 "Scarlett Johansson receives flak from trans actors after her response to Twitter backlash for Rub & Tug")
Scarlett Johansson was recently roped in to play the lead role of a transgender man in Rupert Sanders’ next. Soon after the cast was announced on Tuesday, the makers as well as the actress received a lot of flak for casting non-trans actors for trans parts. Later, on Wednesday, Johansson responded to the incoming criticism from the transgender community. When asked to comment upon the development, Johansson reportedly retracted saying, “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.” And then, what followed was a string of counter-responses from various members of the transgender community, including prominent trans actors like Transparent’s Trace Lysette and Ian Harvie who took to Twitter and expressed their concerns.
What irks them is that while cisgender actors play trans people on screen and get a hefty amount of money as fee along with a series of applauds for their performance, the transgender actors are not cast in cisgender roles. Also, casting a cisgender actor for trans parts does not bring in the experience and empathy a transgender actor would otherwise add to the performance. FX’s POSE actor Indya Moore also echoed the same concern.
Jamie Clayton of Netflix’s Sense8 revealed how difficult it is for trans actors to get cisgender parts in films and TV.
Rupert Sanders’ previous film _Ghost in the Shell_ (2017), starring Johansson as a Japanese manga character, had also received a lot of backlash for casting a Caucasian actor for the role. The film was accused of racism and whitewashing. _Read: Ghost in the Shell: Before the movie, how the manga and anime reinvented cyberpunk fiction_ The upcoming film, titled Rub & Tug, is based on the life of Jean Marie Gill who ran a number of mafia-protected massage parlours in Pittsburgh during the 1970s and 1980s, which were fronts for prostitution by assuming the identity of a man, Dante ‘Tex’ Gill.
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