Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón talks trans representation (& tropes) in new film

Before she joined the film, Emilia Pérez was going to be quite different, with the characters being several decades younger, but Audiard loved Gascón for the role, and soon, she began helping to to shape it.

"[The] truth is that Jacques was always very open, very open to listening to me, and he really gave me a lot of freedom to create," she tells Out. "All I could bring to the table was my own experience, which is clearly very different from a lot of people. I think as human beings, we all have different experiences, we have different lives."

"But at the end of the day there was a lot of freedom and love in wanting to understand this character. And I definitely think that there was a before and after in terms of how everyone on the crew sees trans people," she adds. "I think all the crew and all the people that worked in this film, including myself, learned how everyone deserves respect. Everyone deserves to be treated equally."

One of the things Gascón insisted on was playing her character both after, and before her transition.

"I think of Emilia as an actor, she was a different character and playing Manitas, she's in this deep social darkness and she's wanting to become who she's always been, this butterfly, this beautiful woman that she's always wanted to be," Gascón notes. "So I tried to not bring any negative perspective into this. I didn't want to think about it like taking a step back. I really went at it from a very creative perspective. I wanted to be able to take this character where I wanted to take it. And I think being able to play both sides of her allowed me to do this."

She was worried, however, that her performance under a layer of makeup and prosthetics might end up feeling overwrought and verge into comedy in very dramatic scenes, like the one where Emilia first tells Zoe Saldaña's character Rita that she wants to transition.

"I thought that people would laugh, and I was very scared," Gascón reveals. "I talked to Jacques and I told him, 'This is a really important moment. This is a really important moment. It's a really important scene for trans people. It's a really important scene for Emilia herself,'" she remembers. "And I'll never forget this. It's just one of these things that he told me this and it really resonated with me, and he looked at me and he said, 'Make it so that they don't.' And I think we did it. I think we did it."

Gascón, who is a lesbian, is also extremely proud that she was able to be a part of and bring a trans lesbian love story on the big screen. After Emilia transitions, she meets a cis woman named Epifanía (Adriana Paz) and the two start up a relationship.

"I think a lot of the time because there's so many important themes within the film, this doesn't get a lot of visibility," she says. "And it's something that belongs very much to the LGBT community. Here we have this trans woman with a cis woman, and at the end of the day, it's just two women."

"And I think we have the opportunity to have this change of perspective that sex or sexuality is not attached to our gender," she says. "Something really interesting that happens to me often is that people talk to me and they tell me, 'You've taken on this really long road in order to become a woman, but you still like women.' And I have to tell them, 'What I like is not who I am.'"

Gascón also knows that some audiences, specifically trans ones, might be reluctant to see a movie about a trans woman who is a criminal and murderer and has a tragic end. But she hopes they still give the film a chance.

"I would tell them to watch it. To watch it because what Emilia Pérez is able to achieve goes above all expectations," she says. "I think I'm really grateful that through her we're able to bring her perspective out to the outside world and learn. I think we can all learn from her that we can all become better people."