 14-year-old daughter, Victoria. As she strutted across a sun-swept plaza in her leather jacket and fur-lined boots in search of a quiet café where we could record the interview, she showed me a picture she took on her ride down of an Emilia Pérez poster on the side of a newsstand. Above the faces of Gascón and co-stars Saldaña and Gomez is the name of the vendor: Good News. “It’s a promising omen, no?”

Gascón has already made history by winning the best actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival that she shared with Saldaña, Gomez and Adriana Paz. The victory prompted a reactionary backlash in France, most prominently from far-right politician Marion Maréchal, niece of the National Rally standard-bearer Marine Le Pen and granddaughter of the movement’s late founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. “So a man has won best actress,” Maréchal tweeted. “Progress for the left means the erasure of women and mothers.” Gascón wasted no time in counterpunching, suing Maréchal over a “sexist insult on the basis of gender identity.” (“It’s with the lawyers now,” she says. “It’s going to be a long process.” She intends to give any indemnities to trans rights organizations.) The actress says she is bracing herself for “Señora Rowling” to weigh in. 

As she speaks, laughter swallows the ends of her sentences. Whether it’s a nervous tic or an overflow of joviality is unclear. It happens when she describes her first meeting with Emilia Pérez writer-director Jacques Audiard in central Paris in January 2022. “It was as if I’d entered a store, bought an oil lamp, rubbed it and out came a genie,” she says. “He would have said, ‘Hi, I’m Jacques, what are your three wishes?’ and I would have said, ‘I want to make the best film in the history of cinema, I want to be the best actress in the history of cinema, and I want us to do very well.’ ”

It took Audiard several years to find his way to Gascón. In the first four or five drafts of his script (which he initially planned to stage as an opera), all the characters were far younger. Manitas/Emilia was just 30 years old. “I was looking for actresses in Los Angeles and a good amount in Mexico,” says the director. “And they were wonderful, but it just wasn’t working.” Eventually, his music supervisor, Pierre-Marie Dru, told him he had seen a trans actress in Spain. “I said, ‘Why not?’ ” recalls Audiard. He quickly realized she was the one. “First of all, she’s very funny, she’s very inventive and she already had a certain idea of her character when she arrived.” 

The filmmaker had seen Saldaña read for the lawyer part around the same time, “and it was a real shock. The actresses weren’t 20. They were 40, 45, 50. And it changed everything, absolutely everything about the movie.” But it worked. 

As in every genie story, Gascón’s came with a catch. The monkey’s paw in this scenario was that she had to sing and dance. “I said to myself, ‘Well, this is going to be absurd,’ ” she recalls. “There are other people who are much more qualified than me.”

Her voice, by her own account, was “broken” as a result of hormone therapy that left her with a sultry rasp and limited range. As for cutting a rug, she says, “I’d always felt like RoboCop when it came time to dance, to move my body. Very Terminator.” 

Audiard didn’t mind. “The fact that different actors had different lyrical and choreographical abilities felt very natural,” he says. If anything, he found it fitting that a hardened gangster wouldn’t bust a move: The modern noir master thought of the Norman Mailer novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance. 

In the end, Gascón convinced herself that she, and perhaps no one else, could find the essence of Emilia Pérez. “I wouldn’t sing well, and I wouldn’t be the best dancer,” but “I understood that this character was for me.” 

It helped that the musical Audiard had in mind was not exactly of the Busby Berkeley variety. At that point, Gascón had only seen one of the celebrated auteur’s hard-edged movies — the English-language Western The Sisters Brothers — and didn’t even realize it was his. She hadn’t watched The Beat My Heart Skipped, the magisterial prison drama A Prophet or the equally bleak Palme d’Or winner Dheepan. She had, however, read his script for Emilia Pérez, and she had notes. 

“The most important thing for me was the motivation” for the protagonist’s sex change. Audiard’s original script, she says, treated Manitas’ transition as a screwball premise, an elaborate disguise allowing him to disappear and evade the authorities that the character only later grows into. Gascón told Audiard it’d be far more interesting, and truer to life, to have Manitas genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria. 

Audiard long had imagined an internal struggle within Emilia between man and woman, demon and angel. “I now realize it was a profound psychological error,” he says. “She’s a powerful educator. She led me to understand that, well before transitioning, we’re already what we want to become.”

