Stars and co -creator of his own show

On By Littum

The lavers COX is no stranger to flame its own track. In 2014, while playing prison, Sophia Burset deployed on Netflix’s “Orange Is The New Black”, COX became the first trans -fun person who became grace Cover to Time Magazine And to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in any functioning category. A year later, she won a daytime Emmy Award for Hosting and performing producing “The T Word”, a MTV documentary about seven transport’s lives. In 2017, on the short-lived CBS-legal drama “Doubt”, she became the first transactor to play a trans character in a series of regular role on TV TV.

But with the new Prime Video Family-Sitcom “Clean Slate”, which premieres Thursday, COX now makes COX add a new title to her famous CV: Star, Co-Creator and performer of her own show. The eight-episodes series follows Desiree Slate, played by Cox as she returns to Mobile, Alabama, 23 years after moving to New York as a teenager. She goes back to connect again with her father, an old-school car wash owner named Harry-as after receiving an email from his alienated child is shocked to discover that the son he expected to find on his Door step, now is a transgender woman.

For Cox, 52, the opportunity to overwrite his own show has been a dream over 20 years in creation. Seven years ago, Cox and her manager agreed to meet with author producer Dan Ewen, who threw them the idea that a trans woman returned to her roots to repair fences with her father. Within a week after their four -hour meeting, Ewen had written a draft of the pilot script, which eventually found its way into the hands of Norman Lear, the heavyweight producer known for creating popular ’70s sitcoms like “All in the Family , “” One day at a time “and” The Jeffersons.

After the idea disappeared in development and pitch phases for a few years, Cox admitted that she was concerned that networks and studios were not interested in buying trans stories. But in 2022, on Lear’s 100 -year birthday, Amazon formally ordered an entire season of “Clean Slate.” (Lear died the year after.)

Like Lears previous sitcoms, “Clean Slate” tries to tackle Hot-Button problems in an inclusive, accessible way and avoid the tendency to hit viewers over the head with a clear message, but instead choose to shed light on the everyday matches of marginalized Society.

“As much as he tackled controversial questions, he leads with humor,” Cox said of Lear. “It was about finding the humor in our everyday lives … and we didn’t make humor like cracking down. Good humor comes from knowledge – from knowledge of a society, of a group of people. “

With that approach in mind, the creative team wanted to honor the specificity of Cox’s own experiences of growing up in a small town in Alabama that the actor said “life.” Like her character Desiree, Cox feels a kind of nervous energy every time she returns to her hometown, where she remembers enjoying the “wonderful” musical performances in the church, but feels a huge shame over her sexuality and congenital femininity.

“The trauma that I experienced growing up in the south was real,” she said, “but there has been really scary, horrible, terrible moments in my life that became funny for some reason.”

Although she is usually able to put some distance between herself and her characters, Cox admitted that Desiree – which she considers a younger, “Messier” and “Less Healed”, but “more elitist and condemning” version of herself – is the closest she has ever come to play herself on screen. Some of the history lines are even taken directly from her own life, including one where a priest effectively refuses to recognize Desiree’s identity as a trans woman by giving her a handshake rather than a hug after a favor. Cox remembered the real life event where her mother informed her after a priest’s handshake that he “hugs the women in the congregation and he shakes the men.”

As one of the most famous trans women in the world, Cox acknowledged that there is some kind of unspoken loneliness that comes with being among the first to break a glass ceiling in Hollywood. For the first two decades of her career in New York, Cox remembers to know that she was “delusional” for believing she could have a mainstream -actor career as a black trans woman because “no one had done it before . ” Since she effectively became the face of the trans movement a decade ago, she has felt the need to sacrifice parts of her personal life to commit herself to go in for a cause much greater than herself.

“I just had a breakdown recently, and frankly, part of the collapse was about this political environment that we are in, and I launched this show and To know That I need to be in service right now to the best of my ability, ”Cox said. “I have to let go of any person, place or things that are going to get in the way of serving my society first in the way my higher power wants me to.”

“Clean Slate” debuts at a particularly full time of the trans community. Since returning to power last month, President Donald Trump has signed several executive orders targeting the trans community in particular and declared that there are only two biological genders, which further limits transitional-related care of minor nationwide and sparse transgender people from open to serve in the military.

Cox, who has long expressed its resistance to Policies that restrict the rights of transgender peopleoffered an honest assessment of the current social and political climate: “That’s what it is.”

“No one opposes them, which is a problem,” Cox said of the Conservatives who support laws and executive orders aimed at transgender people. “We have to accept it, and then we have to come psychologically, emotionally, and we have to get through it as a society. When I say communities, I especially talk to the LGBTQ+ community, but I talk to black people. I talk to immigrants, migrants. I talk to the working class people in general because, girlWe are all To get it. “

Cox said she feels grateful in this current political climate to have a platform to help humanize the black and transcounds further.

“What I want to say to transfers, and everyone out there fighting is that victim is something we choose,” she said. “Yes, the government can suppress us, and they are and will, but I am the master of my destiny, the captain of my soul. I refuse to be a victim. “