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Emilia Pérez, the buzziest title at Cannes this year, has landed at London Film Festival, the latest stop on its awards-season campaign. Just across the river Thames from the London Eye, fans of Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña have gathered outside the Corinthia hotel, where the movie’s stars have assembled. Inside, all eyes are on Karla Sofía Gascón, the film’s hugely charismatic breakout star.
The Spanish actor, who kicks off her heels and jumps up to kiss me as I walk into the room, made history with Saldaña, Gomez and their costar Adriana Paz by becoming the winners of the first jointly awarded best-actress prize at Cannes. Jacques Audiard’s film also won the jury prize, and Gascón is now a favourite for the best-actress Oscar. If she gets her widely expected nomination in January, she’ll be the first openly trans performer to do so.
Emilia Pérez is a wild ride even by the genre-defying standards of the director of A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and Paris, 13th District. Based on an opera libretto that Audiard adapted from the novel Écoute, by Boris Razon, the film is about Juan, a growling drug-cartel leader who fakes his death, then re-emerges years later as a woman, the maternal Emilia Pérez of the title. Remarkably, Gascón plays both.
Saldaña plays Rita, the lawyer who arranged for Emilia’s disappearance and reassignment surgery, and then reconnects her with her traumatised wife, Jessi (who is played by Gomez), and children. The reformed heroine then meets a new love interest (played by Paz), through the NGO that Emilia funds and runs to help relatives of Mexico’s “disappeared”.
As nervous viewers await various dramatic reveals, they are treated to several anthemic songs, including the improbably toe-tapping La Vaginoplastia.
It’s certainly the most celebrated narco-themed, telenovela-toned, transgender musical of 2024.
“When I first joined the project I spoke with Jacques,” Gascón says. ”I had the script, and I had underlined 50,000 things because I had 50,000 questions. ‘Why is it like this? How are we going to do this? How do you want to do that?’ And at the end of this really long conversation Jacques said to me, ‘Any other notes, or should we just start a script from the beginning?’”
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Audiard initially wanted to cast a cis male actor for the film’s early scenes. Gascón, following a few months of deliberations, insisted on playing the two roles. She and Audiard worked extensively on the pair of characters, “to see how they were separate people before they come together”.
“I didn’t want to give up on that,” she says. “Once I decided, I threw myself into the character. The physical changes of the character were quite easy. The bigger challenge for me was the Mexican accent, because for people who don’t speak Spanish, perhaps you don’t realise, but it is really hard perfecting the Mexican accent, because it’s not my natural accent. It was a lot of work.”
The musical numbers were equally challenging, especially given that Gascón was playing alongside Saldaña, who has a background in dance, and Gomez, who has combined her acting career with her life as a pop star. The film’s songs, which were written by the French singer Camille in collaboration with her partner, the composer Clément Ducol, are as intricate as one might expect from a project originally conceived as an opera, interspersed with plenty of bangers: El Mal, performed by Saldaña and Gascón, is surely headed for the Oscar shortlist. (The numbers were choreographed by Damien Jalet, who previously contributed the footwork to Suspiria and to Anima, the dance film made by Paul Thomas Anderson and Thom Yorke.)
“Jacques is incredibly smart, in that he knows exactly how to get the best out of people,” Gascón says. “I’m never going to compete with Shakira. I’m not. I don’t even want to. I wouldn’t even try. Another difficulty was the pitch of the songs. I had to sing in two different voices, neither of which is my own voice – one was a lower pitch, one was a higher pitch.
“Going back to the first moment I read the script, I thought there is no way I’m going to be doing this film. I can’t sing, I don’t read music. But Jacques knows how to work with the virtues or the specific skills of the people around him. I think that’s how I was able to contribute the best of myself to the film.”
Emilia’s transition couldn’t be less like Gascón’s. In Audiard’s story the heroine disappears entirely. Gascón’s experience, conversely, was very public. Born in Alcobendas, on the outskirts of Madrid, Gascón began her career as an extra on Spanish TV before relocating to Mexico, where she carved out a career in action roles and telenovelas. Her fans were not universally thrilled when she began transitioning, six years ago. “I’ve never been given a prize,” she said at Cannes. “I’ve mostly been given blows and kicks.”
“There is a real connection between Emilia and me,” the 52-year-old says today. “Part of that is that I put my entire life and soul into these words on paper to create this character. But the transition for Emilia is a very radical one. She becomes the polar opposite of what she was. She was living in a very violent, masculine world, where she needed to pretend to be something that she wasn’t.
“In my case it wasn’t so radical. I didn’t change as physically as she did, and I didn’t feel as bad as she did in my skin before. My life is made up of beautiful moments. It’s like looking at old photographs. You evolve and you grow and you become the person you are today. I look at photos of myself as a five-year-old and I can’t recognise myself – but the same goes for photos of myself 10 to 15 years ago.”
Audiard has said that he is not sure where Karla Sofía Gascón begins and Emilia Pérez ends. But there is another significant difference between the two women. Emilia removes herself from her family. Gascón, who lived as a man until she was 46, remains a devoted father. She is married to Marisa Gutiérrez. The couple have been together since they met as teenagers, at a nightclub in Alcobendas. They share a teenage daughter.
“I think that is the deepest connection between Emilia and me,” Gascón says. “Neither of us could bear to lose our loved ones.”
The actor made headlines with her emotional acceptance speech at Cannes, in which she dedicated her win to all trans people “who suffer and must keep faith that changing is possible … If you have made us suffer, it is time for you also to change”. (Today she says, “I hope that what the audience will remember about my performance is my acting.”)
After the festival Gasón felt forced to take legal action against the far-right MEP Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of the French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, for sexist comments that she posted on X. The haters will have to wait: Gascón is living her best life.
“I feel like I am in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days,” she says. “People say to me, ‘Are you living the dream?’ I am living in the clouds. I’m travelling the world and meeting all these interesting people. It’s an amazing journey. My life has changed. Before I had nothing to do but say to my cat, ‘You are nice.’”
Emilia Pérez is in cinemas from Friday, October 25, and on Netflix from on Wednesday, November 13th
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