Trans Actress Karla Sofía Gascón on Oscar Buzz and Online Trolls: 'I've Developed a Taste for Revenge'

Trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón has been lavished with praise and Oscar buzz for her stunning turn in "Emilia Pérez," but also showered with threats and ugly messages from trolls. It fires her up: She calls the hate her "gasoline."

The Hollywood Reporter noted that an Oscar nomination for Gascón would leave her "poised to become the first transgender performer to win." (Elliot Page, THR recalled, came out as trans only after his Oscar win for "Juno.")

"Not since 2017's 'Moonlight' has an Academy Award front-runner been so well suited to trigger Donald Trump's base," THR quipped, before thumbnailing the Netflix movie's storyline: "A Mexican cartel kingpin named Manitas (Gascón) hires a careerist corporate lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help him transition to a new life as a woman, fake his death and resettle his wife (Selena Gomez) and kids in Switzerland."

"And it's a musical."

Citing the worldwide spread of transphobic rhetoric, Gascón, a Buddhist, observed, "There is a part of society that lives off hate, that lives off selling hate, and there is another part that wants to live in hope, with the same rights, all of us in peace and respect." The actress, who hails from Spain, added: "I always see it as a struggle between light and dark."

In this moment, she added, "I am public enemy number one right now in the world for many people."

Some of the vitriol directed at her has come, unsurprisingly, from right-wing public figures. After she won for Best Actress at Cannes, French politician Marion Maréchal ("niece of the National Rally standard-bearer Marine Le Pen and granddaughter of the movement's late founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen," THR noted) took to X to send out a tweet reiterating a standard transphobic trope: "Progress for the left means the erasure of women and mothers." Gascón promptly sued. Now, THR relayed, the actress "says she is bracing herself for 'Señora Rowling' to weigh in," a reference to the seemingly tireless anti-trans "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling.

But those seeking to demoralize the actress have instead achieved the opposite. Gascón told THR that the hate and rage she faces serves as "my gasoline to then tell the people of the light: 'You have won.'"

"The more people hate me, the more insulting messages they send, the more I say, 'Thank you,' and the more I'm going to enjoy this moment."

That said – and her Buddhist beliefs notwithstanding – Gascón went on to declare: "I've developed a taste for revenge."

The best revenge, of course, is well-earned recognition for achievement, and the Oscar buzz around her performance holds the promise that Gascón's thirst to get her own back on the trolls might well be slaked.

The film has its critics among trans advocates, but one thing it does not lack is authenticity of motive. Being a trans actress cast in a trans role, Gascón was ideally situated to inform filmmaker Jacques Audiard that his script's original premise – for Gascón's character Manitas to seek gender transition as a means to evade prosecution, setting up the story for a "screwball" treatment – fell short of the experience of transgender people. "Gascón told Audiard it'd be far more interesting, and truer to life, to have Manitas genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria," THR reported.

Another change: Audiard depicted the character, post-transition, as suddenly being sexually interested in men, a shift that Gascón found not to be credible based on her own life. In the film, the character – now Emilia Pérez – begins a new relationship with another woman.