''If someone came up to me and went, 'Hey! Wanna go see an independent movie about a transgender woman and the son that she didn't know she had?''' says Felicity Huffman, ''I'd go, 'Ugh!' because I'd think it would be upsetting and dark and violent, but it's an independent movie so it's culture and art and I'd take it like medicine. I was in a theater doing a play once and I heard this older couple talking, and the guy turned to the woman and said, 'I don't like getting upset after 6 p.m.' Well, I kind of feel that way too. I want to go to something that's easy. And here's the thing about this — it's an adorable, fun road movie.''
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When Huffman signed on to do the film, for a five-figure salary, she told Tucker that she had only a 14-week window before Desperate Housewives started shooting. (''The whole time I was just cursing that damn TV pilot,'' remembers first-time feature filmmaker Tucker. '''It's never going to go anywhere, this movie is what's important!''')
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When Huffman found out that Tucker had added a last-minute scene that called for her character, Bree, to briefly expose her penis, she broke down. ''I went into the trailer and she looked distracted and upset,'' says Tucker. ''I reassured her that I would only put the scene in the movie if it didn't feel exploitive, and her shoulders were shaking and she started to sob.'' Racked by Bree's sense of vulnerability and her own anxiety about audiences seeing her up close as a man, Huffman told Tucker, ''It's so real and I wasn't ready for this.''
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After Transamerica wrapped, Huffman headed straight to the set of Desperate Housewives. A week into filming, Huffman phoned Tucker and told him she was having a recurring dream that the show's makeup department wasn't able to cover up her 5 o'clock shadow.
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(excerpts from EW review)
...in Transamerica, the lithe, quick-witted actress, best known these days for her Emmy-winning membership in the Desperate Housewives sorority, plays a pre-op transsexual whose birth name was Stanley and who now calls herself Bree. That's to say, Huffman is a woman playing a man in the process of transforming into a woman — a prim, conservative tranny, in fact, with a preference for boxy, church-lady suits. (She appears to share a tragic fashion gene with Tom Wilkinson in Normal.) When Bree is unnerved, she flutters like a girly Southern belle; when she speaks, she further softens her husky alto voice with refined enunciation. Yet Huffman teases out a hint of her character's past maleness in the way the ladylike Bree composes herself — a captivating flight of technique, built from equal parts empathy and skilled control.
Bree lives in Los Angeles, where she's well on her way to final gender-reassignment surgery when she receives a call from someone in New York claiming to be Stanley's son, Toby (Kevin Zegers). The teen runaway, a street hustler currently in jail on a related charge, is looking for his father — and, incidentally, needs to post bail. Toby's late mother, Bree is shocked to learn, was a brief girlfriend from Stanley's male college days.
Without admitting her real relationship to Toby, and at her psychiatrist's insistence, she flies to New York and bails the kid out. (Toby assumes she's a missionary who saves lost street youth.)
I fell into a serious lust based on this one picture:
Kevin Zegers & Felicity Huffman in Transamerica
I think I was onto something here...
Oh damn! 21 yrs old!
Here's hoping he's a decent actor...