Likewise, Gascón felt that Emilia’s sexuality was ill-defined. Emilia’s first post-op sexual encounter, for example, was originally with a man she picked up on the street. “It was a very funny scene,” Gascón says, “but it changed the whole perspective of the character and turned her into someone far more promiscuous.” The notion that Emilia’s sexual proclivities would abruptly change along with her gender expression did not correspond to Gascón’s own experience. 

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about my script?” Audiard told Gascón, she recalls with a laugh.

Again, the filmmaker invited the feedback: “She considerably softened her character, made her more likable and more empathetic.” 

***

“I’ve known since the age of 4,” says Gascón. “I would see other girls and say, ‘I want to be like that.’ Or I saw a girl on television and identified more with that character.” But to say as much to her parents, brothers or friends would have been “absurd” during the 1970s and ’80s. 

“The first things I was given were pistols, a machine gun, a bow and arrow, a soccer ball,” Gascón says. “If you looked too closely at a doll, people would say, ‘No, that’s for girls, it’s very bad.’ And if you cried, they would tell you that you’re a girl, as if it were bad to cry. That was the period in which I grew up.” 

Her own childhood could have been the stuff of an Audiard movie. Violence was always around the corner. “I come from the world of the streets, even if it wasn’t the Bronx,” she says. “It was a place and a time in which you had to survive a little, and you had to be stronger so they wouldn’t beat you up at school.” 

She found refuge in video games — particularly a pre-Nintendo 8-bit system called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum — and in playacting with her younger brother, Roberto. Together they’d turn the sound off on the TV and dub the characters’ voices, or record their own pretend radio programs. Their parents dismissed this as a silly pastime and insisted they focus on their studies instead. “Parents never know how important something is going to be in the future of a child,” she notes.

Gascón did. At 16, she decided she wanted to act and dropped off headshots at a casting agency. She soon got calls for background parts: “Applauding, brandishing a spear, saying ‘good afternoon,’ whatever it is an extra does.” The time on set gave her a practical education in filmmaking and an enduring sympathy for extras. “I recognize their work because I know what it feels like when you think not even God pays attention to you,” she says. “I always want to give them a message of encouragement and tell them I was there, so don’t lose hope.”

When Gascón was 20, her older brother, Gregorio, died in a skiing accident. The pain of the loss is still raw decades later. “When something like that happens, you lose faith in life,” she says, her eyes suddenly glistening with tears. “You start to question everything you were taught to believe. I was filled with a rancor against life itself.” 

Even as she wrestled with grief and her own identity, Gascón at last began to find regular employment, much of it outside of Spain. She spent time in London, working on a BBC series meant to teach Spanish to English speakers, though she never managed to learn English herself — “because I’m ignorant,” she says with a laugh. In her mid-20s, she married her longtime girlfriend, Gutierrez, and the two moved to Milan, where Gascón voiced puppets for children’s shows. Gascón says she was asked to follow members of the company to the U.S. to work with the Muppets — including “Gustavo” the frog, or Kermit, as he’s more widely known. Despite the dearth of non-puppet work, she declined the offer. She had a different vision for her life. 

Gascón finally broke through as a soap opera heartthrob, first in Spain with a recurring role in the late ’90s series El Súper and later in the telenovela-mad nation of Mexico. “The first sequence that I recorded,” Gascón recalls, “I asked an actress who was there, an older lady, ‘Did they tell you when we can rehearse?’ And she looked at me like this and said, ‘Rehearse?’ ” 

It’s difficult for any actor, no matter how gifted, to transcend the ludicrous plots, the porny production values and the cheap synth scores of mid-2000s Mexican soaps, but Gascón gave it her all. Nowhere did she do so more flamboyantly than in Corazón salvaje, in which she played a guitar-swinging, flamenco-dancing bearded gypsy with hoop earrings, come-hither eyes and an Aladdin vest. Gascón bucked against the show’s accelerated production schedules and one-and-done takes. She refused to wear the earpiece through which the actors were fed their lines. “I had to make an extra effort to learn by heart the 40-odd scenes we had to get through every day,” she says. “And because I didn’t listen to the instructions they gave me, we were in constant conflict.” The laugh again: “But my sequences were wonderful.”

In Mexico, feeling confined in her own body, she sought release. She began to paint and write, both quite well. Her wife and daughter had remained in Spain, and Gascón, who has made no secret of her extramarital relationships, began a long love affair with a female Mexican senator. For the actress, the romance coincided with a period of “great suffering.” She had told the senator early on about her desire to live as a woman. She gathered the courage to act on it only to be abandoned. “The person I was with told me she would help me, and it wasn’t so,” she says. “She told me she would be with me forever, and it wasn’t so.” 

