“I feel proud that we made a piece of art that trusts the audience,” Trace Lysette told me about her new film Monica, in which she plays the title character, a trans woman who returns home after decades of estrangement to reconcile with her dying mother. “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a film with a trans person as the lead. It’s not lost on me that this is special.”
It’s been a long road for Lysette to her first role as a leading lady. The actor first gained attention for a role on Transparent as a trans yoga teacher in 2014, which led her to come out publicly as trans shortly thereafter. It was eight years between that role and the premiere of Monica last year at the Venice film festival, where Lysette received an 11-and-a-half-minute standing ovation for her performance.
“I felt a responsibility. I felt this duality of nervousness but readiness. I knew I had put in the work and this was the universe saying, ‘OK, we’re going to give you a shot.’”
Monica is simply one of the best trans movies I have ever seen. Within a discourse that often relegates trans people to a binary of either passing or not, closeted or out, it captures the far more complicated and ambiguous reality of a trans woman who has long since moved past these questions. It is a portrait of a person who is past the angst of transition and who is simply living as a woman who has internalized, and accepted, the vulnerability that comes with her being trans.
“I saw the potential of a fully formed, well-lived-in trans woman,” said Lysette. “I was seeing a part of me in the script that I feel like society is either sleeping on or resistant to. It’s just rare to see this binary trans woman who has lived this life on her own for 20-some years. I feel like our elders, the ones who transitioned 10 or 20 years ago, are the ones we need to be talking to the most and showcasing more than we do.”
One thing that makes Monica so special is that it eschews many of the conventions of the trans story as it is often told in film, TV and books. Instead of centering moments that have become conventions of trans cinema – like the moment of coming out or the act of having a major surgery – it instead elides these things, gesturing to them but placing its focus elsewhere. This allows the humanity and the emotion behind these moments, and the human interactions that underlie them, to be so much stronger, more vivid and more complex than in other trans stories. It also gives Monica space to to tell a less pedantic, far more ambiguous and delicate story.
“What I’m so proud of about this movie is that it has confidence in the viewer,” said Lysette. “If we give the opportunity for the audience to think for themselves and raise their own questions about things, I feel like that’s a more elevated kind of storytelling, where we’re not preaching or ABCing it. I really do feel like stories like this that are so delicate might be better received by those on the other side of the fence.”
In one scene, Monica is putting lipstick on her mother, played by Patricia Clarkson and their housekeeper, a friendly, middle-aged Latina woman. Although the mother cannot help but criticize herself for being too old and not looking pretty enough, soon she lets go and gets drawn in to the magic of playing with the beauty product: for a moment, these three grown women forget the very complicated family drama that enmeshes them and are just three girls lost within the joy of being feminine. Like so many moments in the movie, the scene is emotionally rich and complicated, and although it’s not strictly necessary for the film’s narrative architecture, it feels absolutely essential to why Monica is such a success.
It is in moments like this that Lysette is given ample space to fully own the title role and flex her acting muscle. Early in the movie, during Monica’s first night back at home, we see her put on an elaborate necklace and earrings. Disconnected from anything else in the movie, the scene literally comes out of nowhere, yet it feels absolutely necessary to the story director Andrea Pallaoro is telling – that of a woman who is walking back into a house that is so familiar, yet also completely different because of the gender transition that has re-created her life anew. It is scenes like this that break new ground in trans cinema by letting Lysette inhabit moments essential to the trans experience, but that are so hard to communicate to anyone who has not lived it.
“The necklace scene was a pretty emotional scene, like I was trying to hold back tears. Andrea wanted a very, very specific body positioning and head tilt. It was probably the most specific direction I had ever gotten. I’ll be honest, I was proud of myself for getting there. I just thought about all of my transcestors, all of the girls just watching down, like, ‘you’ve got this, girl.’ It was a daunting piece of direction and I just felt proud that I could rise to the technical aspect of it.”
Although Lysette is celebrating her triumph and is excited for the release of Monica to the general public, she is still well aware of the bias confronting a trans actor in Hollywood. “I’m still hopeful, but I do want to be real that I’ve talked to a lot of my actor friends who have told me, if you were a cis actress who had just gotten an 11-and-a-half-minute standing ovation at Venice, you’d probably have a couple of offers on the table for other movies, or to lead a series.”
Regardless, Lysette remains firm in the resilience and optimism that has seen her through family rejection, years of scraping by as a young trans woman in New York and working her way up to this title role. It very much reflects the character she inhabits in Monica, that of a woman who has learned to live with strength and vulnerability in spite of the constant presence of society’s biases against her.
“I don’t know if I have the antidote for those feelings,” said Lysette. “I’m trying to show up and put one foot in front of the other. I would desire to have options. The beautiful thing about being an actor is that you have this constant evolution. I mean, I came into entertainment as a teenage drag queen. I think about people who have these big, fruitful careers and I just hope that I can have that too.”
Monica is out now in US cinemas and in the UK later this year
