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!”
Over preparing, so to over deliver, is classic Cox, perhaps because the 49-year-old does not take a moment of her fame for granted. She was 40 when she was cast as Sophia Burset, a trans woman in prison for credit card fraud, in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. She had been planning on giving up acting when she got the job. She was in debt, working in a drag bar and had spent decades chipping away at the industry — with small roles and appearances in reality TV. She was also black and trans, making her the ultimate outsider to an overwhelmingly straight, white, cis industry. When Cox became famous — the first openly trans person to cover Time and Cosmopolitan magazines, the first openly transgender primetime Emmy nominee and Daytime Emmy Award winner — she made history.
Fame, she says, “did not feel how I expected it to feel”. There was no sense of relief. “I was like, ‘I don’t know how long this is going to last, so I need to milk it.”’ She knew she needed to build a brand that went beyond the show and was keenly aware “there are many overdue conversations that need to be had with and about trans people”. So she started a speaking tour — she has visited more than 200 colleges over the past nine years — did meet and greets with hundreds of fans and said yes to every work opportunity and selfie request. “I was just like, there are no guarantees in this business, so I need to hustle.”
In recent years, she has tried to find balance, though she has never really slowed down, recently appearing opposite Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman, producing her own documentary, Disclosure, about trans representation on screen and hosting her excellent podcast, The Laverne Cox Show.
That podcast is made with TV producer Shonda Rhimes, who is also showrunner on Cox’s latest acting project, Inventing Anna. It is about Anna Delvey (AKA Anna Sorokin), the young Russian who pretended to be an heiress to swindle glossy New Yorkers. Julia Garner plays Delvey, while Cox is Kacy Duke, a celebrity personal trainer who was pulled into Delvey’s orbit. Cox trained with Duke as preparation for the project. Staggeringly, Duke is 64 — she looks at least two decades younger and radiates health, something Cox says was “deeply inspiring to me”. Cox turns 50 in May. Her biggest priority for her sixth decade is being healthy, feeling good and becoming “actually wise. I want to get older and actually know better”.
She might not feel it but Cox comes across as very wise to me. Our conversation veers from bell hooks to trauma resilience therapy to her hopes for a cross-racial working class uprising in the US. Her analysis of Inventing Anna “as an interesting commentary on the American dream” is typical. The show makes her think about accountability, she says. Why was Delvey held accountable but the Wall Street traders who tanked the US economy in 2008 were not? Cox believes it is inevitable that Donald Trump will be re-elected president in 2024; and that the Democrats are failing, “because our politics have been completely captured by corporations”. It’s really interesting, she says, thinking about Delvey’s story in the context of a corrupt system. In that regard the show is “social commentary, but in a really fun, suspenseful ‘holy shit!’ way,” she says and grins.
I’m the quintessential American dream story in a lot of ways,” she adds. Much of Cox’s life would make Delvey salivate. She recently returned from the couture shows in Paris, posing backstage with Jean Paul Gaultier and sitting front row at Schiaparelli in a wrought gold headpiece. She has travelled a great deal for work and recently realised a lifelong ambition of purchasing a New York City apartment. (She lives alone, between New York and LA, and has a boyfriend.)
Still, financial success wasn’t what drew Cox to performing. She was a dancer first, getting a scholarship to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and later to Indiana University Bloomington and Marymount Manhattan College. She describes dancing, at the age of five or six, as a transcendent experience. “With music playing, things would just come out of me,” she says. “Choosing the life of being an artist was about transcending my circumstances.”
Cox has spoken many times about her tough early life. She grew up in Mobile, Alabama with her identical twin, M Lamar, and their single mother. She was bullied relentlessly — she has described being chased and hit with drumsticks by gangs of school children — and attempted suicide at 11, racked with shame over her attraction to male classmates during puberty.
Once, she admits, she thought fame might make her childhood pain go away. But of course it has not. What does help is therapy, which has been a big part of her life since the early 2000s, when she first realised that acting could trigger memories. “If I’m going to be a serious actor and draw from the traumas of my life, I need to be psychologically and emotionally raw. I cannot be suicidal after I do a role, or after I leave acting class.” The pandemic was tough too. “Stuff came up. I was on my own a lot. And when I’m alone with my thoughts… it’s a cesspool in there.” Fame also does not mean the end of being shouted at or misgendered in the street, or even of danger. In November 2020, she and her friend were the victims of a transphobic attack in LA; she posted about it on Instagram, saying “It doesn’t matter who you are... If you’re trans ... you’re going to experience stuff like this.”
She has had to rethink her approach to trans activism. “I’ve realised that there’s something slightly co-dependent about my activism when it comes to trans issues,” she says. “I take it very personally. I can’t not. When trans children are being discriminated against, or violence keeps escalating… Living in that space has actually become way too much for me.”
Cox is upset as she talks about “this unprecedented moment of trans visibility and this unprecedented moment of backlash,” shaking her head. Last year was the deadliest year on record for trans people, she says. Over 100 pieces of anti-trans legislation were introduced; “a plethora of anti-trans propaganda in the media right now that’s just sort of going unchecked. It’s really a mess.”
“There was a conversation last year about trans-exclusionary radical feminists, and a particular person who made news making allegedly anti-trans statements. For you it’s a cultural war, but for me, it’s life or death. So I can’t,” she says, tears pricking at her eyes. “This is always what happens.” She looks down at the floor, and, for a long time, she is silent.
Now she tries to “lean into my love for trans people, and our beautiful humanity”. Recently, trans actress Michaela Jaé Rodriguez won the Best Actress Golden Globe; Cox was so delighted she posted a tearful 17-minute video celebrating the win on Instagram. “I’m still insanely proud. I was the first trans person to do a lot of things — you know the résumé — and I hoped that some of the doors that I was able to open, with a lot of help, that other trans people will be able to walk through and surpass me. So to see her walk through those doors and surpass my achievements in so many ways, it’s just… it gives me a lot of hope.”
She reels off the other trans actors and actresses working now — Hunter Schafer on Euphoria and Nicole Maines on Supergirl — and says that this new wave feels like her legacy. “There were not trans actors who were able to have these kinds of careers before I did. We weren’t on magazine covers. We weren’t getting nominated. It just wasn’t happening. And now it is. So I own that. And not in an arrogant way, I own it in a proud way. Because it’s never been about me, and it’s just beautiful.”
Credits: Photographer: Andy Jackson; Stylist: Scott Shapiro; Make up: Keita Moore; Hair: Ursula Stephen; Nails: Eri Ishizu; Set Design: Carrie Hill
