Karla Sofía Gascón on the ‘Emilia Pérez’ scandal at the Oscars and her social media posts: ‘I will not be silent’!

Emilia Perez’s star, Karla Sofia Gascon, has been one of the main targets of the media in recent months. She went from winning an award in Cannes and becoming the first trans woman to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actress category, to being excluded from all advertising campaigns for the film that made her famous because of a scandal related to some old trines that made her a kind of pariah. She was excluded from the most important galas, dinners and awards. The actress who used her worldwide fame to highlight the importance of protecting the rights of LGBTIQ+ people is now once again the main one discriminated against. This is her interview in BOCAS magazine.

The story of Karla Sofía Gascón is a good example to think about how the culture of cancellation works. It took only a few weeks for this Spanish actress – the first transgender woman to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actress category and a growing symbol of the spokesperson for LGBTIQ+ rights – to become an unwanted voice: a stone in the shoe of a film that was hoping to become the revelation of the year for the most important film awards.

Emilia Pérez, by French director Jacques Audiard, cost 21 million euros – a modest budget for a film production – and received 13 Oscar nominations, the same number as Forrest Gump or The Lord of the Rings. It was billed as a “narcomusical” (a term not very popular in Latin America for obvious reasons) because it tells the story of Manitas del Monte: a Mexican drug lord who wants to change genders (and change his life). After being reborn as Emilia Perez, the former drug trafficker cannot stay away from his family (whom he took out of the country to protect them) and calls them back; at that point, Emilia, who introduces herself as Manitas’ sister, creates a foundation to help find those who have disappeared in the drug war. In addition to Gascón, who carries the film from beginning to end as Manitas and then as Emilia, Zoe Saldaña was cast as the lawyer who helps Manitas make the transition and then does all the work of the foundation, and Selena Gómez as Manitas’ American wife and the mother of his children: two names that guaranteed the film an initial media boom.

The film touches on complex issues: from the importance of memory in overcoming conflict to the capacity for personal and social transformation to leave violence behind. For this very reason, it has been heavily criticized, especially in Mexico and Latin America: “Jacques Audiard is incapable of understanding why he does not want to dance with his little songs in the land that laid the dead, which the film uses as a carpet,” wrote Antonio Ortuño in an article for El País. Then the comments of several accounts on X even talked about the accent of Selena Gomez (who plays Manita’s American wife, a woman who could very well have an accent), and then gloated when an interview was discovered in which the film’s director said, in mid-2024, that Spanish “is one of the languages of emerging, developing countries, of humble, poor and migrant people.

Karla Sofía Gascón was born in Madrid in 1972. While still at school, she learned to defend herself against the gangs of kids who bullied her. Her name was then Carlos Gascón: she grew up playing the proto-video games of the 1980s and watching the movies that arrived at the video libraries near her home, from Jurassic Park to Rambo. “I didn’t really know who I wanted to look like, whether it was Samantha Fox or Stallone,” she wrote in Karsia, a book she published in 2018 that chronicles her life and transition process. Her career in front of the camera led her to appear in dozens of productions for film and television, first in Spain and later in Mexico. At the beginning of her career, she married Marisa Gutiérrez, with whom she has a daughter, Victoria, 15 years old.

It was not easy for Karla Sofía Gascón to take on the role of Manitas del Monte. She had to relive many questions and experiences related to her transit process in order to perform challenging scenes. The result is evident in many reviews, which are not so complimentary about the film, but highlight the work of “Gascón embodies Emilia in a commanding but quiet way, showing a greatness full of irony and a wit that constantly borders on authority and vulnerability,” said, for example, Richard Brody, film writer for The New Yorker magazine. The best actress awards at the Golden Globes, the European Film Awards and Cannes – where she shared the prize with co-stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez – seem to support this view. It was there, in Cannes, that she gave the speech that made headlines around the world: “I want to send a message of hope to all trans people. Like Emilia Perez, we all have the opportunity to change for the better, to be better people. So: ‘Let’s see you change, you bastards! Shortly after, she sued a French far-right politician who criticized the awards with a transphobic comment. The case is still pending.

