When the BBC was casting its adaptation of Paris Lees’s autobiography, What It Feels Like for a Girl, it wasn’t the only one wrestling with how to find the right actor to play the lead in a biopic. “Cher did an interview,” smiles Lees, “and she said: ‘We just can’t find somebody that’s Cher.’ I was like: ‘Same, girl. I hear your struggles.’ So me and Cher have been going through it.” Sitting next to Lees is the actor they went with, Ellis Howard, whom you may remember as the sapling Ivan VI in HBO series Catherine the Great, but who you will never have seen being this luminous.
“In the beginning, we were looking for a trans person,” Lees says. She and Howard are sharing a Zoom screen, and it’s not so much that they look similar as that they both look so cinematic, they seem to match – “But then I just knew, the moment I saw Ellis, that this cheeky, cheeky person could do it.”
