PHOTOGRAPHER: ANDY JACKSON, STYLIST: SCOTT SHAPIRO
(Picture: Andy Jackson)What a treat it is to watch Laverne Cox give good face for the camera. She is a virtuoso under the photographer’s bright lights, pouting, smizing, arching her back, spiralling one hand into the air with a dancer’s flourish. Periodically, she burst into song — her glossy, vibrato harmonies float over Beyoncé’s Homecoming, the soundtrack to our shoot. At one point she picks up a discarded spiked stiletto shoe and prettily holds it up to her cheek, as though it is a phone handset.
Cox makes all this look easy, but of course it is not. Everything in Cox’s trail-blazing career has been hard won, even this apparent ease in front of the camera. Later, she tells me about a seasoned actress who told Cox how much she hated photoshoots. Cox asked: did she prepare for shoots, the way she would prepare for a role? “I prepare, I put music on, and I pose, I figure out my angles,” says Cox, crediting America’s Next Top Model as her teacher (“obviously”). “But I’ve figured out my own thing too. You have to figure out your own way,” she told the actress, who took the advice and said that it had changed her life, “and she’d been in the business forever!”