On January 30, shortly after the Oscar nominations, Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi, who identifies as Muslim, published a thread of tweets that the actress had posted on her Twitter account between 2016 and 2021, in which she reacted to various news stories – some related to attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe – with phrases such as “retarded followers of Allah” or “Islam is becoming a focus of infection for humanity.” The thread received more than 4 million views, and Gascón was called a racist: “All these messages from the star of a movie promoting his progressive values. How can you not laugh?” wrote Hagi. And that was just the beginning: before she deleted her X account, other users posted messages in which the actress talked about the protests in the United States sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota (“I really think very few ever cared about George Floyd, a druggie hustler, but his death has served to re-emphasize that there are still those who think black people are monkeys without rights and those who think the police are murderers. All wrong”) or the 2021 Oscars: “More and more, the Oscars look like an independent and vindictive film award, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Blacklivesmatter demonstration, or 8M. Karla Sofía admitted to writing those tweets, and in an interview with CNN en Español, after explaining herself and apologizing for any offense her tweets might cause, she said she wrote them as a way to vent in the face of what made her despair in the world.

Gascón’s invitation to various award ceremonies, including the Goya Awards, was withdrawn, and the film’s producers and distributors announced that they would not support her on promotional trips. Even an independent Spanish publisher who had planned to reprint her book abandoned the idea. From that moment on, the official images published by Emilia Pérez showed Karla Sofía blurred in the background, while Saldaña was sharp in the foreground. Vanity Fair magazine published: “It’s almost safe to say that Emilia Pérez’s leading lady, Karla Sofia Gascon, has torpedoed her own chances of winning Best Actress at the 2025 Oscars. Why do hundreds of people suddenly and radically change their minds? Why is it taboo not to isolate the one everyone says needs to be isolated? “To make sinners invisible, so that they suffer the worst social punishment a human being can suffer. The only thing worse than having to answer for one’s crimes before a judge is to be rejected by society,” said the Spanish writer Elvira Lindo in her column in El País. It seems that this rejection, this collective search for justice, sometimes completely obscures the possibility of understanding those who do not necessarily think the same way, and it is paradoxical that a person who has experienced marginalization and discrimination in her own skin should now suffer something worse because of a few tweets written when she was not a famous actress; would she have written them now? Not only Netflix decided to punish her, but also some of her colleagues and the director himself. Her case is as dramatic as that of Soviet traitors and deserters, who were even erased from official photos so that nothing would remain of them. But in her case it is impossible to erase her from the movie: she is the protagonist.

This interview with Karla Sofía Gascón took place on January 18, six days before she was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards. At that time, her tweets had not yet been published and she was actively participating in the Oscar campaign. “Get ready to see the best film in the history of world cinema,” she told the audience that had arrived at the Cinemateca in Bogotá to see the Colombian premiere of Emilia Pérez. “It’s just that I find it very funny,” he told me later, when I asked him about that phrase. “I use a lot of humor and irony, also exaggeration. And, well, look, all these resources have a point of truth: you have to learn to see it.

There was something in that statement that felt like an order: Karla is an imposing woman, and sometimes, between jokes that she tells seriously, she sends deeper messages. She is also irreverent and direct: if she feels she has given an ambiguous answer, she tries to keep talking until she says something powerful and sometimes visceral. Sometimes she even responds with anger and outrage, especially when it comes to social networking topics.

After the interview, while she was being made up for the BOCAS photos, she decided to put together her own playlist: “I listen to ethnic music. Instrumental. Anything that doesn’t have lyrics, so I don’t have to listen to bullshit.” His phone played various Celtic music compilations to set the mood for the photo shoot with Hernán Puentes. And in the middle of their poses, a song with lyrics played: a song by Piche, the French drag rapper who was part of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

“Casse, casse le genre, / maintenant c’est pas l’orientation qui fait la sexualité. / Danse, danse, mon enfant / Sur tes talons hauts tu pourrais bien t’envoler” (Break, break gender now / It’s not orientation that makes sexuality / Dance, dance, little one, / With your heels you can escape).

At the end of that issue, I tried to contact her again to continue and update the conversation. But there was no response from her or her team: Karla Sofía Gascón had decided to put aside the confrontational instinct that had characterized her in recent months: “I hope my silence allows the film to be appreciated for what it is: a beautiful ode to love and difference,” she said in the last message she posted on her Instagram.

Is it true that when you first talked about taking on the role of Emilia Perez, you asked the director, Jacques Audiard, to change the script?

Yes, I asked him and suggested it several times. I let him know that Manitas del Monte’s motivation for his transformation process could not be to escape justice; that would completely lose the character. I don’t think there are many secrets: in the movie, one thing is what you wrote and another is the development of all this. There were many things I would have liked them to take out, others they took out and I would have liked them to stay in… What I have to say is that the sense of the movie changed in the process to a place where I felt more comfortable. For example, in the original version, in the beginning, there were many scenes in which Manitas del Monte slept with men, or in which she made love to people in the street and in a violent way… It was a different character, but it evolved as we realized which was the movie we wanted to tell. That movie was not in the script, and I think that’s wonderful.

