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Netflix’s Will & Harper, a new documentary about friends Will Ferrell and former Saturday Night Live head writer Harper Steele road-tripping across the U.S. after Steele came out as a trans woman, is primed to start conversations among viewers. And according to Ferrell, the fact that a film with this goal is coming out mere weeks before the presidential election is no coincidence.
“When [Harper and I] sat down with Netflix, we made it clear that we wanted this out before the election,” Ferrell told Variety during Will & Harper’s Los Angeles premiere. “We wanted it to have enough runway for people to see it and hopefully start having important discussions in their living rooms.”
In the film, the duo embark on their trip together in order to become reacquainted amid Steele’s transition. But as Them editor Samantha Allen p
ut it in her review Ferrell is also there to be a “cisgender battering ram” should his friend face harassment and transphobia at one of the rural American locales she’s loved her entire life.
They do deal with some hurdles along the way, from social media abuse after getting spotted at a Texas steakhouse to running into Indiana’s Republican governor Eric Holcomb, who has signed anti-trans legislation, at an Indiana Pacers game. But Steele also finds plenty of unexpected sources of connection, whether she’s bonding with fellow trans women in small-town Illinois or being told to not be afraid to attend events at one of countless Midwestern racetracks she’s frequented over the years.
Given how much politically-motivated fearmongering anti-trans pundits, including candidates and elected officials, have fostered around trans Americans recently, it’s no surprise that the Will & Harper team hopes that the documentary will spark much-needed conversations. The Trans Legislation Tracker has monitored more than 650 anti-trans bills across the country in 2024 alone — the most of any year on record — and the Trump campaign has fully embraced anti-trans rhetoric while right-wingers champion the deeply unpopular, deeply anti-LGBTQ+ policy platform Project 2025. If a star-studded yet frank look at one older trans woman’s experience reckoning with her relationship with America helps to foster some basic empathy among voters, all the better.
Speaking to Them, Steele said that although she acknowledges that going across the country with Ferrell and a camera crew is “not a normal trans experience,” making the film helped reaffirm her faith in non-coastal America’s attitudes toward queer and trans people.
“I’ve already gone back alone twice,” she said. “[...] I have gone back with more confidence, across [the country] back and forth, and find similarly that a lot of my projected fears are wrong and misguided. That’s not to say it’s not still fearful… I don’t want to paint a picture that what we saw in America was completely normal because I was with Will.”
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