Karla Sofía Gascón On Her Journey To The Role Of A Lifetime In ‘Emilia Pérez’: “It’s Love’s Triumph”

The first time I meet Karla Sofía Gascón is on a London stage. I’m wrapping up a group interview in front of a live audience for Jacques Audiard’s film Emilia Pérez, and as the director, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz all file off into the wings to boisterous applause, I notice that Gascón, the titular actress, has stopped. She turns 180 degrees and heads back across the stage. The clapping becomes uncertain. They don’t really know her. They haven’t seen the film yet. What is happening?

Up close to me, she says softly, “This was a small interview.” Oh god, is she upset? It’s true that these event interviews are, by necessity, fairly brief. But then, suddenly, she hugs me tightly. Oh, I think. She doesn’t care how any of this looks; she hasn’t noticed the schedule or the so-called order of things, it’s that she hasn’t yet had a chance to truly connect, to be real. “Thank you,” she says, squeezing my arm, meaning it. The audience erupts into cheers, and as she walks away, she gives them a wave. “Thank you!” she calls to them. “I’m Karla!”

A few days later in New York, we meet again at the photo shoot for this piece. In front of the camera, Gascón twirls in a silky, black, Lanvin gown. Its ruffled sleeves unfurl as she lifts first one arm to her face, then the other, in a suggestion of Flamenco. The Madrid-born actress laughs and cracks jokes constantly with the photographer and his crew. Tonight, she will attend several Emilia Pérez events, and she must be jet-lagged, exhausted even, but still, she is ebullient.

It’s been a hard and complex road to this moment, requiring bravery most cannot begin to fathom. Gascón, who lives in Mexico, has long been known for her roles in telenovelas. Then, just a few years ago, at age 46, she came out as a trans woman. She wondered if she’d ever work again. She battled endless abuse and online trolling. Now, at 52, she’s the lead in Audiard’s dynamic and daring Emilia Pérez, playing a trans woman whose experience differs wildly from Gascón’s own. With the world watching, could she be the first trans actress ever to win an Academy Award?

In Emilia Pérez, Mexican cartel leader Manitas Del Monte dreams of transitioning to live as her authentic self. Enlisting the help of a beleaguered lawyer, Rita (Saldaña), she must leave behind all she knows, including her beloved wife Jessi (Gomez). It’s a thriller, a drama and a comedy of sorts, all at once. And, as if that doesn’t transcend enough genre barriers, it’s also a musical.

Another actress might have baulked at Audiard’s vision for her, but Gascón jumped in with both feet. She didn’t consider herself a singer, but she would learn. And when Audiard suggested a cis-male actor could handle the early pre-transition scenes, Gascón insisted she would play that part too.

The results are so touching, so dynamic, so arresting, that all four actresses shared the Best Actress Award at Cannes. For Gascón, that festival premiere would signal another new beginning. As she rose from her chair that night to thunderous applause, the first people she saw in the packed theater were Spanish actress Rossy de Palma and Anatomy of a Fall director Justine Triet, crying.

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Then, days later, as the Emilia Peréz team waited for the awards ceremony, a member of the production team knocked on the door to fetch Gascón. She knew then that “something special was about to happen.” She went into the bathroom and quietly sobbed.

Gascón would become the first trans performer ever to win Best Actress at Cannes, and as she collected her award alongside Saldaña, Gomez and Paz, Gascón dedicated hers to all “who suffer and must keep faith that changing is possible.” Now, as we sit for this interview, she is pensive as she recalls that moment. We discuss the fact that she is an actress first, plain and simple, celebrated for her work, regardless of her trans identity.

“If I receive anything in my life it’s for my work, it is not for my color of my hair,” she says, via a translator. “I’m feeling a lot of responsibility, not only for my work, but for this movement around me. I represent, obviously, the minority that I represent. But I think that I represent a lot of people in this world that want, or need, to be free. I’m talking about my colleagues, other actors that are coming up, that started from the bottom and have been working for a long time and have felt that rejection and continue to work and continue to learn and continue to grow. I think that’s maybe one of the very important groups of people that I represent. And I hope that I represent hope for my colleagues.”

