Felicity Huffman fought the writer/director of her acclaimed new film Transamerica over a scene where her male-to-female transgender character exposed his penis after breaking down on the set. The actress thought nothing of exposing the rubber prosthetic when she read through the scene in the script, but when it came to shooting the big reveal, she felt it was inappropriate.
She recalls, “On the day of shooting Duncan Tucker (writer/director) came and said, ‘I want to actually shoot the actual thing. We need to see it.’ I had an actual thing and I actually found it very upsetting. That’s the one time I broke down in filming. I was crying.”
She added, “You would think, ‘It’s a piece of rubber, who cares what they see?’ but I think I’d lived in the skin of (character) Bree for so long that I felt how she would feel. It felt exposed and it felt like a betrayal and it wasn’t something I wanted to have and, nor did I want to show people.”
Tue, Feb 21, 2006
Felicity Huffman