Gascón felt the urge to end her life. The thought wouldn’t leave her alone. “I started thinking how I would do it,” she says. But rather than carry out the plan, she decided to write about it, experiencing suicide on the page first as a form of catharsis. “At the very least, before dying, I’d have written everything down,” she says. She kept writing until she completed a book, a magical realist memoir in which the narrator, hanging from a belt in a loft apartment, relives her own life, her childhood, her dysphoria, her brother’s death, her lover’s betrayal — “How it hurts to go, more from the going than from the pain.” The book culminates in a fight between dragons. “All of it is true,” Gascón says. 

Karsia: An Extraordinary Story, as the book is titled, was published in 2018 under her birth name, Carlos Gascón, by which she was known at the time. It doubled as an announcement of her new identity. By then, she had completed much of her transition — all of it, she emphasizes, paid for by Spanish government health care — and the back cover shows her in full splendor, signed “Karla Sofía Gascón.” 

Gutierrez, her wife, welcomed Gascón back home. “She’s always known who I am,” Gascón told Spanish newspaper El Mundo, “but turned to stone when she saw me as a woman.” Gascón’s brother Roberto burst into laughter when he first heard the name she chose after her transition. Her mother, meanwhile, was not surprised. Gascón had told her about her intentions long before. “And she said, ‘I believe you, because you always do what you say.’ ” 

***

In Emilia Pérez, as in Karsia and Gascón’s own experience, transitioning is associated with death. Emilia wakes up in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages, quasi-mummified. Her previous incarnation, the drug lord Manitas del Monte, is reported dead. Gascón inhabits both roles so convincingly that many have assumed they’re played by two different actors. (Prosthetics help.) She gives Manitas an eerie whisper, an echo of Don Corleone, evoking a coiled snake capable of sudden violence. He is a fearsome presence even though he never picks up a gun or raises a hand. “It reminds me a little of what Steven Spielberg did with Jaws,” says Gascón. “It was scarier when the shark was going to arrive than when it was in front of you.”

Gascón takes issue with the notion, advanced by interviewers and commentators, that playing Manitas required her to somehow go back to a previous state of being, a transition in reverse. “When they ask me what it was like to return to that part, I say I have not returned,” she explains. “I have never been Manitas, I have never been this person. I have only gotten into the skin of this character and I have given him my soul so that he has life. In the end, for an actor or an actress, the most important thing in this world is to have lived and experienced all kinds of things. But it is obvious that when you play a murderer, you don’t have to have murdered anyone.” 

The role nonetheless required Gascón to call upon a memory of masculinity. “I have noticed the difference between what testosterone gave me and what estrogen gives me,” she says. “Testosterone made me a much more aggressive person than I am; estrogen makes me a more sensitive person.”

For a while now, there has been a debate about whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should introduce gender-neutral acting categories, as some other awards-granting bodies have. But while a nomination for Gascón would be a watershed moment for AMPAS, it would likely not force the organization to rethink its binary classification. “In the end, the Academy and the festivals will decide to change their rules depending on what happens in society,” she says. “But for me, it would have caused me tremendous discomfort if they had created a special category. I would feel very bad because I do not feel strange or special. I have simply made a transition,” she says between sips of tea and bites of a chocolate palmier. “I am a lady, and I am 52 years old.” And to the voices who’ve suggested she should be considered for best actor since she plays a man for the first half of the film, she answers, “It’s as if you told Dustin Hoffman when he did Tootsie that he had to be nominated for best actress.”

And anyway, Manitas was the easy part. The fun part. The more outlandish the role, the freer an actor can be, says Gascón. Playing Emilia, who finds love and dedicates her life to helping the victims of cartel violence as a form of repentance, demanded a subtler touch. 

Despite her inexperience at the top of the call sheet, she realized that she had to take command. “In this film, I had power as a protagonist that I had not had in other places,” she says. “So there were two ways to take this film. When you face world-class Hollywood stars, you can either approach them as a fan — like, ‘Wow, sorry, excuse me, forgive me for speaking to you,’ etc., etc. — or you can say, ‘I admire you, I adore you, and I respect you, but now we are going to make a movie together and we’re going to do what we have to do.’ ” 

She retained Emilia’s imperiousness and menace between takes: “There were moments in which I treated Zoe Saldaña as if she were my assistant and Selena as if she were my wife. So they were very confused by me.”

