Scarlett Johansson has drawn criticism yet again for a controversial casting choice. Earlier this week, Johansson was announced as the lead in Rupert Sanders’ new film Rub & Tug, which follows Dante “Tex” Gill—a trans man, and a fixture of the Pittsburgh red light district’s massage parlor industry in the ’70s and ’80s. In an unsurprising turn of events, Johansson’s plan to star in the film has drawn a fair bit of criticism, most vocally from actual transgender actors who feel their experiences are being co-opted by cisgender actors.
Trace Lysette, a trans actress best known for her work on Transparent, furiously tweeted, “I wouldn’t be as upset if I was getting in the same rooms as Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett for cis roles, but we know that’s not the case. A mess.”
“And not only do you play us and steal our narrative and our opportunity,” she continued, “but you pat yourselves on the back with trophies and accolades for mimicking what we have lived.”
Jamie Clayton, a fellow trans actress who starred in Netflix’s Sense8 and The Neon Demon tweeted, “Actors who are trans never even get to audition FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN ROLES OF TRANS CHARACTERS. THATS THE REAL ISSUE. WE CANT EVEN GET IN THE ROOM.”
When Bustle reached out to Johansson while the controversy was unfolding, the actress, through her reps, responded dismissively: “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.” All three of those cisgender actors have won accolades and awards for playing transgender characters on TV and in film—though Tambor, at least, has expressed regret for playing a part that could have gone to an actual transgender woman. “Please give transgender talent a chance, give them auditions, give them their story,” he said, while accepting his second consecutive Emmy for Transparent in 2016. “I would not be unhappy if I was the last cisgendered man to play a transgendered woman.”
Only last year Johansson was fielding similar criticism for her role in Ghost in the Shell—also directed by Sanders. In that movie, Johansson plays a character who was Japanese in the project’s anime source material; in the film, the character is a Japanese woman trapped in a robot body.
Critics have also blasted the movie itself for apparently treating a real life trans figure as someone who merely disguised themselves as another gender; one Twitter called that aspect out by writing, “This isn’t just a cis person being cast as a trans character. This is a trans figure, being written as a cis character.” Many of the trades that first announced Johansson’s casting—taking cues from the official plot description of Rub & Tug—described Gill as “a woman who dressed like a man,” rather than as a trans man. Even Gill’s own obituary, written in 2003, called Gill a woman and used female pronouns, though it also noted that Gill “wanted to be known as ‘Mr. Gill,’” and “may even have undergone the initial stages of a sex change that made her appear masculine.”
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