Mick Hartley

Male transvestite fetishist Karla Sofia Gascon has won Best Actress in the European Film Awards. https://t.co/u003iFYI4q

— Róisín Michaux (@RoisinMichaux) December 9, 2024

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Read all about it in the Guardian – Karla Sofía Gascón is the first openly trans actor to win best actress at Cannes for her role in Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical. She talks about awful corsets, riding motorbikes and suing her critics:

When Madonna posted an image of the Spanish actor Karla Sofía Gascón on Instagram recently, the word she scrawled above it in vivid pink letters captured what most viewers will think after seeing her in the award-winning noir-musical Emilia Pérez: “WOW”. The 52-year-old Gascón, who was born and raised near Madrid and has spent the bulk of her career acting in Mexican telenovelas, plays the drugs kingpin Manitas, who fakes his death, transitions from male to female and reinvents herself as Pérez, a socially conscious activist. Emilia Pérez the movie, like Emilia Pérez the character, is a one-off. After all, there can’t be many films that feature brutal Mexican drug cartels and a singalong about vaginoplasties.

As befits a project that began life as a libretto, the movie is operatic in its emotions. “Madonna was crying so much after the screening in New York,” says Gascón, perched demurely on the edge of a chaise longue in a London hotel room. Her thick chestnut hair brushes the shoulders of her black dress, which has white collars and white-trimmed short sleeves. “She told me: ‘You’re amazing!’ She was crying and crying. I said: ‘Madonna, please. It’s only a film. Be happy!’”

You see? Men do women so much better than women do women. 

Not that approbation precludes abuse. The morning after Gascón’s triumph, the French far-right MEP Marion Maréchal tweeted: “So a man has won best actress.” Six LGBTQ+ organisations filed complaints against Maréchal. Gascón has personally sued her.

Well – only those on the far-right could possibly object to all this pink fabulousness. That's how it works in Guardian-land, isn't it?