‘Emilia Pérez’ star Karla Sofía Gascón makes history as first trans Best Actress nominee at the Oscars

Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón has made Oscar history. The titular Emilia Pérez star was just nominated for Best Actress, making her the first openly transgender performer ever nominated in the category. She stars in the musical as a Mexican drug lord who undergoes a gender transition but can’t fully escape her past.

This nomination is historic, but it didn’t come as a surprise. Beginning at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, Gascón and costars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz were jointly named Best Actress. Emilia Pérez was then acquired by Netflix, which released it in theaters on Nov. 1 and on its streaming platform on Nov. 13.

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Since then, the film has been enthusiastically embraced by awards groups. It received 10 Golden Globe nominations, the most ever for a comedy or musical, including one for Gascón. It went on to win four of those awards, including the top prize for best film. Gascón also received nominations from the Critics Choice Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and BAFTA Awards for her performance. The film is also a Critics Choice and BAFTA nominee for Best Picture and a SAG nominee for its ensemble cast.

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Gascón isn’t the first person nominated at the Oscars for playing a trans character. But in the past, those roles were played by cisgender actors. Chris Sarandon earned a Best Supporting Actor nom for playing Leon Shermer, a transgender woman before her transition, in Dog Day Afternoon (1975). John Lithgow was nominated in the same category as transgender former football player Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp (1982), as was Jaye Davidson for playing Dil in The Crying Game (1992).

Hilary Swank won Best Actress for playing a transgender man who is murdered for his identity in Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Felicity Huffman was nominated in that race for Transamerica (2005), which made her the first and only cis woman to be nominated for playing a trans woman. However, the trend of cis men winning awards for playing trans women continued with Jared Leto‘s Best Supporting Actor victory for Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Eddie Redmayne‘s Best Actor nomination for The Danish Girl (2015). (Elliott Page, who is trans, was nominated for Best Actress for Juno but revealed his gender identity years after the nomination.)

Hollywood has long been criticized for casting cis actors as trans characters, partly because they take acting opportunities away from trans talent but also because they perpetuate the false notion that a trans woman, for instance, is a “man in a dress.”

“Having cis men play trans women, in my mind, is a direct link to the violence against trans women,” argued trans writer Jen Richards in the Netflix documentary Disclosure. “When you see [transgender actresses] off-screen still as women, it completely deflates this idea that they’re somehow men in disguise.”

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As groundbreaking as Emilia Pérez and its lead actress have been, the film has not escaped criticism for its portrayal of the trans community. The LGBTQIA+ advocacy group GLAAD, for instance, called the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.” It has also received backlash for its portrayal of Mexico, about which Oscar-nominated Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain, Killers of the Flower Moon) said, “The film felt completely inauthentic, not just in its storytelling but in the ways it ignored Mexican culture and context.”

Critics who advocate for the film have called it “endlessly captivating” (Graeme Guttmann, Screen Rant). They also describe it as “a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart” (Stephanie Zacharek, Time) that “reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman” (Dana Stevens, Slate). The film’s performances are “career-defining” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). The film has a generally positive Metacritic score of 71 and a Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of 76 percent.

Gascon has defended the project, recently sounding off on the online scrutiny in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “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 said. “Second, they claim to speak for everyone. Let me tell you: Being LGBT doesn’t make you less of an idiot.”

Paz has also spoken positively about the film, focusing on its depiction of Mexican culture.

“I’ve heard people saying it’s offensive to Mexico. I really want to know why, because I didn’t feel that way. And I have questioned some people that I trust, not just as artists but as people, and they don’t feel that way, so I am trying to understand,” Paz, who is Mexican, told Indiewire.

Regardless of the film’s backlash, Gascón’s nomination is a step forward from the male actors who were commonly cast in transfeminine roles before. She’s the first; perhaps she won’t be the last.

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