Yahoo Lifestyle “Sons Of Anarchy’s” Creator, Kurt Sutter, Just Admitted That He Wouldn’t Cast A Cis Man To Play Transgender Character Venus Van Dam Today
Back in 2008, the FX series Sons of Anarchy burst onto our screens and quickly became a global sensation.
In case you didn’t know, the show was created and written by Kurt Sutter and stars British actor Charlie Hunnam as Jax Teller, a biker struggling to balance being a good person with being a part of a legacy motorbike gang, SAMCRO.
Sons was hugely successful thanks to its gripping storylines, shocking twists and turns, and seriously emotional moments that left even the toughest of fans in tears, and by the time the show ended in 2014, it was averaging more than 4 million viewers a week.
In Season 5 of the show, which aired in 2012, the character Venus Van Dam was introduced — a transgender sex worker played by cisgender male actor Walton Goggins.
Venus made her debut in the episode “Orca Shrugged,” but became a recurring character in the show who regularly helped out SAMCRO as one of their closest allies.
A romantic relationship also developed between Venus and club member Tig Trager, played by Kim Coates. Venus was one of the few people to bring out Tig’s softer side in Sons’ entire seven-season run, and their romance was accepted by the rest of the biker gang without question.
And earlier this year, Walton opened up about the unconventional way he landed the role of Venus, explaining that he and Kurt first crossed paths when Kurt was one of the main writers on The Shield, which Walton starred in between 2002 and 2008.
“[Kurt] did an interview where he said: 'The only two people that I could never have on my show are Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins, because no one could ever see them as anything but their characters on The Shield,'” Walton said during an appearance on Wired’s Web's Most Searched Questions series.
“Someone sent this article to me, I read it, I forwarded it to Kurt Sutter, and I said: ‘Fuck you, man. I wouldn’t do your show anyway,’” he recalled. “True story. I said: ‘The only way I would do your show is if I played a transgender [character].’ Two years later, he sent me a text and he said: ‘Were you serious?’”
“And I said: ‘About what?’” Walton continued. “He said: ‘About playing a transgender [character].’ And I said: ‘Do you have pages?’ He said: ‘Yes.’ He sent them, I read them, and it was one of the greatest things that I had ever read. And it made me laugh, and it broke my heart.”
Walton was dedicated to playing Venus as accurately and respectfully as possible, and went on to detail exactly how he approached the role, starting when he was still working on Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie Django Unchained.
“I bought a pair of high heels while we were doing Django Unchained, and I walked the streets of New Orleans after wrap, at, like, midnight, every night for the better half of a month, just to get used to it,” he said. “If you can walk in high heels on cobblestone streets, you can walk in them anywhere.”
“I don’t feel like I did that show,” Walton added of Sons. “Because it took four and a half hours to get made up; I’d come in very early in the morning, and no one — out of respect to me and deference to Venus — no one ever saw that transition except the people who were working on it.”
“Charlie, and Kim, and all the boys on the show only ever met me as Venus Van Dam,” he explained. “We had been friends for years before that, but they never talked to me as Walton. They only referred to me as Venus, and they treated me as the lady that I was.”
Walton concluded that playing Venus “will remain one of the greatest experiences” of his life.
And in a recent episode of his and his wife Katey Sagal’s podcast, PIE with Kurt Sutter and Katey Sagal, Kurt reflected on the role of Venus, and admitted that he would not cast a cisgender man in the role if he were to make the show again.
Kurt also reiterated Walton’s dedication to “respecting the community” and portraying Venus in a “truly authentic” way that wasn’t “demeaning” to transgender women.
He said: “I think my favorite love story in all of the shows I’ve written was Venus and Tig. I mean that, I’m not being facetious; it was the one time in Sons where I got to be poetic because everything that came out of her mouth was, you know, ripped out of the pages of Tennessee Williams.”
“There was no limit, and you could strip down this veneer of badass from Tig and show his vulnerability where it tapped into all his odd sexual predilections and yet his desire for love and connection and understanding,” Kurt went on. “It wasn’t exploitative.”
“Yes, if I were doing that scene or if I was building that dynamic today, I would definitely use a real trans actor,” he added. “I would not have used a white straight man, but at all times, Walton was a goddess, you know? He was very, very concerned with respecting that community, and portraying it in a way that was not demeaning, that was not making fun of [it].”
“Everything he did was truly authentic, which allowed me to write [Venus] like this beautiful, gentle, vulnerable Southern Belle,” Kurt recalled. “And it was like: ‘Holy shit,’ I felt like I was writing 19th-century love poems.”
Kurt went on to say that Venus and Tig’s romantic scenes were “the most fun” he has ever had when writing.
What do you make of Kurt and Walton’s approach to Venus? Let me know in the comments!
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