Emilia Perez: The story behind Netflix’s polarising trans gangster musical

“I sincerely hate musicals,” declares Karla Sofía Gascón in English, only for her interpreter to query if that’s what she meant to say. “No, I hate musicals,” Gascón insists. “There’s only one musical I love, and it’s called Emilia Pérez.” Gascón, a 52-year-old Spanish actress, is speaking to me a day before Emilia Pérez premieres at the London Film Festival, and she’s in an upbeat mood, even high-fiving me at points. “I hate it when people sing in movies. But this film is amazing. Maybe it can change people with stupid minds like mine about musicals.”

Emilia Pérez, though, is more than a musical. A Spanish-language crime-comedy that amalgamates telenovela twists, gangster shootouts, and tenacious outsiders who spontaneously burst into song and dance, the film is made by Saint Laurent Productions and is also a Best Picture Oscar frontrunner that stars a transgender actress in Gascón. Both a mainstream crowdpleaser and an arthouse gamble that competed for the Palme d’Or, Emilia Pérez was awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes, an honour shared between its four stars: Gascón, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, and Adriana Paz. Adding to the concoction is that it’s written and directed by Jacques Audiard, a French filmmaker known for gritty, macho action, not flights of fancy, who speaks neither Spanish nor English. While the film is set in Mexico, it was filmed in Paris.

On his 2018 western The Sisters Brothers, Audiard cast a trans actress, Rebecca Root, in a supporting role. However, the 72-year-old director, whose credits include Rust and Bone and A Prophet, claims his inspiration for Emilia Pérez wasn’t to do with representation. “10 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought of making a musical,” says Audiard in French through an interpreter. “The idea came to me because of a transgender character in a novel. It’s not that I wanted to represent a specific character, but the idea of an opera imposed itself on me. A musical dimension is what made the character of Manitas magical to me.”

Audiard is referring to a chapter from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute in which a drug dealer signs up for gender-affirming surgery to evade capture. In 2020, Audiard started adapting the minor character into an opera libretto in four parts with two French musicians, Clément Ducol and Camille. After three months, Ducol suggested it should be a film – Audiard jokes that Ducol simply wanted to write less music – which led to the casting of Gascon as Emilia Pérez, who, in the first act, is Manitas, a cartel leader with an entirely different voice and body language. Gascon thus plays Emilia before and after transition. “Manitas was the most fun role I’ve ever had,” says Gascon, who in real life transitioned at 46. “I loved being as far away from me as possible.”

Emilia Pérez launches, though, on the streets of Mexico with Saldaña as Rita, a lawyer who demonstrates her knack for reviewing paperwork, filing pleadings, and performing outrageous dance choreography while bellowing out melodies about her emails in a song called “El Alegato”. Saldaña’s other numbers include “La Vaginoplastia”, a catchy toe-tapper that rhymes as many words as possible with “vaginoplasty”.

“The music gives the audience a direct passage into Rita’s emotions,” says Saldaña, a 46-year-old Dominican and Puerto Rican actress known more for Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy than her background in ballet. “What’s it like to be a lawyer who’s studied something she’s truly passionate about, and now she’s performing it in the most grotesquely insane, illegal way, and helping criminals get off? Through these choreographies, we allow our characters to be raw.”

“That’s how Jacques wanted it,” says Gomez, sat next to Saldaña. “He didn’t want it to sound like perfect songs. He wanted to feel the pain when we were in pain.” Now 32, Gomez, whose father is of Mexican heritage, had never acted in Spanish before playing Emilia’s wife, Jessi. “I’ve released music in Spanish, and I felt so confident doing that,” says Gomez. “This was different. We were telling stories through the music, and it was tearing apart everything inside me. I got such powerful emotions out of it.”

“I always have to audition. I have to fight against my image... I’ve been working since I was seven, so there’s a lot of things that were cheesy. But I own it. I was young. I don’t live with regrets” – Selena Gomez

“Spanish is the language I speak predominantly at home,” says Saldaña. “It’s really special being able to make art in my native tongue, because it’s something I’ve never been given the opportunity to do. Hollywood views films in different languages as ‘foreign’, and I’ve always resented that word.”

After being kidnapped, Rita helps Emilia fake her death, transition, and start anew as a charity worker. However, Jessi is a grieving wife who doesn’t realise she’s not actually a widow; even when using Emilia as a babysitter, Jessi is oblivious to the fact she’s idly chatting with the other biological parent to her children. Emilia, in turn, starts a romance with a real widow, Epifanía, which leads to a tender, heartfelt duet called “El Amor” sung over a kitchen table.

“They’re selling this as a movie about a drug dealer blah blah blah,” says Paz, the 44-year-old Mexican actress who plays Epifanía. “But it’s about love. It’s a very human movie everyone can understand. It’s based in Mexico and in Spanish, but it can touch hearts all over the world.”

Gascón, too, is amused by the difficulties in describing Emilia Pérez. “It’s not a film about one singular topic,” she says. “It’s not a documentary. If you want to watch a documentary, go to National Geographic. Why should we only talk about one thing, exhaust that topic, and bore the audience?”

Regardless of the number of topics it covers, Emilia Pérez is driven by a sharp, propulsive musicality and is choreographed by Damien Jalet, who orchestrated the ballet in Suspiria and Thom Yorke’s Anima. “Action scenes are fundamentally fake because they’re for the audience to believe in something,” says Audiard. “But when you film dancing and singing, you know you’re watching a performance. There’s something honest about it. It’s like watching athletes in the Olympics.”

Across the interviews, it’s apparent how much the movie means to its participants. On Instagram, Gomez has shared the moment she tearfully realised her audition for Audiard was successful. I express surprise to Gomez that she still has to audition. “Are you kidding me?” says Gomez. “I always have to audition. I have to fight against my image.” Gomez acknowledges that not everything she’s done has been Spring Breakers. “I’ve been working since I was seven, so there’s a lot of things that were cheesy. But I own it. I was young, and loved being part of a whole community. I don’t live with regrets.”

Gomez also beams about supporting a film with a trans lead playing a trans protagonist. “It feels incredible to make history, in a way, with something told in such a pure way,” she says. “It’s not the centre focus, but it’s the exact metaphor that all these women are going through. People are meant to be who they are. However that looks and feels to them, it’s so important.”

“Emilia goes through this metamorphosis to become this amazing butterfly she was always destined to become,” says Saldaña. “This is not a film you want to have thoughts about. You just sit and, whether you like it or not, it’s going to compel you to have feelings. That’s how we can make a change. That’s how we can address a complex conversation around transness.”

As for Gascón, she’s pleased that Emilia Pérez encourages viewers to be their true selves, in whatever form that may be. “Everyone should be free to make their own decisions,” she says. “If the film helps even one family when their son or daughter says ‘I actually like this kind of person’ or ‘I’m this kind of person’ and it helps them not kick them out of the house, but love them and give them the support they need, then that would be wonderful.”

Gascón continues, “People that like action films, people that like drama, people that like comedy, people that like musicals – everyone will like this film. Even people who don’t like musicals.” She’s even snuck into theatres to spy on people’s reactions. “People laugh when they’re supposed to laugh, and they cry at the emotional parts. Audiences are like drunk people and children: they always tell the truth.”

Emilia Pérez is out in cinemas now, and is streaming on Netflix from November 13