What if your new favorite high school comedy comfort movie wasn’t just fun and touching, but queer and trans AF? Look no further than writer-director Siobhan McCarthy’s transcendently joyful, blissfully stupid, and surprisingly heartfelt debut feature She’s The He, which defiantly reclaims the traditional gender-bending narrative while mocking the hateful and insidious rhetoric around tans people using bathrooms.
The film follows Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) just before their high school graduation as they decide to pose as trans women in a last ditch effort to quell gay rumors about them. It’s all a joke until Ethan realizes: she really is trans. As the school year ends, the two best friends must reckon with their changing friendship, coming out, and coming-of-age.
With She’s The He now playing in select US theaters and available on VOD from Obscured Releasing—following a festival run that took in SXSW, NewFest in New York, and the BFI London Film Festival—filmmaker Siobhan McCarthy and star Misha Osherovich speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about how the film came about, the experience of making it with a predominantly trans and queer cast and crew, and the queer art that inspires them.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Siobhan, what was on your mind as you set about writing the screenplay for She’s the He?
Siobhan McCarthy: “So much of this movie came from me being stuck at home during the Covid lockdown and having to retread the paths of my high school experience. I rewatched all of the comfort movies that I was watching when I was a teenager. I also graduated from college during the pandemic and was thinking about what it means to be a trans person dreaming of working in Hollywood. All of those thoughts were percolating in the back of my mind as I stepped out into my professional career. As well as just being a trans person out in the world, facing up against the bathroom panic and this whole narrative that has been been pushed forever.”
“It felt like there was such a clear tie between those things and this style of comedy that’s so present in movies like Clueless and She’s the Man and has a lineage that traces all the way back to Wilder’s Some Like it Hot to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and As You Like It. There is an implicit queer and trans subtext in all of that storytelling. It’s always been there from essentially the beginning of this form of theater and it felt so odd to me that no one had thought to take that subtext and make it text.”
“I was letting those things vacillate around my brain and then I felt them collide with an experience where I’d had a particularly terrible day and came home and went, God, it would be so nice to have a movie I could watch that would feel like balm in this terrifying world. So I pitched this movie as a joke to one of my friends. I was like, ‘wouldn’t it be crazy if this existed?’ They were like, ‘yeah, it would, you should write it.’ So I wrote it in two days, sent it back to them, and they said, ‘you should find a way to make this.’ And now we found ourselves here.”
I’m glad you told the right friend who encouraged you to do it.
Siobhan: “I feel really lucky because this movie was made on the backs of all of my friends who, when confronted with impossible problems are just like, we should just do it, we should fast forward, we should keep going!”
Misha, what was your initial reaction when you read the script for the first time?
Misha Osherovich: “It was a wild script to read! It read so quickly and I never once knew where it was going, which was a little concerning, but a lot of fun. But honestly, what made me sign onto this film was getting on a Zoom with Shiv. Shiv had so much excitement for it and so many ideas. It was one of those situations where I knew I was going to be in good hands if I signed onto it.”
“We collaborated. We talked about different lines in the script and we got really excited about it. My manager saw how excited I was and even she got excited about Shiv and different actors we could find for this movie. So it was that level of enthusiasm as well as a wild script that made me like, let’s do this thing!”
What was Ethan like to play, particularly at such a pivotal moment in her life?
Misha: “It was a bizarre, very meta, kind of trying at times, but also really rewarding experience. I was pretty early in my transition doing this movie and so I definitely—in all the best, and in some respects, terrible ways—got to relive high school. I got to redo some of those moments, which is amazing, and got to wear a dress. Famously, on this movie our incredible costume department made me a dress based on my measurements. It’s the first dress that I’ve owned and it hangs in my closet now. So it was a really meta experience of redoing high school and also discovering myself in real time as a trans person.”
I had expected to laugh a lot, but I hadn’t expected such tender, poignant and heartfelt moments. Siobhan, why did you want that mix in the film?