But, as Gascón says, “There’s this darkness versus light.” In the wake of that win at Cannes, right-wing French politician Marion Maréchal made transphobic remarks. Gascón responded by engaging a lawyer. Six French LGBTQ+ groups stood behind her — Adheos, Families LGBT, Fédération LBGTI +, Mousse, Stop Homophobie and Quazar —a nd filed an official complaint against Maréchal with the Paris Public Prosecutor over “insult due to gender identity.”

Gascón mulls now over her decision to clap back at such hate speech. “I am a warrior,” she says. “I love to take on the fight. I like to confront it. And I did that quite a lot in my past. I’m 52 years old and I’ve gone through some really complicated things, including in Mexico, which was the country that knew me the most when I went through my transition. And I knew that was going to happen.”

Her mission when she responds to such people, she says, is to raise awareness. “I’ve done a lot of trying to educate people, to make them respect me. I’m that frontline warrior.” But she is philosophical too. “I realize that people will only learn from their own experience. They will only learn when they themselves want to. And if they don’t want to learn, then they’re not going to. And at some point, I have to put that aside. I can’t change people’s minds by pushing my own convictions and ideas. I think right now, the best way that I can do it is through my work, and that’s what I’m focused on. There are people writing to me and telling me, ‘Every win that you take, I feel it like it’s mine. We feel it like it’s our own.’”

Gascón says in the past, she’s felt very critical of her work, but with Emilia Pérez it feels different. “I feel like this is the first time that I can say, you know what? Hats off.” She pauses, thinking of Audiard’s French and finds the word for ‘hat.’ “Chapeau!” she says, and laughs. “The work that I did, I think is deserving of all of the attention and all of the success that it’s having. And I take a lot of pride in that, in being able to do this work, being able to leave it all there. And it has nothing to do with my background, with having to come back up in my career, or my sexuality, or my gender, it’s the work itself.”

It was Pierre-Marie Dru, the film’s music supervisor, who first mentioned Gascón’s name to Audiard. Via Zoom, with his co-writer Nicolas Livecchi translating alongside him, Audiard explains that he met Gascón and Saldaña around the same time and that they sparked a reimagining of the women’s roles.

“What struck me in both cases is that I had been wrong about the character’s ages in the screenplay. In the screenplay, Rita was 25, Manitas was 30, Epifanía was 17. And when I discovered Karla Sofía, I saw before me a mature woman who already had history. Because of Karla Sofía’s age, because of Zoe’s age, because of Adriana’s age, it became clear that it was a story of adult women. Whereas until then, in Mexico, I had been having casting sessions with young 25-year-old women, and it was not working at all. It was superficial.”

He did not specifically set out to make a film about transitioning or about the decision to have gender-affirming surgery. “What interested me was the cartel boss, the jefe, who decides to become a woman, how this character goes from hyper-virility, hyper-machismo, hyper-patriarchy toward femininity. If it was transition on its own, I wouldn’t have thought of that. The film about just transition is for someone else to make, not me.”

Before shooting, Gascón asked Audiard how they would communicate between her Spanish and his French. He told her they would use “telepathy.” In practice, they really did seem to understand each other intuitively. “Look, Jacques is very intelligent,” Gascón says. “I think he’s smart enough to not need anyone. He’s so smart that he picks up on what others can provide for him and can inform him on. I think he’s absolutely wonderful.”

Yet Audiard was also very open to Gascón’s thoughts and opinions. “I’m so grateful for him because he gave me this beautiful opportunity to create and to be part of the creation of this project.” However, she admits she might have gotten a little carried away at times. “He allowed me to truly enter into my character and share my point of view on the project with everybody on set, to the point where I thought I was assistant director number 2! I was really taking on that role. In fact, when Selena came over to Jacques’ place and we were working on her character, I was there telling her, ‘I think she should be from Monterrey because that’s at the border … And her parents … this and that.’ He really allowed me to get in there, to be a chef in the kitchen, and especially for the character that I was interpreting. And of course there’s a story there. I think that we’re very different, the character and myself, but there is a story there that overlaps where I can provide a lot of insight.”

Gascón wrote her suggestions to Audiard. “There’s a lot of emails back and forth that we had. He would come to me, and he would be like, ‘I have this idea. Can you help me make it more concrete?’ Or I would send something over, and he would say, ‘Well, maybe we can summarize this a little bit.’”