Were you looking for references in other movies and shows about how trans people are portrayed? What do you think about that?

Of course I do. I know them because the subject has obviously always interested me. What do I think? That they are and have always been the same: the story of the person who was in prostitution, or the one who wanted to get out of prostitution, or the one who was in the violence of prostitution… There are some things that go beyond that, like The Danish Girl, which I personally liked a lot. It’s really a poverty, let’s say, to see the general level of production and direction and creation, where there’s a tendency to…

To stereotype?

Yes, and to go for the easy joke. I always say I can’t stand cabaret shows where the person who comes out to sing is the trans woman or the drag queen or a transvestite who imitates old singers and says she’s eaten everything. I don’t find those shows fucking funny to be honest with you. Maybe some people do it, and it’s very commendable to do it, but I don’t like it.

Why?

I’ve always been a person who wanted to normalize things. It sounds really hard to say, but it’s one thing to be LGBT and it’s another thing to want attention. There are a lot of people who like to be in groups that amplify attention, but I feel like that’s not being LGBT and that’s not being sexually different. To be sexually different you don’t need anything, you just have to be you and that’s it! You don’t need a flag or you don’t need to cut your hair in any way. That there are people who like these groups? Well, that’s fine, let everyone do what they want!

That is to say, you don’t like that collective mentality….

I never liked the groups! None of them. I understand that you have to unite to be stronger, but it also has a negative side because in these groups there are always leaders who take over the word and in the end everything becomes a lie because they start taking away freedom. What I have seen is that these voices end up monopolizing, proposing only one life option, one way, and they say: “If you don’t do this, you don’t belong,” or “To be trans, you have to be this, not that. And that is what they are running away from!

Back to Emilia Perez: how did you take on the challenge of playing a character who wanted to make a transition?

All actors and actresses, those of us who dedicate ourselves to bringing other people’s lives to other people, have to draw a lot from our experiences. You can build a character, but in the end the construction comes from what you have lived. I always say that the most important thing for an actor is to have lived, not to have taken a course in “understanding the depth of human emotion” [laughs]. But you have to be careful how we use our own experiences to bring them to other characters, because there always has to be a line of separation. To answer your question, that happened to me with Emilia Pérez: there was a moment when I felt I was losing myself in the character. I remember two very specific moments: the hospital sequence and when I’m in bed with the child.

Did it revive the transformation process?

In reality, fiction has nothing to do with reality. What is true of the hospital scene is that operations are not a dish of good taste for anyone.

In Emilia Pérez there is a song that talks about the relationship between the transit of Manitas del Monte and the possibility of change in society. Is that how you see it?

Absolutely. I believe that when we begin to have the freedom of our bodies and our minds, and we do not give that freedom to those who are telling us all the time what to do with our lives and what to think, then we can begin to have a real evolution. We have to take a step forward, change a lot of things in ourselves and begin to free ourselves from all these shameless leaders who lead us to do things that we may not want to do.

Was it your first musical?

And let’s hope it’s the last one! (laughs). When they tell me I have to sing in another musical, the answer is: I don’t know. If I was 30 years old, I would say: “Come on, I still have time”. But I’m not in the mood for little dances anymore. I’d rather do karate choreography, and I always wanted to do action movies because I like them so much! Suddenly I regret it, because I see myself at 52 years old, beating myself up, throwing myself around, rolling around… My bones are not the same anymore, but I still want to do those things.

Tell me about your experiences growing up in Alcobendas, the neighborhood where you were born. You once described it as a kind of Bronx. Why is that?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know the Bronx, but from what I saw in the movies, it was a complicated neighborhood, right? Well, the same thing in Alcobendas: it was a working class neighborhood, with normal people. There were kids and we fought all day. Some of them had a knife and they would take your things and so on. At that time it was the law of the strongest in childhood, it was a time when bullying was normal, it was not something that was persecuted or anything like that, but it was normal that they did it to you; then you were ready to be thrown in the water or something like that when you went to school or high school.

There you had your first contact with the cinema…

I come from the time when the first video games came out, the first VHS and Betamax players, the first computers, the first video games… We went from playing with a line and a dot to what we see now in the PlayStation, if I had had that at 15, I would have hallucinated in colors! The same thing happened to me with the cinema and movies: in the neighborhood where I lived, the only movie theater we had was the one next to our house, and the first movies we saw were some horrible ones that my father took us to sometime: I remember one of the Power Rangers, Clash, one of a Minotaur that came out and killed people; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Chinese stuff that my father and mother liked… And those by Paco Martínez Soria, Spanish cinema stuff that was authentic, movies that made the audience laugh.

