I Am Cait might not be returning for a third season, but its star has another exciting small screen project lined up. Earlier this year it was announced that Caitlyn Jenner would be appearing on Jill Soloway‘s groundbreaking TV series Transparent, a show widely credited with pushing transgender issues (and Amazon Prime) into the mainstream consciousness. Soloway has now revealed more details about Caitlyn’s role. Speaking with Variety at the Toronto Film Festival, she said that she will appear in a divine, drug-induced hallucination.
“She’s in a dream sequence,” Soloway explained. “[Gaby Hoffmann’s character] Ali has a kind of wild, nitrous-inspired goddess-worshipping dream sequence. And you can’t talk about the goddess without Ntozake Shange and Caitlyn Jenner who are both in the dream.” Shange is the famed African-American feminist playwright best-known for her Obie Award-winning 1975 play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Her work frequently explores themes of race and gender.
According to Hoffmann, Jenner was “a total natural” in her role and totally chill with the improvisational scenes that Soloway prefers over heavily scripted ones. “She was great,” she said. “She was a total natural. She was funny. She was great at improvising.”
Transparent hasn’t been perfect at representing the trans experience. Many people have called out the show for casting a cis male actor to play a transgender woman, something Soloway recently touched upon in an interview with New York magazine. “Cis people telling the stories of trans people gets the stories told, but we’ve made a gigantic effort to make sure that there are a lot more trans actors in the show, as well as trans characters and trans people behind the scenes and doing an employment program,” she said. “We have a very trans-central experience. And I think it was an absolutely positively necessary thing to create upon realizing what it meant to have a cis man in this role.” Two years after the first episode aired, she now employs over 50(!) trans and gender non-conforming people as crew members and actors, making Transparent the most trans-inclusive show ever.
Transparent Season 3 is set to premiere on September 23.
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Text Hannah Ongley
Image via Instagram