With a string of high-profile, transgender-themed movies and television shows hitting silver screens and airwaves across America, 2015 is shaping up to be the year that transgender entertainment entered the mainstream.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that one more trans-themed project is being shopped at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival – a film with a gender-reassigned action hero at its center.
According to THR, production company The Solution has taken to TIFF to shop a project called Tomboy to interested buyers. The film reportedly centers on an elite hitman who gets gender-reassigned into a woman against his will by a shady surgeon known only as “The Doctor.” After the surgery, the now-hitwoman sets out for revenge alongside a nurse named Johnnie.
Sigourney Weaver and Slumdog Millionaire star Frieda Pinto have been in negotiations to play The Doctor and the nurse, respectively, but the project is reportedly still looking for a female lead to play what sounds very much like a gender-reassigned version of Liam Neeson’s character in 2008’s Taken.
Interestingly, veteran action director and (arguable) buddy-cop picture inventor Walter Hill (48 Hrs., Red Heat, Last Man Standing) is reportedly attached to direct off of his own script. Said Ben Said (Maps to the Stars, Carnage) at SBS Productions is producing the film.
TIFF is probably a good a place to shop transgender-themed entertainment this year; the festival will see screenings of two very high-profile trans-themed films The Danish Girl and About Ray. The Danish Girl stars last year’s Best Actor-winner Eddie Redmayne as painter Lili Elbe, who became one of the first documented recipients of gender reassignment surgery in the 1920s, while About Ray stars Elle Fanning (Maleficent, Super 8) as a New York City teen who creates emotional ripples among the women in her family when she decides to transition from female to male.