Most popular movies, so to speak….

I also remember summer movies in the open air; I had all those experiences. But then came VHS and hundreds of movies of all kinds, and look how you get caught up in all that commercial cinema! I thought it was wonderful. I grew up with Jaws 3D, with Rocky IV, with Star Wars, with Indiana Jones and all these wonders and gems.

After doing Emilia Perez you have met many of these stars: Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg…

When I saw Steven Spielberg and he greeted me, I said: “Holy shit, this is not normal! It was a few months ago at the Governors Party. I was standing next to Quentin Tarantino. I was introduced to him, he greeted me and said, “I want to see your movie. Tarantino said the same thing to me and I hope you saw it and liked it.

Is it true that your career began with a call to Spanish television?

Yes, I remember it as a normal thing: I woke up one morning, I knew what I had to do and that was it. I called and that was it. That’s how the whole story started that led me here.

How confident does one have to be to do that?

If I had thought about that, maybe I wouldn’t have dared to call to make a fool of myself! (laughs). But I think sometimes you have to lose pride to gain other things. This is very important: pride leads us nowhere, it is one of the most terrible things that we humans have; it is good if you use it well, for example: not to sink in difficult moments, but not if you use it to say: “I am the shit”. I think the most important thing for a human being is to know how to laugh at himself: that’s what I achieved with this call.

Throughout your career you have acted in several TV series in Spain and Mexico. How did you deal with the tendency to stereotype characters that is so common in this medium?

When I first came to Mexico, it was hard for me to get a place because I wasn’t super tall and I didn’t fit the prototype of the super cool macho guy that they have for soap operas. The funny thing is that later on they also stereotyped me with bad characters and things like that, because for some reason Spanish people with our accent are seen as villains. It was fun for me to see how they try to pigeonhole you. I remember once I was doing tests for a soap opera and I heard a producer say: “No, he’s got a very big nose and that’s not going to look good on screen. Absurd criteria, right? Then you say: “How can you compete with that? The only thing you can do is to continue to love your work, to believe in yourself and nothing else, because if you start behaving the way other people want you to behave, it will never stop. And this has happened to me many times. I see it very clearly now: I was in a world where I was doing the things that I thought other people wanted me to do, and the truth is that freedom as a human being and as an artist begins when you separate yourself from all of that.

At the beginning of your career you married Marisa Gutiérrez. Tell me about her.

I have to build a monument to Marisa. We have known each other for a thousand years and she has put up with me all my life: we have a wonderful little girl and she is still at the bottom of the barrel. When you are with someone for so long, you end up seeing them as your family: we know more about each other, about each other, than my parents do, for example, so it is very difficult for me to separate what you are as a family and what you are as a couple. At the end of the day, I think the love of the family comes first, and it is impossible to separate yourself from that.

It has been a relationship that goes back and forth… Even in Mexico you had other partners.

I was separated from her many times, but in the end we were always in touch. There was a point where you have to change your perspective: if you’re going to be, you’re going to be okay.

How did you find spaces of freedom in that relationship?

It was difficult, because I’m also a very bad girl: I want freedom for myself, but not for others.

Tell me about your daughter Victoria. She is 15 years old and went through her transition as a child: she says in the book that she called you “Mapi”.

It was very nice because children are not conditioned by society, nor by the environment around them, nor by what others say they “should” be. Children are free to think, and it is strange because this does not happen to older people. When I think about this, I remember some comments I read in a book by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, where he talks about living in the moment, in the present, without judging and without being conditioned by anything. Children are like that and I think that is why they are the ones who carry the truth.

I also want to ask you about your approach to Buddhism, a subject that has been present in your life.

Yes, it’s nice. Some Italian friends told me about their experience a long time ago and I laughed my head off. I consider myself an “aphilosopher” and an “arreligious”, but in the end I discovered that it is very important for me to have a moment of reflection, a meditation. It is useful for so many things! Then I read about the Law of Attraction and how it relates to meditation… Everything revolves a little bit around cause and effect, and in the end, when you start looking for what you want to be and do, and you do it with clarity, you see the paths you have to take to get there. The result may come to you late, soon, or not at all, but it will certainly be good for you. And very strange things happen, sometimes you don’t even know why.

Which ones?

I usually know what is going to happen.

An intuition?