Emilia Pérez was filmed mostly in a Paris studio. Mirroring Emilia’s own sense of isolation, Gascón spent the months-long shoot in self-exile, declining invitations to socialize with the cast and crew, including one outing to a Beyoncé concert. “I was lonely because I had no one,” she says. “No family, nothing. The truth is that it was very good for the character, but it was very bad for me.” 

When production wrapped, Gascón shared a photo on Facebook of her at dinner with her beaming castmates Saldaña, Gomez and Édgar Ramírez. (That she favors Facebook, of all social networks, is perhaps the best indicator of her age.) “Forgive me for my desperation,” she wrote. “For how much of a beast I can be in life. It was a luxury to share the screen with each one of you. A true privilege.”

Gomez says Gascón had no reason to apologize for her stubborn dedication to character. On the contrary, “I thought that [her method] actually helped me. I was scared to take this project on. I was a mess. We had really powerful moments where we would both just feel tender and personal.” 

There also were more unsettling moments, such as the scene in which Emilia throws Jessi (Gomez) onto a bed in a fit of jealous rage. “It was really intense,” Gomez says. “I did feel scared. Not of Karla, but when I watched that scene, I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ I freeze completely. My body does. And it felt like a natural reaction. She really challenged me. She is able to fully transform herself.”

Adds Gomez: “I can’t wait to watch all the nominations because I’m going to lose it for her. She is worthy of every accolade for doing this movie.”

***

Gascón is settling into Hollywood stardom nicely. She’s been invited to sit front row at Saint Laurent, which produced the movie and dressed her for several of her events. Just the night before, she was hanging out with her neighbor and Alcobendas’ most famous export, Penélope Cruz, who still lives there with husband Javier Bardem. Gascón is suddenly fielding the kind of offers she could never have dreamt of just a few years ago. Pedro Almodóvar has told her he wants to work with her. She soon will begin shooting Las Malas, a dark Spanish-language fairy tale directed by the Academy Award–winning co-writer of Birdman, Armando Bó. And now, having accompanied Gascón across the world on the festival circuit and befriended her glamorous co-stars, even her daughter, Victoria, is harboring cinematic ambitions. “She’s the improved version of me,” says Gascón. 

With notoriety comes scrutiny. Emilia Pérez has taken flak not just from the reactionary right but also from young online progressive circles, and Gascón is glad to take both on. The film has been criticized for trafficking in clichés and gender stereotypes, for equating transitioning with death, for presenting it as a kind of moral redemption, for making older cisgender audiences feel virtuous by endorsing it, among other objections. An article in Vox sums it up: “Could a movie musical about a trans Mexican drug lord be this awards season’s Crash?”

Gascón doesn’t hold back. “First off, I’m tired of TikTokers, Instagrammers, influencers and people who get up in the morning and are all soccer coaches, they are all journalists, they are all film critics. You must be super well-adjusted to criticize the work of 700 people from your couch, sitting there next to your PlayStation,” she says. “Second, they claim to speak for everyone. Let me tell you: Being LGBT doesn’t make you less of an idiot.” 

***

Toward the end of our interview, Gascón looks over my shoulder. A middle-aged woman has sidled up to our stools, angling for a word.

“Excuse me,” she says, smiling, “I’m not one to interrupt when I see someone famous, but I saw you and …”

Gascón stands up and warmly greets her. The woman explains that her 18-year-old son had recently transitioned and had at last received his national identity card confirming his gender. She felt the need to share the news with Gascón, who has become a prominent advocate of transgender rights in Spain and abroad. 

“We’re fighting for everything to go well,” the woman says. “For him to be happy and accepted. There are still so many stumbling blocks.” 

“The earlier the better,” Gascón says. “The matter is still so complicated.”

The interaction takes no more than two minutes, but by the end, both women are in tears.

“Give him a big kiss from me,” says Gascón. “And tell him to see the movie!”

The woman apologizes again and heads out, but not before asking me to take a photo. 

This happens all the time, Gascón says. It can get overwhelming but also profoundly motivating. It’s what allows her to brush off the online hatred. “Social media is a lie,” she says. “The reality is in the street. It’s people who come up to you to say thank you,” she says. “There is something beautiful happening in society, like what happened with that lady. Many people are waiting for me to be nominated somewhere. If I’m given that award, they’ll jump for joy.”

And her vengeance, then? 

She laughs.

“Complete.” 

This story appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.