‘Emilia Pérez’ Star Karla Sofía Gascón Says Trans Hate Is Her ‘Gasoline to Keep Going’

Karla Sofía Gascón wants to be in the light. It’s a warm late-October day in Los Angeles, and the actress has arrived for a lunch date at the Sunset Marquis in a silky black dress and a bare face. In English, she asks the restaurant waiter for a sunlit table. In Spanish, she turns to me and says, self-mockingly, “I seem like la Sofia Vergara with my accent. But I guess it’s part of the appeal.”

Gascón is in L.A. today for what feels like a fleeting moment. For the last several months, she’s been crisscrossing the globe promoting her mind-bending musical-drama-comedy Emilia Pérez (now streaming on Netflix), in which she stars as the title character. After the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, Gascón became the first openly trans person to win the festival’s Best Actress award, alongside her castmates Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, and Adriana Paz. The film, from writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone), also captured the jury prize there. Following our conversation this afternoon, Gascón will be heading to some red-carpet event she rolls her eyes about, and she just returned from an 18-hour trip to Mexico, where she received another award for the film. 

“I’ve been all over the world [so much] that I think the immigration officials suspect I might be trafficking drugs,” she says with a laugh. “They look at me with a weird face.”

While Gascón has no experience trafficking drugs, her onscreen counterpart would have good reason to be concerned. In Emilia Pérez, she plays a monstrous Mexican drug lord named Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, who undergoes gender-affirming surgery and, once in her own skin, attempts to make up for the harms of her violent, pre-transition past. Given that the film is an over-the-top melodrama told in the heightened language of a musical, it would be easy for someone to overplay the part — but the emotional work Gascón does is nuanced and layered. Gascón’s natural wit and sass bleed into her portrayal, like in a scene where Emilia slyly asks her kids about their mother’s new boyfriend, endearing hints of jealousy sneaking into her line of questioning. Later, that same jealousy overtakes her in a scene that turns dark, with Emilia showing deep hurt and flashes of rage.

The range Gascón showcases in the film has already earned her Oscar buzz, not to mention a flood of offers. The film — and her part in it — has also sparked both conversation and, predictably, transphobic backlash from the far right.

“If this happened to me when I was 20 years old, I’d be hallucinating,” Gascón says of the whirlwind experience. “But now, I truly don’t give a fuck about anything. I see it as a fun game to play. It’s all nonsense.”

GASCON, 52, WAS BORN in Spain and raised near Madrid. The acting bug bit her in her teens, but she was only able to book small parts and commercials. On the advice of a director, she moved to Mexico, where she got a foothold in the industry with recurring roles in some of the country’s iconic telenovelas, including 2009’s Corazón Salvaje. Her biggest break came when she played Peter, the money-hungry boyfriend, in the 2013 film Nosotros Los Nobles. All the while, she was grappling with her true identity. Finally, in 2016, she decided to step out of the public eye for a time and move back to Spain to transition.

She announced her transition in her 2018 autobiography, Karsia, Una Historia Extraordinaria, and braced for the reaction while gradually kicking her career back into gear in Mexico. There was a time, not long before she booked the part as Emilia, when she was known for fiery back-and-forths with detractors online. (“I swear I’ve deleted a bunch!” she says when I say I stalked her Instagram.) After she was eliminated from MasterChef Celebrity Mexico in 2022, she wrote online: “I’ve suffered incomparable mockery from the garbage that inhabits our planet.” 

After a few sips of her mezcal drink, Gascón admits that she feels a great responsibility to represent the trans community. Only these days, she doesn’t fire off rebuttals online. “I can’t be on the frontlines, responding to hate comments,” she says. “I’ve learned that my work needs to speak for itself.”

With Emilia, she speaks volumes. Gascón says she poured her “entire soul” into the film. And she gives heaps of credit to her scene partners — especially Gomez, who plays her character’s ex-wife, and Saldaña, who plays the lawyer who helps her transition — for doing “the best fucking job of their lives,” too. “I didn’t know what I was going to face,” Gascón says of meeting the more established stars. “I was like, ‘Here come the extraterrestrials.’ They could destroy your planet or make it better…” But, to her surprise, Gomez and Saldaña were welcoming and down-to-earth. “I’ve met a lot of girls in Mexico who act more like divas than the two of them.”

“Working with Zoe and Selena has been such a pleasure,” she adds. “Like any family, there were days when we didn’t stand each other, and other days when we loved each other.”

That familial energy is evident when, midway through our drinks, a man walks by our table, letting out a whistle that Gascón instinctually recognizes. “That’s Jacques, the director,” Gascón says, waving at Audiard with a laugh. They’re all smiles now, but Gascón says she gave the French director an earful when he first offered her the role of Emilia. Initially, she found the script too frivolous. “The day we met in Paris, he asked me, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I like this, I don’t like that, I like this, I don’t like that.’ And he said, ‘You fucker!’” she recalls. “The first script was a lot more comedy, and that worried me. It was going to be a completely different film.” She felt strongly that it needed to grapple more fully with the trans experience in all its complexity.

“If Manitas transitioned just to flee justice,” she adds, “then the entire thing would’ve been a joke. It would’ve been a pure comedy for people to laugh in theaters without anything transcendental. It would’ve been a film that the LGBTQ community would’ve said ‘What is this?’”