She laughs as she recalls suggesting that since Emilia has money, wouldn’t she have a snow machine so her kids can ski? “Production was like, ‘OK, OK, that’s too much, but maybe she can have a skiing game.” And sure enough, in the film, Emilia’s home features an arcade-style ski machine.

Audiard seems to relish the memory of all that back-and-forth. “She’s an actress who has a great deal of authority,” he says. “We can discuss everything, she and I, and sometimes it gets heated, but we listen to each other. And I think the singularity of Karla Sofía, and why I like her as an actress, is her history. I truly love her. She probably had a knowledge of that character that was deeper than mine. She knew more about the character than I did, which is very pleasant for a director. She has a real power to propose strong ideas, to bring a lot of things, and that’s on a lot of different levels in terms of acting and comprehension. And she has lived things that she could tell me about.”

Gascón says she felt that appreciation and consideration from Audiard and his team: “They really created around me as an actress; they really used a lot of who I was in order to make sure that Emilia could be a true character.”

That consideration and sensitivity was why Audiard had not initially imagined Gascón in the Manitas role. “Karla absolutely wanted to do both,” he says. “It was me who was hesitant. I’m not in the mind of a trans woman. I don’t know what trauma is there. I can’t know.”

But for Gascón it was an obvious choice. “I honestly thought that I would do a better job in that first stage of the character. I liked it more. I think, as an actress, it was a lot more interesting. There was a lot more character development than her later stage, which is a lot closer to who I am, and it wasn’t as interesting for me. How could I pass up the opportunity to not take on the full role? I think it would’ve been lazy of me. It would’ve been kind of a bum move, kind of careless and really ugly for me not to fight for that first part, which I think is where the core is. And to be honest, I think the result is wonderful.”

Her understanding of what Audiard wanted is this: “I think in his head, he wanted these two characters to be as distant from each other as possible. He wanted them to be polar opposites. He wanted the change to be absolutely drastic, a change that nobody could understand. It’s really like Beauty and the Beast. He wanted that type of contrast. And he ended up doing it, but with me, to the point where people ask, ‘But who did Manitas?’”

That high contrast was also down to Audiard’s crafts team. “They were all so wonderful. Hair and makeup, [costume designer] Virginie Montel, who I love profoundly. I adore her. We all built together this character of Emilia before and after, and we all had our own interesting ways of how we wanted this character to look. At the end of the day, it was Jacques who had the last word, and I think he chose well. And of course, he chose the ugliest one that we did not understand. But we looked at the footage that we had, and we looked at the photography, and it really was the best choice because that version of Manitas was the version that had the most inner life that you could see. But it was such work to bring this character to life, just so many hours, the tattoos, the prostheses … The fake nose! They surprised me. They took molds of my face, chest, arms. They had this chest that had little tiny boobies with hair on it that they didn’t use. They just did all kinds of crazy things to me.”

Although the film is comedic in parts, it was vital that the choice to transition was seen seriously. Gascón says, “I needed to clarify what Manitas’ main motive was to go through the transition and become Emilia, because I felt that any wrong decision could end up making this film a joke, just a comedy where people would watch it, they would have a good laugh, and it wouldn’t really go anywhere. The scene with Rita when Manitas wants to become a woman. I was scared people would laugh. I told Jacques, ‘People are going to laugh, because if you look at it objectively, you can see that it could be quite a funny scene.’ It was really tough. He looked me in the face, and he said, ‘Make it so that they don’t.’ And I think at the end of the day, they watched the sequence, and nobody laughed.”

Gascón also felt strongly that Emilia would not be violent. She worried about a scene where Emilia confronts Jessi. “In the script, it was written that Emilia would hit her and would knock her out. I had many discussions with Jacques because I felt that we would have lost the character if this had happened.”

Gascón admits, “I don’t have many filters, whether I like it or I don’t, I say it.” And working with major Hollywood stars like Saldaña and Gomez was a new experience. “It was tricky because I didn’t know the world that they were coming from,” she says. “I didn’t know if I was going to be encountering two Hollywood stars that only cared about their star and about their acting. I didn’t know how they were going to come in. I was a little bit worried about how I myself was going to be acting around them. But I think I ended up choosing the best path, which was to treat them as equals and to work as if we were at the same level, instead of approaching them as a fan, like, ‘Oh, I’m working with Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez.’ I think that would’ve been detrimental to my own work and to their work as well. And it would’ve been detrimental to the film at the end of the day.” Her approach paid off, she says. “I think that helped because we really developed this really intense union to the point where sometimes our relationships as actresses overlapped into the relationships between the characters.

