Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“That might be my favorite sex scene,” Rob Huebel confessed about the first time we see his character Len in season 4 of Transparent. He’s engaging in some morning sex with his separated wife Sarah, played by Amy Landecker, and let’s just say the talk is not quite “dirty.” “I will say, I watched it and I think we were just improvising,” he explained.
“Yeah, that was a Jill shout out too, the improvised slip. She was like, ‘Say uhhh, the permission slip!’” Landecker added. Perhaps two adults writhing against each other while running over the day’s to-do list doesn’t sound hilarious to you (or maybe it sounds all too real), but welcome to Transparent world, where the actors always manage to find the comedy in life. This season, Transparent includes a trip to Israel for the Pfefferman family, with some members exploring their identities deeper than ever before, and some facing down their past experiences head-on. Oh, and also the threesome stuff.
“We were talking about how all of our sex scenes—I can’t think of one that doesn’t have a comedic element. So it’s a lot easier to do it under those circumstances. Like, if we were all lusty, that’s when it’s uncomfortable,” Landecker explained. “I was watching it, and because there was just that one shot of us overhead, I could tell that we were just both about to laugh. They cut right before we started laughing,” Huebel revealed of the scene.
Oh, but don’t think Sarah and Len are just having sex with each other this season. Enter Lila (Alia Shawkat), a preschool teacher Sarah runs into at a sex addicts meeting and the couple quickly becomes entwined and infatuated with. Of Shawkat, Landecker gushes, “She’s dreamy. The only thing that was hard…our writers are great because they change the season as we’re going with stuff that’s coming back to them, and my first sex scene with her, which was just a fantasy I’m having while masturbating, I was so freaked out. I was like, this girl is just so young. So they decided to write in Sarah’s anxiety about age. Alia is this young, beautiful girl, and I felt bad. I was like, is she totally grossed out?”
“Yeah, we’re like the creepy old people pawing all over her,” Huebel offered. Hardly! Shawkat fits perfectly into the Pfefferman universe (Pfeffer-verse?) of Transparent, almost as if she’s been there all along. “She’s just this perfect find,” Landecker went on to say. “They have this gift of finding these people who come into our world that just fit as if they’ve always been there, who are game for the way we work, which is very free and open and we’re constantly changing stuff. We change the scripts, the writers are there, there’s no ‘These are your pages, go do your job.’ It is a living thing. And she just fit like a glove. Everyone was obsessed with her, and she’s so beautiful and so special.”
True, and while her scenes with Landecker and Huebel in Transparent were fun and natural for them…well it got a little bit awkward for one of her other co-stars. “We were saying, it might change the way Jeffrey [Tambor] looks at her in Arrested Development,” Huebel explained.
As the Arrested Development cast begins production on season 5, there may be (or, Maeby) a little less eye contact this time around, is all, even though the two do not share the screen on Transparent. “He said on Arrested Development he’s been seeing her on set and he’s like, ‘I don’t know how to look at you right now.’ I mean, they watched her grow up and now she’s a young woman,” Landecker said.
That she is. Shawkat created a lot of buzz with her role on last year’s first season of Search Party (the show returns to TBS for season 2 in November), just as she’ll do as Lila. But she’s just one part of Len and Sarah’s relationship, which is currently as intact as we’ve ever seen it on the show.
“I love Len,” Landecker stated. “I feel like I’ve known some very complicated women like Sarah, and some of them have this man who just loves them no matter what…. a really challenging partner, and there’s this huge hope I find that’s very romantic, that there’s someone who loves that no matter what. I find Len’s love of Sarah so touching, because she’s such a fucking pain in the ass, and he’s just there, and he gets her and he cares about her. It’s very moving to me.”
Clearly she’s not the only one. “I know that the writers, there’s certain people that as actors [they] start liking to see together, and I know that they just kept— I don’t even know if [he was] meant to have that big of a role, but whenever Rob came on, everyone loved Rob. And everyone wanted Rob, more Rob, I want more Rob, so then we’re finally given all Rob all the time.”