I’ve always known what’s going to happen, the problem is I don’t know how it’s going to happen and that makes me very angry. I have a vision: I visualize something that I think is going to happen and I do what I have to do to make it happen. But something uncontrollable always comes out, because of course I can’t foresee all the variations [laughs]. I once said to a friend of mine: “I think I am psychic. And he said to me: “Look, what you do is a logical evaluation of all things, you gather them in your mind and make a very clear approximation of what is going to happen in the future; but nothing else. And I replied: “I find your scientific explanation of all this very interesting, don’t you? But I am still sure that I know what is going to happen. For example, for the Golden Globes, two months before – I don’t know how many – I drew the dress with a yellow stripe and an orange stripe, and I sent it to Yves Saint Laurent with a reference to the Buddhist statues in Ayutthaya, Thailand. I said, “Please make me the dress for the Golden Globes. I did it without any hope that he would do it, but the turkey got bold and said, “Hey, this is fashion history too. Maybe it wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he recognized that I had a story to tell. It was a dress that was the talk of the world at the time. When he sent me the sketch, I said: “Wow.

In 2018, you made your transit public with a book: Karsia. It is the story of your life, but, in the middle of it all, the main character takes his own life. Why did you write it?

I’ll tell you straight: I wrote it to not fulfill it. For me, it was like a lifeline, the rope that I grabbed to keep pulling. I found that much more interesting than getting out of the way. That’s why.

In the book you talk about a moment when a hairdresser in Mexico gave you extensions. And you write: “Here I found the place of freedom”. Tell me what it was like to go out on the street at that moment, what was the social shock for someone who was a well-known figure.

Well, in the end, it was a process that I had been going through for many years in my life. I had always tried to go my own way, and I had gotten used to people looking at you and insulting you. In the end, the important thing is that it doesn’t hurt: there are those who criticize you, others who praise you; that’s normal. The other thing, which was more difficult, was to prepare myself for the fact that everyone would confuse my pronouns and get up my ass when I asked to be called something else: they preferred to treat you as they pleased and hurt you everywhere. In the beginning, of course, you’re between Pinto and Valdemoro, and then there’s a moment when people don’t really know where to put you, right? Because we are used to being divided.

But your transition took place in Spain. You have said publicly that you made this decision in part because the health care system in Europe offered more guarantees. What can Latin America learn?

Not only Latin America, but the whole world. I think Spain has a very good system in terms of rights and social security. I tremble every time I am in the United States and I feel like I am going to get sick because I say: “I’m going to have to sell my house to pay for the hospital. Health and rights should be universal, and governments should be dedicated to protecting all people out there. Human rights should be above any political or economic differences. There are things you shouldn’t even be able to touch. And now this man [Trump] comes along and tries to remove any mention of gender or trans people? No! There are some things you shouldn’t be able to touch. I’m looking forward to [J.K.] Rowling or Trump or somebody else making a direct comment, because so far they’ve been talking out of both sides of their mouths. Rowling already came out at the Golden Globes and criticized trans rights, that they were going to kill women and children. In other words: I am the world’s problem.

You have been very active in these discussions.

I won’t shut up! I can’t shut up. If I shut up, it’s because they ask me, please, and if they ask me seven times, I do it. Otherwise I would fight with everybody all the time, I would go to all the programs and tell everybody: “Come on, let’s eat the rabbit.

What does this phrase mean? Like, “Let’s discuss uncomfortable topics”?

Yes, and what happens is that because all these discussions on social networks are empty, you end up in an unreal world where you are talking to the same person, but you think they are 20 different people… Even, on the other hand, they suddenly tell you the opposite. No one wants to admit it, but the whole world of social networks is a lie, and everyone uses it to their advantage: big companies, tiktokers… Everyone creates fake profiles to deceive. I receive proposals to increase the number of followers, to give them likes on posts, to make good or bad comments… And they are robots! It seems absurd to me.

How do you think we can have a healthier conversation on social media?

I don’t know, but either we do something about it or we’re not going anywhere. Maybe it is to put on a digital identity card where you have to take responsibility for what you are talking about. But the thing is, for me now, the networks have no credibility. No social network. And the one that has the least is X, which was Twitter, because now it’s: “Come on, let’s smash everything. And the problem with all of this is that if you try to work in an honest way and you say something that is not regulated by these types of entities, they send you to the bots to fuck you up, to take down your page or to insult you. If you don’t react, that’s up to you: you enter the other dynamic, which is the group of sections.

JOSÉ AGUSTÍN JARAMILLO

BOCAS Magazine

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