What kind of research did you do?

Well, the first thing I did when I talked to Duncan was I told him how excited I was and then proceeded to [try to] talk him out of casting me and casting a man instead. I was saying, "You've got to cast a man in this role, otherwise the inherent drama is robbed, it's hollow! Everybody knows what I've got under my skirt!" I'm really glad he didn't listen to me. He very wisely said, "Look, the drama is not about what's under your skirt. There have been a lot of movies about men playing women; I believe there are two Academy Awards for them. And this is not a movie about what's under your skirt."

It's actually very smart. The backdrop is that she's a transgendered woman. But it's a movie about your heart breaking open. It's about someone who feels so alienated from herself and from society and feels that people don't really know her, who feels that her family hasn't accepted who she really is. I think many people can relate to some of those feelings. Certainly I could. So once I started to understand the emotional through-line, and where this woman was coming from, then I had to tackle the outside.

What did that entail?

I met with Andrea James and Calpernia Addams who run a production company called Deep Stealth Productions. They really helped me with the internal truth of the project and they also helped me with the external. Then I went to a convention in San Jose [Calif.] for transgendered individuals; I worked with a woman named Denae Doyle who trains transgendered women how to act like women.

It's such an enormous undertaking and so frightening, [that many men] actually do it a little later in life, because they probably spend the first half of their lives hoping it's not true. But you can imagine: You're 45 years old, you're 6-foot-4, and you finally decide, "I've got to do it. I have to be who I really am. Now how do I act like a woman?" Then you've got everything from the voice -- which is a huge hurdle to overcome so you don't sound like Harvey Fierstein or Tony Curtis in "Some Like It Hot" -- to how do women stand? Men take up more room physically in how they occupy a room. Women are more vocal; when they talk to each other there's a lot of head nodding, a lot of "Uh-huh, uh-huh." Men tend to give couple-word sentence replies. There's so much to learn.

When we started shooting in New York my voice hadn't landed. I felt as if physically it was coming along and I was starting to understand Bree's journey, but I needed to sound like a man who hadn't quite found his voice yet. And physically as a woman I don't have the chest cavities or the head cavities to make that kind of resonance, so I worked with a wonderful coach and we finally found it. I would place my voice in this hollow part and it was perfect because at least to me it came out sounding sad. And Bree is sad.

It sounds like your experience was learning how to be more masculine as your character is learning to be more feminine?

I would like it to be that because it's so perfect -- that yin-yang. But oddly enough, the [deepening] voice was just a technical challenge that opened the door into the inner workings of Bree. What I found physically is I had to become more feminine. We take our femininity for granted because you've been a girl since the day you were born, so we can stand with our legs apart, we don't have to do mincing steps. Transgendered women find the outside world hostile or at least unwelcoming if they're not lucky enough to pass easily. If you don't look very feminine and people notice, then at best you're an oddity and at worst you're freak. So they become as feminine as they can. So my journey, oddly enough, was to become more feminine.

But in several scenes, you have a penis.

I do have a penis! We called him "Andy"!

I put Bree together at the beginning of the day with help from everybody. I wanted to be true to what Bree becoming a woman would be. So it's very tight underwear and then support pantyhose.

Wait, why very tight underwear?

Because you want everything sucked in. You want it to hold your "tuck." Then support pantyhose and then a girdle over that. I'm not saying all transgendered people do that; they don't. But Bree would because she's so frightened of the outside world and she's uptight. For a lot of the shooting I did wear Andy in my pants as well. You know how they say all guys think about is their penis? Well, I understand because this weird appendage in my underwear is all I thought about. Even though it was a rubber one, it took all my concentration.

Was it big?

It was big enough.

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