As for Huebel, he’s as game as ever. “I definitely root for [Sarah and Len]” Huebel said. “It’s definitely fun for me to be a sort of ancillary part of the family — Pfefferman adjacent. And to go on the trip with them to Israel is super fun. It’s also, from a character standpoint, it’s fun to have someone there to comment on how fucked up the family is and point that out. I think that’s very funny and useful.”
This comes in especially handy during a scene that plays as equal parts tense and comedic finds the Pfeffermans fighting outside of the home of Lila’s mother in Israel on the way to sightseeing. Because of course that’s where this show takes them. “It was so fun to shoot,” Landecker recalled of the episode that was directed by co-star Gaby Hoffmann. “We shot that with the light dying, we squeezed it in in like 45 minutes, and it’s probably one of my favorite scenes of the whole season. And it’s actually, I know, Gaby and Jay’s [Duplass] favorite. She was like, ‘You have to see this one scene,’ and it felt like just classic Pfefferman madness.”
While things don’t quite come to blows, Huebel noted, “It is funny to me the lengths that Len will go to support her. Like, literally anything she wants he’s like [sighs] yeah, yeah, if that’s what you want, anything to make you happy. And of course she will never be happy.”
But as Landecker pointed out, “There’s also something very powerful about a straight white male, very typical, this sort of emotionally stunted who’s present and who loves this family. Like, you’re so not Jewish, you’re so not trans, you’re just this very classic trope in a much more complicated story and you just play it with this warmth and heart. You sort of represent yourself as Rob, this kind of classic comic guy who’s tall and handsome, and like, what are you doing here? And it’s so great that he’s there. It makes us all feel accepted and loved and sane.”
The Pfeffermans spend the majority of this season in Israel…or do they? “We actually did not go to Israel,” Landecker confessed, chalking it up to “movie magic.” Creator Jill Soloway and a crew did go to collect footage, but as Heubel explained, “When you see Israel, that is Israel. [But] we weren’t there. I’m glad because no one can tell.”
Landecker notes that, “They beautifully shot people. They inserted incredible faces, like in the markets in Israel. But what’s really incredible is the efforts and the brilliance of our production. I mean, Cat Smith, who I think was Emmy nominated this year (she was, but lost to Veep). She created bedouin camps, markets, and if she doesn’t win [next] year, that’s insane. Because she basically makes you feel like we’re in Israel. We’re in Simi Valley, which had a golf course sand mill that we used as the desert. Santa Clarita for the settlement, I think. We did the Wailing Wall at Paramount, on green screen. They created part of it.” When you see this season, the fact that all of these places were created in California and not across the world will blow your mind.
But the real kicker? “The Dead Sea was Universal Studios. We had a green screen.”
Go ahead and brace yourself, because the Dead Sea scene, is about as emotional and well-acted as it gets this season. “It was our last day of shooting, and everyone brought their bathing suits, everyone was listening to reggae music, it was like we were on an island somewhere,” Landecker elaborated. “We wore floaties in the water at Universal, I had a floatie diaper that was the same color as my bathing suit so you couldn’t see it underwater.”
If this all sounds like a huge undertaking, it’s nothing compared to what it would’ve taken to get everyone to Israel to film. “Yeah, I think technically, it would’ve been too crazy. To shoot in the ocean would be too hard,” Huebel said. “I mean, thank god we didn’t,” Landecker added. “We talked about doing it in Israel, and then we talked about the logistics of doing it in the Dead Sea, and it was barely possible. Not to have land and rigs—thank god we didn’t do that. It’s really salty too, we were told. [Jill] kept having to tell us that it’s rocky and salty. She was like, ‘You’re not in clean, easy water.’ I’d like an Emmy nomination for my fake Dead Sea acting.” Landecker may have been joking about that last part, but she shouldn’t be. It’s a breathtaking, stand-out moment for the season, one that with a little help from a floatie diaper, viewers will remember forever.