Siobhan: “I think that it’s intrinsic to the queer experience. All queer people live a life that is filled with these high highs and low lows. The fact of being trans in America, especially on the street, is that you can go from the funniest, most absurd, most joyous experience in the world and immediately pivot into something terrifying or extremely difficult. That contrast feels intrinsincal to the queer experience and especially to queer art.”
“So much of the modern version of camp was born out of the tragedy of the AIDS crisis. So much of queer perseverance is about the balance of being able to find joy in darkness, but also engage with and genuinely acknowledge the difficulty that can come with the queer experience. So for me, in crafting something that is based on this form that is usually in a more cis straight context, purely jokes wall-to-wall for an hour and a half felt like it wasn’t engaging with queer history. It wasn’t a genuine representation of the trans experience if it didn’t also acknowledge that difficulty and that lineage of camp art and of queer art that has existed within the film industry pretty much as long as we’ve been making movies.”
There’s such a great dynamic between Alex and Ethan in the film. Misha, what was it like creating that with Nico? Again, we get hijinks but also some very real moments between them like the coming out scene.
Misha: “I would say wholeheartedly, thank God for Nico! He is so funny. He came into the process five days before we started shooting, but he came in prepared and had so many ideas for the character. I can speak for Nico a bit because I know that he was a little concerned at times. Like with that coming out scene in the car that you mention, there are moments where this character is really a dick. He’s quite awful, in the best movie way. I come out as trans and then he goes, ‘what does it have to do with me?!'”
“It’s Alex’s journey that I think a lot of masc, and cis masc in particular, folks watching this film will probably see themselves in to some degree. Especially if they have queer people in their lives who have come out and gone on a journey with that. Nico handled those tender moments so smartly and put just the right amount of humor in there. It was really rewarding to watch Nico and Shiv work together on those moments and find the balance between comedy and drama.”
“I’ll say it till the day I die, but this movie was really an experience for me of being able to sit back and watch a lot of brilliant people work and to thank God that I got to be in the same room. I was often just a sounding board for a lot of that brilliance, particularly Nico’s, with that mix of comedy and drama that he intuitively knows so well.”
Well, you brought your own brilliance, Misha. I know Nico also brought a lot of improv ideas.
Siobhan: “Yeah, Nico’s a stand-up comedian. Nico knows how to think on his feet, unlike anyone I’ve ever met in my life. For me, and I’m sure for you too Misha, it was such a benefit to be able to course correct this movie and course correct that tone with Nico.”
Misha: “Yeah, 100%.”
I don’t know about you, but sometimes with a blooper reel at the end of a movie I sit watching in disbelief or cringe and think, these clips are not funny and these people do not look like they’re having a good time making this movie. Why did they put this on here?! Whereas with She’s the He, you can feel the joy exuding from the screen and get a sense of what it was to be like on this set filled with so many queer and trans folks both behind and in front of the camera.
Misha: “I think it’s the smartest thing in the world that Shiv included that early 2000s joycore blooper reel because in those OG movies when you see those blooper reels, you’re right, if they suck, they suck, and if they’re fun, they’re really fun. It’s really indicative of how me, Tatiana, Nico, and Malia were all having a really good time and showing up to set was like showing up to high school or summer camp every day. So one of the smartest decisions Shiv made, among many smart decisions, was putting in that blooper reel because it really does show what we were like on set.”
Siobhan: “So much of the reason for the blooper reel was obviously paying homage to movies that I love. But it was also to hammer home the idea that this movie represents both a joyous queer experience on screen, but also on a metatextual level it felt very important to me to mainline to trans people that we can do this, we actually can make movies. So while bloopers are usually used to express that joy, I also wanted to include a blooper reel so that people know that trans people made this movie and that they enjoyed themselves making this movie. Trans people can do this. That felt like the perfect note to end on. Marrying that joy with the actual reality.”
It’s such a vibrant and dynamic film, how did you go about creating the visual language? It sounds great too, with a fantastic soundtrack.
