Ann Thomas, Founder and CEO of Transgender Talent

Ann Thomas, the founder of America’s first entertainment management and production company, Transgender Talent, is paving the way for transgender and nonbinary actors to find success in the performing arts.

After a stint on Ryan Murphy’s hit series Glee, Thomas realized there was a need for transgender actors, but no resources to connect them with producers or directors. Since creating the agency in 2015, she has seen an immense increase in interest from major networks and studios.

Transgender Talent represents almost 60 clients including The Craft: Legacy’s Zoey Luna, Good Trouble’s Emmett Preciado, and Food Network’s Domaine Javier, and provides management services and emotional and psychological support to trans actors looking to make their way in the biz. Recently, the company has opened a consulting business to assist the entertainment industry’s drive to increase diversity and inclusion both in front of and behind the camera.

Thomas, who is an activist and second-generation transgender person, knows that her management spans more than just acting roles—it ensures talent are understood and treated with respect. She will never stop being committed to lifting trans voices.

OFM sat down with Thomas to talk more about Transgender Talent, how the company began and evolved, and why she encouragers clients to take on any role they can land.

Can you begin by telling us more about Transgender Talent and why you wanted to start it?
Transgender Talent is a talent management company specifically for transgender and nonbinary people. I started it basically because I was on Glee in that massive, 197-person, transgender choir in Season Six, and I was approached afterwards by various Hollywood people saying, “Hey, how can we find you guys again?”

Basically, I was asked to, in some way, start providing a place for us to go. They had assembled that choir by contacting almost every major LGBTQ center in the country. Most people were flown in from all over the United States, and they didn’t want to go through that again. They would rather go to one place. I started looking for an agent, and I couldn’t find a single one that mentioned anything LGBTQ at that time—this was early 2015—nobody that would even do gay people. I was like, really?

So, I started Transgender Talent out of members of that choir. That’s where we started; that’s why we did it, and now, we have a place for Hollywood to come and get ahold of trans actors, or other performers.

To sign on with Transgender Talent, what qualities and expectations do you have for your clients?
When we first started out, we had no idea what we needed to do for that because we didn’t know what Hollywood was expecting. That was a long growing process. At this point, we require you to be at a professional level in whatever the skill is that you are coming to us with. Whether it’s on-camera acting, voiceover acting, or singing, any of those areas, you need to be at a professional level and demonstrate it.

That is one of the biggest problems that Hollywood has. All these people are running into town going, “I’m the best!” Everybody’s going, “Prove it.” If you don’t have a reel or any other kind of evidence that you can actually perform with that professional level, you are SOL. There is nothing we can do for you. You must have a really good reel in any one of those three areas. Some people are proficient at professional levels in all of the areas that we represent, so we just ask you to give us one to start with.

Some of these people don’t know what it is that they need to have on a reel, so typically, we guide them towards voiceover if they do that because that is a great start. You can do it by yourself at home, and you can knock it out usually in less than a week. If you have on-camera talent but don’t have any evidence of it, like if you did a lot of theatre but don’t have any footage of that, then you have to shoot stuff, and that takes a while.

How has the company evolved since 2015?
A lot! We started out as a listing service where people would contact us, and we would give them a list of names and contact information for people who fit what they were looking for. Then we grew from that. We had to decide whether we were going to become a management company or an agency, and it took us a while to explore that. We figured out really fast that we wanted to be a management company because agents have to have a license and meet other requirements to legally look for work for another person. Then really strict constraints are put on us to what we can and can’t do. If I was an agent, I would not be able to do an interview with you right now, and I could not appear on camera.

I want to keep doing that, so we grew into being a management company. Then we started doing more submissions, and we kept getting comments from casting directors saying, “You’re submitting more trans people for the roles that we’re looking for than the rest of the industry combined.” That kept happening over and over and over again, for about two years, we were knocking it out of the ballpark with tons of trans actors for the roles they were recruiting for.

We grew from that to where we got approached by an agent about some roles and we started working with him, and we were getting actors signed with him. We got our contract up to speed, and we started doing contracts with everybody that we had as managers. We started making them official by doing the contracts, and then we started expanding more and more. Now, we have 14 agents that we work with spread out over five companies, and they range widely from on-camera and commercial talent to voiceover, public speaking, and Broadway. We have really expanded a ton in so many ways.

Hollywood has also evolved since the founding of Transgender Talent, but it is still dragging in some areas. Do you believe the industry is getting better when it comes to casting trans performers?
That varies (laughs). It is constantly an education process with us as a company. We started out having to educate every casting director we came across, and we were eventually asked in either 2016 or 2017 to teach the writing staff at Breakdown Services on how to write breakdowns for trans actors. We did that, and things vastly improved. If you can get into Actor’s Access, go in there and look up transgender casting calls from 10 years ago, and you will see shocking crap like “trans woman or drag queen.” Those are two different things. Not the same at all. The other one is “butch lesbian or trans man.” That’s not the same thing. They don’t look the same; they don’t act the same; nothing is the same in either of those scenarios. You will see the stuff more recently is much better.

