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.