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Saved By the Bell Reboot Casts Trans Actress Josie Totah
The former 'Champions' star will play a leading role as the school's mean girl.
90s classicSaved By the Bell is coming back to TV, and the reboot will feature a transgender actress in a major role! We absolutely love to see it.
Josie Totah has been cast in the upcoming revival as Lexi, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In a welcome change for trans characters on TV, Lexi is described as "a beautiful, sharp-tongued cheerleader and the most popular girl at Bayside High who is both admired and feared by her fellow students." We love a 2020 Regina George.
It's unclear whether Totah's character is also trans or cisgender.
Totah has previously appeared in Champions, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Glee. The actress came out as trans in an essay for Time in 2018. "I plan to play roles I haven't had the opportunity to play," she wrote. "And I can only imagine how much more fun it's going to be to play someone who shares my identity, rather than having to contort myself to play a boy. I'm going to gun for those roles, be it a transgender female or a cisgender female. Because it's a clean slate -- and a new world."
The new series will air on NBC's aptly-named streaming service Peacock, and will see the return of the original show's stars Mario Lopez and Showgirls legend Elizabeth Berkley as A.C. Slater and Jessie Spano. The reboot is described as "a single-camera comedy that explores what happens when California Gov. Zack Morris (Mark Gosselaar's role) gets into hot water for closing too many low-income high schools and proposes the affected students be sent to the highest-performing schools in the state -- including Bayside High."
Saved By the Bell lands on Peacock in April.
RELATED | Josie Totah Comes Out as Trans in TIME Magazine Essay