And Landecker’s not the only one who really and truly brought it this season (as this entire cast does every single year). Alexandra Billings, Davina herself, has an incredible and important storyline this season, including a flashback episode (episode 5, “Born Again”) that gives her character a chance to be explained and highlighted. This also afforded her the opportunity to contribute to her storyline from her own life after the urging from a castmate. “Trace [Lysette, who plays Shea] turned to me and was like, ‘You know, we should go over there and tell them things that we like about ourselves and our characters.’ And I was like, ‘we should?’ And she said, ‘Yeah!’ So I followed her, because that’s what she does, and we went in with lists about our lives and about our characters, and the writers took note. They received it and they wrote it into the episode. I have to give the writers an enormous amount of credit for not only listening, but also applying, which is extraordinary on any show. But it’s because of Trace. I never would’ve thought of that.” Not that Trace had done it before, but as she explained, “I just wanted to make sure that they had all the ideas and resources that they could have in order to create full characters for the trans actors on the show.”
That they are. So much so, that even non-regular viewers of the Amazon original series are more than familiar with it. As Billings explained, “I’m a professor at USC now, so I’ve been there now for three weeks, and I’ve been misgendered three times on campus by students. In my teaching career of 30-plus years, it’s never happened to me, ever. Not this many times. It’s happened occasionally, but never with the vitriol and purpose that it’s been happening with. I chalk that up to the time that we’re living in, with these white, cisgender, heteronormative men that are running the country now that have given permission to all of these humans who believe that their prejudice is righteous and their bigotry should have voice. And it’s blossoming around us. But here’s the great gift. I was standing in the middle of the campus to teach and two students were coming towards me, two big guys. And one of them said, ‘That’s a guy,’ loud, like at me. Then the same guy said, ‘That’s a tranny.’ And then his friend said, ‘That’s the tranny on that tranny show,’ and then left. And I thought to myself, wait, here’s the great gift: they’re watching the show.”
A similar incident happened to Trace as well. “I had a cab driver drive past me in LA and say, ‘Are you on Transparent, and are you a guy?’, something like that. And I was just like, I don’t know how to answer that. All I gave him was the finger. I think I said, ‘Are you a guy, bitch?’”
“These people who never would have seen this show, they can’t avoid it. These humans that profess to hate us are being bombarded by this portal that Jill Soloway has opened. It’s extraordinary. So even the people that supposedly, especially the men who don’t like us, are the ones that are fucking us,” Billings explained.
But perhaps Lysette put it in even more succinct terms by noting, “They’re going home and are watching tranny porn.”
Season 4 of Transparent continues to highlight many different forms of the trans experience, including a rather jarring scene at the end of episode 2, “Groin Anomaly” when Maura (Tambor) and Ali (Hoffmann) go through security at the airport on their way to Israel. It’s an important, necessary, and eye-opening scene for any cisgender humans that like to complain about the airport. While Billings and Lysette have luckily not had a “Maura incident” they both have gotten searched before, with Billings pointing out, “My bag, or me, always gets searched, whether it’s first class or coach. Always, without fail.”
The scene is a simple way that this show continues to broaden horizons and bring awareness to everyday experiences that can be traumatic for some people. “I had a girlfriend text me early this morning that said, ‘Hey girl, can I call you when I get through security at the airport?’ and she’s trans. Immediately I was like, oh fuck,” Lysette said. “My nerves went through the roof and I was like, ‘Yes, call me, call me as soon as you can.’ So she calls me, and she had to talk about a boy. [laughs] You know, about her relationship. It didn’t have anything to do with airport security. Airport security is scary for trans people, and I’ve been lucky and also blessed that I didn’t have any experiences like that. I think a lot is probably due to my image, but I’ve heard some horror stories.” She means legit horror stories, not just ‘The security line at JFK is so long!’ And while we’re talking horror stories, look out for episode 9, “They Is On The Way,” where Billings gives an incredible performance opposite a terrifying houseguest, a moment that is sure to make you tense just watching it.
“One of the reasons I love this show is because there’s a big difference between Maura and Shea,” Billings explained. “Because trans people fall in many different kinds of containers, the main ones are passable and non-passable. You either wear your trans-ness on the outside in a very real and obvious way, or you don’t, and you assimilate. So you have Shea who assimilates really well, and Maura who doesn’t. And then you have Davina who really is in the center, who sometimes can assimilate and sometimes doesn’t. So these three trans people I think really allow the trans experience to be seen through very specific lenses.” For the fourth season in a row, amen, sister.