“With Adriana, it was a little bit different because we come from a very similar world. So, it was a little bit easier. I think my role with her was to support her because she was coming into a production that was already underway, which can be really horrible for an actor when you come in and you don’t feel comfortable, you can become really insecure. So, I really wanted to integrate her as much as I could.

“They were so wonderful. The work that they did, with me, was to really come at me with the same energy that they were receiving. If they share one thing in common is that they really work very intensely and they bring their heart and soul into their work, but they’re all very unique. For example, Zoe has this incredible ability to really focus in. She’s very strict with her work. It’s something that I really admire, that I wish I could take on myself. Plus, she’s a wonderful singer and dancer. Then we have Selena who is very present in the moment. She really listens and I love that about her. With Adriana, she is also a star in her own right. She’s won the Ariel Award in Mexico many times, so she’s already recognized in her career. I was really there to learn from them as much as I could.”

Saldaña recalls observing an enormous respect between Audiard and Gascón. “They had such love and respect for each other, and you could see that passion as they explored how to bring Emilia to life. I met Karla when we first rehearsed together, and then I met a different side of her on the last day of shooting. It was incredible to witness an artist who went so deep into creating a character like Emilia Pérez.” Her favorite aspect of working with Gascón was creating the evolution of their characters’ close, almost family-level friendship. “The relationship between them is complex, but it’s also a beautiful journey that you watch unfold. Rita’s relationship with Emilia starts out based on fear, but both women are just trying to get to a point in their lives where they can live more authentically.”

Gomez calls Gascón “our anchor” and credits her with pushing her “to give everything that I had”, recalling an “incredibly intense scene between the two of us, and she showed up giving 150 percent.” Gomez is, she says, “beyond proud of her and honored to now call her a friend, and someone I deeply care about. Not to mention she truly is so funny. I am glad everyone is seeing this side of her as well.”

All three of Gascón’s co-stars are accomplished singers, so Gascón had her work cut out. She got there with the help of French composing duo Camille and Clément Ducol, who won the Cannes Soundtrack Award. Gascón says, “I had the added difficulty that the registers that I was singing in, they were both out of my range. For the first part the register is very low. And then for the later part, the register is very high, and I’m kind of in the middle. So, I’m sure that they had to use equalizers and mixers. Camille probably had to combine my voice for the really high-pitched vibratos. I told her, ‘My mother’s going to be watching the film and she’s not going to understand whether there’s the mini vibrato here or there’s something else in there.’ But they must have recorded my voices thousands of times, just every breath I took. But they did such wonderful work, not just with me. I think the music in general is prize-deserving. The opening sequence for me where you move from the Mariachis and you open up into Mexico City, the way that the music brings you in with that street chant about the fridges and mattresses… When I saw that opening sequence, I thought, this is one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and I knew that we were going to make history.”

Later that night in SoHo, I see Gascón again, at an Emilia Pérez reception. Earlier that day she’d told me she’d always felt like something of a mystic. “I don’t believe in anything,” she’d said, “but I’ve always known since I was young, who I want to be and where I want to go. It’s beyond logic.” Really then, it’s leading from the heart that’s brought her to this time in her life, to this role in a film that’s ultimately about the power of love to transcend time, distance, identity and sexuality. Audiard put it thus: “The trajectory that Emilia has is one of someone who makes a second life for herself, and she does that to move towards love, to finally find love. But that is a tremendous effort for her.” At the reception, I watch as Gascón moves among the guests, chatting and joking again, everyone around smiling or laughing in response. I think of her reply when I asked her what she thought the film was about. “It’s love’s triumph,” she said.

Emilia Pérez is in theaters November 1st.

Photographer: Andrew Zaeh; Videographer: Andrés Cardona; Video Director: David Ferino; Creative Director: Fah Sahkaret; Producer: Jack Mallett; Production Designer: Anna Maltezos; Digital Tech/ Photo Assistant: Meredith Truax; Production Assistant: Vianny Guevara

Gascón’s translator: Cordelia Montes; hair: Marc Mena; makeup: Genevieve Herr.