We still get writers and casting directors reaching out to us who clearly have no clue about (being) trans, and they think they know it all already. I think the worst one I ever saw was for a major show that was written by top writers. I didn’t know who they were until I was reading through the script, and I get to this part where this trans man, who was kind of mysterious in this thing, is going into a public restroom alone, and he takes his T-shirt off showing the gauze wrapping his breasts. I’m like, “Dude, you probably never touched breasts.” I was right! I looked it up, and it was three gay guys! Sorry, but gay guys probably don’t go touching breasts! They don’t realize they can’t be held up with gauze very easily. Some trans men do that at the very beginning because they can’t afford a binder, but still, it read really wrong. These guys were major, award-winning writers.

The series got canceled within three episodes of airing because there were other things wrong with it, but this is the kind of thing we run into. People think they know what they are doing, but they don’t because they don’t hire a consulting company, and that is another thing we are starting. We are launching a consulting division. We started consulting on films around six years ago, but we have not actually advertised that. Now we are going to, and you can hire us to consult your scripts, consult your set, have us come in and do training with your behind-the-scenes folks, whatever you need.

Do you exclusively receive casting calls for actors to play roles that are transgender or do some of your clients take on cisgender roles?
We encourage our actors to play any role that they can. We have plenty of them. The first time I got a trans actor into a major cis role was playing one of the lead characters of Bobby in a feature film called The Void by Canter-Lassen Productions. Olivier Luciano played Bobby, who was a cisgender character, and Olivier is a trans man. That was around five years ago.

So, we have been pushing it ever since. The major stuff, we have a trans man in Spider-Man: Far from Home who plays one of Peter Parker’s classmates, and we pushed Sony not to declare anything about the gender. Gender identity was not discussed in the movie. We also have Emmett Preciado in this season of Good Trouble playing Rowan, and they came and asked him after he had been in a couple episodes. The director called and said, “Would you like this character to be trans or cis?” Emmett’s like, ‘I want it to be a cisgender character because I need the experience.'”

This is why we push this direction. There are not enough transgender roles to keep any transgender actors full-time. There really isn’t. There were a few in Pose who did very well, like Mj Rodriguez and others who were able to get some fairly good momentum. In an article with The Hollywood Reporter, she talks about signing with United Talent Agency (UTA) and has all this stuff coming up, and that is fantastic. She is moving ahead. When we first started out, I could count on one hand the number of transgender actors in the entire industry who have full-time jobs as actors. There’s that few, and it is not that much better today, unless you play cis or non-gender roles.

It also has to do with audience receptivity. They are not going to put a bunch of trans roles and trans storylines out there if the audience doesn’t want to watch it. So, I have to go back to the practicality of it. I would love for trans stories to be told, but if the audience isn’t going to watch, the network isn’t going to pay for it. They won’t air it. That I why I want my actors in cis roles as much as possible.

Do you think there is a great urgency nowadays to tell trans stories?
Amongst the trans community there is, but for me, it’s not. The reason for that is because you have to look at the world market. Gradually, there was a shift in audiences in what Hollywood is producing. What happened was, years ago, most of the products that Hollywood created in films and TV shows were aimed at American audiences, but I grew and grew overseas. It was only a few months ago, I saw an article in the trades, and when I talk trades, that means like The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, or Deadline, but I saw an article in there that said it has officially shifted now to where the majority of audiences for our shows are overseas. With that said, we have to look at the lowest common denominator if we are going to try and get into a lot of countries with our stories.

Not slamming Pose at all, I love what they did, but the last time I saw an article about the quantity of countries it went to was, four countries for Season One, and eight for Season Two. I don’t know how many for Season Three. Just because it’s on a streamer that’s big, doesn’t mean it’s visible everywhere. There are whole websites devoted to telling you how many shows you can see in what countries on that same streamer. So, that is a dismally small number of countries compared to Spider-Man: Far from Home, which was in around 78, and according to the John Hopkins thing about COVID, there are nearly 200 countries in the world.

If we want our stories to get out there, we need to tell them in a way that the audiences can handle. We don’t want to be stepping on conservative feet. Even in this country, we get pushback from conservatives about trans story lines. Imagine what it’s like when you are talking to any conservative country out there, like Russia and China. Everybody says Russia and China are controlling our media, but what about Saudi Arabia? What about Brazil? The highest number of trans people killed per year is always Brazil’s. They are conservative, too, and so are so many other nations. Malaysia, anybody leaning in the direction of being Islamic is going to be more conservative than we are. Look at where Rocketman was banned. It was banned in Samoa, which is a conservative, Christian country. We cannot blame it all on the Islamic people. Christian countries do, too.