Siobhan: “The sound is so crucial to me. I worked closely with my sound mixer. We’re good friends and have been working together for a while now. I ended up picking all the songs that are in the movie. They’re all songs that I know and love and wanted in this film. I feel incredibly lucky that we were able to get all of them.”
“By virtue of who I am, I had a finger in basically every pie of this film. I cut it, I wrote the score with my brother, I music supervised the whole thing, and I did all the animation. So much of the visual language is just my brain being vomited onto the screen. As you can see, I’m covered in tattoos. I was always drawing on myself as a way to survive high school as a queer and trans kid. So it felt only right that animation would come into the film and feel like this representation of my own history. In the opening title sequence, there’s this animation of a flower that is a vagina with a penis coming out of it. I drew that when I was 18 or 19 with Will, my co-editor on the film. We’ve known each other since we were little kids. I only found those cells as I was adding the animation to the film and it felt like the perfect culmination of me as a teenager being brought into me as an adult, making this thing for my past self.”
All the music choices are great, but “Time Warp” is such an unexpected needle drop.
Siobhan: “Yeah, “Time Warp” is really the standout and it was one that almost happened by accident. We were cutting that scene, which comes in an interesting place in the film tonally. It’s a pivot out of a harder, more severe moment that needs to bring the film on its upwards arc towards the end. So that scene, and the two needle drops that are back to back, is where that pivotal tonal shift is and we kept struggling with what song to put against that fight scene. We knew we needed something driving, something that felt like it was going to carry this movie through.”
“I had imported a bunch of my favorite songs into our editing software so we had this library of songs that I loved and thought, God, wouldn’t it be great if we could get these. We had some numbers from musicals in there, which is how the party scene came to have this “Cell Block Tango”-esque orchestral vibe that me and my brother wrote, essentially as an homage to “Cell Block Tango”. Another one of those musical songs was “Time Warp”. Almost as a fluke, me and Will were sitting in the editing room trying song after song when Will went, “what if we put “Time Warp” in here? Wouldn’t that be insane?!’ So we put it on the cut and it was so immediately clear that there was some intangible thing that made it perfect in both the scene itself and the flow of the movie. To this day, I don’t know why it works so well, but there’s something about it that’s perfect. Obviously, I also love that it’s speaking to the lineage of queer history and queer cinema.”
Last question for each of you, what’s your favorite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
Siobhan: “Right now, it’s Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I’ve been reading it because of another project that I’m working on, in conjunction with David France’s book, How to Survive a Plague, which is an on-the-ground account of the AIDS crisis in New York. I’ve been reading both of them in tandem and there’s something incredibly powerful and affirming about being able to go back and get reminded of even the recent history and battles that have been fought so that I can even be here making this movie and doing this press.”
“It feels so notable to me to remind myself every day how hard my ancestors have fought and how strong and durable they were. To have it reaffirmed as I go through these pieces of artwork or read these personal histories, that not only have we always been here, but that we can survive things that people are not even supposed to survive—things that are utterly untenable—and we can come out the other end making beautiful art, feels so impermeable to me. It feels like we’re immortal through that.”
Misha: “First of all, Shiv is always that smart and I couldn’t possibly try to follow up on that. Except to say that I have similar thoughts on our queer lineage and on the tragedy but also the hope that comes through the tragedy. Filmmakers like Ira Sachs are really important to me. I’m thinking in particular of films like Passages, where there’s some comedy, there’s a lot of love and heart, but when the tragedy comes in—especially in complex queer relationships—you see how the pain of being queer at certain moments in your life dictates not only the history of queer culture, but also how relationships form. Ira’s ability to walk that line between really tender and really heartbreaking means a lot to me. I think him continuing to make films is a really good indicator of that same lineage that we get from Angels in America of queer people continuing to tell their stories and where they come from.”
By James Kleinmann
She’s The He is playing in select US theaters and available on VOD now. For more on where to watch the film head to obscuredreleasing.com. Follow @shesthehemovie on Instagram.