Gascón says she loves how the film turned out, but she believes Audiard left some material on the table. She thinks it would be great to learn more of her character’s backstory, including Emilia’s experience with gender dysphoria. She confesses that she’s even suggested they make a prequel. “I’m serious,” she says. “I’ve told him that there are things I wish I could’ve seen, but I can’t tell you.”

To bring as much authenticity and consistency as possible to the role, Gascón also begged (and convinced) Audiard to let her play Manitas, Emilia pre-transition. “So many people have asked me, and it bothers me, how it felt to ‘regress to being a man.’ I never regressed to anything,” she explains. “I play a character that isn’t me. If someone asks me to play a murderer who wants to end the world, and I end up saying, ‘Oh my god, how am I going to do that?’ then who would play that role? What kind of an actress would I be?”

While Gascón has been doing her best to shake off the character, she assures me that her own experience transitioning couldn’t have been more different — especially compared with Emilia’s undergoing multiple complex surgeries at once. “A transition as intense as Emilia’s isn’t something that can happen to anyone,” Gascón says, referring to the character’s radical transformation, and the relative ease with which she re-entered the world. “My journey was dark and complicated.”

Gascón, who is married with a 14-year-old daughter, recounts the anguish she faced while dating a female politician when she was living in Mexico. That partner at the time knew about her plans to have gender-affirming surgery, but “when she realized it was true that I’d transition, she said, ‘This is going to fuck up my political work.’ And that killed me,” she explains. “I was left alone… It was such a dark experience that brought me to the verge of suicide.”

Although she’s never publicly named her Mexican partner, she writes about their relationship in depth in her autobiography, describing how close she came to taking her own life after facing so much rejection. “On one hand, I had my Spanish wife constantly insulting me for my decision to change sex, and on the other hand, my Mexican partner disappeared without wanting to know anything about me for the same reason,” Gascón writes in her book. “I had believed that they loved me, not a piece of meat.”

“I’m a really strong person and I always knew I’d move forward,” Gascón says today, “but I understand these people who are bullied and decide to kill themselves. It’s unbearable. With the hate I’ve gotten and continue to get, I don’t think anyone else would be able to deal with it… but I take it as my gasoline to keep going.”

It’s not just anti-trans critics who express their opinions. She says she’s taken heat from all sides simply for living her experience her own way. “I probably do some things that even my community wouldn’t love,” she says. “People have told me ‘Why don’t you do your makeup? If you wanted to be a woman so bad, why don’t you do your makeup?’ What does makeup have to do with being a woman?”

THE FILM IS GENERATING conversation not just around the trans experience but other kinds of representation, too. One Mexican writer described Emilia Pérez as a “vision of Mexico without Mexicans,” calling out the actors’ diction in the film, along with its foreign-perspective portrayal of the country’s culture. Gascón understands the critique. “Kidnappings, bad people, drug traffickers exist everywhere. Why do we focus on Mexico so much?” she muses. “Probably because it’s next to the U.S., which is where people pay the most to do drugs.” 

None of the film’s protagonists are indeed Mexican, and for any viewers whose ears are finely tuned to the stars’ not-quite-Mexican Spanish, it is largely explained away in the film: Saldaña’s character, like the actress herself, is said to be of Dominican descent; similarly, Gomez’s character was raised in the States and moved in with Manitas as a young adult. 

Emilia was the only character who, as Gascón puts it, “you couldn’t justify being from somewhere else.” She adds, “A Mexican drug trafficker not from Mexico wouldn’t make sense.” She says mastering the accent was “a difficult job” (made even more challenging by the fact that they were filming in Paris, hearing French-inflected Spanish from some on set) that involved “a lot of discussions with my accent coach.” Talking with her today, it’s almost impossible to imagine how she downplayed her Madrileño Spanish. “No mames that you can tell [my accent] a bit,” she says when I mention it, sneaking in some Mexican slang. 

Gascón maintains that the film never lost its Mexican essence, saying it might even be “more Mexican than what many Mexican [filmmakers] make.” She points to the movie’s opening scene of a mariachi band playing as one of her favorite parts in the film. The band leader is a Mexican wardrobe worker who has his own mariachi group in Paris outside of the film. “That fucker put them in the movie,” Gascón says of Audiard. “He’s so smart.”

MINOR CONTROVERSIES ASIDE, Gascón is clearly enjoying this press run. Her daughter, Victoria Elena, has become a favorite at her red carpet events. Gascón’s eyes gleam as she talks of Victoria, who apparently buddied up with Dune director Denis Villeneuve during one festival. “Everyone is asking me about her instead of for me!” she jokes. Of her wife, Marisa, she adds: “My wife deserves a statue because she has had to deal with so much.”

Professionally, there’s going to be a clear before and after Emilia Pérez for Gascón, and she knows it. She’s looking forward to taking on some roles that aren’t so heavy, and that don’t involve as much singing and dancing. And lately, she’s been telling everyone who’ll listen that she wants to play a James Bond villain. She even met Barbara Broccoli, who produces the 007 films. “Comedies or villain roles make me feel like a fish in water,” Gascón says. 

As for Emilia Pérez, she’s glad her initial resistance to the role crumbled: “I didn’t want anything so profound. It’s very invasive. But nope, the first role offer I got was about something very tough related to transness. And you know what I said? ‘I’ll do it.’” With a cackle, she adds, “Some things are so beautiful that you can’t say no.”