If we want our stories out there, the best thing for us to do is be out, trans actors playing in movies that don’t have trans storylines that make the best sense. The viewers will then see this stuff on their local affiliates, and it should be everywhere if we have a general type of story that all audiences can relate to. Viewers will go, “Oh, who is that?” They look it up, and oh my! It’s a transgender person! This is what I hope happens. Those countries that put up those firewalls to keep their people from seeing it, come on. All the kids know, like Gen Z, they all know how to use proxy servers and VPNs. They get around those firewalls. You cannot outsmart them. They are going to find out, and when they are desperate to identify themselves with their gender or sexual orientation, they are going to look. They don’t want to feel alone.

This has been a hot debate for the last couple years. Do you think straight actors should stop playing LGBTQ characters?
You would throw that at me! (Laughs.) Actually, I am one of the more vocal people pushing back saying, “Duh. Yeah!” Why? Because if we put those limitations on them, we need to be comfortable with having that limitation put on us. The problem is, if we have 90 or 1,000 breakdowns a year that come out, if only 5 or 10 percent are LGBTQ, then that blocks us from 90 percent of the roles out there. Do we want to do that? I don’t think so.

At this point, there are no trans actors that are A-list. I’m sorry. Everybody’s like, “There are A-list actors,” and start naming all these names. Like, dude, do you know what it takes to be A-list? They are not A-list. It’s written in the contracts we’ve gotten. To be A-list, that means you have been a lead in three major feature films that are successful. Start naming trans actors who have been in three major films as a lead that were successful. You can’t think of any. So, that is just the beginning. Then, there are many other steps past that before you are considered A-list. We aren’t even at square one.

To get trans visibility, if we want the story to be told properly, we need to have consultants brought on who can do that. At the same time, this is something a Hollywood executive told me, he said, “Don’t ever tell them who said this, but do you know where some of these stars come from? They do this with white guys all the time. They take this guy out of school out of nowhere, stick him in an ensemble cast surrounded by A-list stars, and his career suddenly goes through the roof.” Hollywood needs to do that with trans actors, too. Then you’ll start seeing some stuff take off. That’s what I am trying to do. It takes a certain number of A-listers to elevate the movie to the point where the funding will come through for it.

It is literally business stuff that you must do, so I am pushing that direction first because I think that is where we need to go. If we must put up with non-trans folks playing trans roles, then hire trans people to consult who are the closest match to that character. I have seen this with at least one movie so far, and the trans community went crazy saying it was all wrong, but a consultant was hired to literally train the A-lister all about being trans by taking them and dressing them up, making him go through all the stuff that trans women have to go through, taking him around West Hollywood and visiting all the trans hangouts, and going down and meeting the street walkers wherever they hang out. When the movie started shooting those scenes, that trans consultant was on set for every shoot. They were there to supervise, and that is what we must have.

If they are going to do that, which is fine with me, but a lot of trans people do not feel that way. I agree that it is an issue, but the money in Hollywood for funding goes the path of least resistance. If you keep resisting the cash flow, it will go somewhere else, and they have done that in a film. For the last four years, there have been no trans actors in lead roles except for our actress Zoey Luna who was in The Craft: Legacy. Thanks to COVID, it went streaming instead of a theatrical release last fall.

I am known for working with the industry, and I have gotten to know the people from several major studios. I am trying to build trust with them and let them know that I am a reasonable person, and I understand the business side of this whole equation. I went through film school back in the 80s, I owned my own TV production company way back then, and I did a bunch of technical directing and live theater for years, so I learned a lot of business side stuff. I was also a business consultant for 25 years, so I worked with CEOs, controllers, and companies ranging from a dozen employees to hundreds and hundreds of them. I helped their companies operate, so I get the business side of it. To make a profit, you must find your audience and make this work. So, I am willing to negotiate and work with folks on it. I just want to make sure they understand that.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to mention or plug?
Watch for Zoey Luna doing a cameo in the Dear Evan Hansen film, and in our voiceover division, Kayleigh McKee, who is the voice of Varden Dawngrasp in Hearthstone. On the music side, we are doing a music video coming out in correlation with Dear Evan Hansen featuring as many of our clients as possible.

We also have Hennessy Winkler in the touring production of Oklahoma! that will be launching very soon, and make sure to watch for Domaine Javier. I don’t know what she has up her sleeve, but she is one of the top people on Food Network. She was on Worst Cooks in America Season 20, then went onto co-host a show with Carson Kressley called Worst Cooks: Dirty Dishes and was on Best of the Worst. So, we have a lot going on!

For more information and to stay up-to-date with Transgender Talent, visit their official website or follow the company on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Photos Courtesy of Bobby Quillard