On Screen: Hunter Schafer’s Impact on Queer and Trans Representation
By: Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp
Raw, controversial, and full of emotional gut-punches, Euphoria contains some of the most resonating portrayals of teen life ever aired on TV. The first season of the moodily-lit, Gen-Z drama, initially aired on HBO in 2019, shocked viewers with its visceral approach to topics like teen sex, drug use, and mental illness. The most thrilling and revolutionary part of it all, however, is the show’s in-depth, personal explorations of queer and trans teenage experiences, helmed largely by actual queer and trans cast members.
While Season 2 production has been halted due to COVID, showrunner Sam Levinson and team shot two pandemic-friendly bridge episodes exploring what Rue (Zendaya) and Jules (Hunter Schafer) have been up to since their dramatic parting in the cliffhanger season finale. With the latest installment, “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” we get to know the free-spirited Jules intimately, seeing past her seemingly flighty exterior as she grapples with her self-image, transness, and sexuality. This is the first time that she shares what she is truly thinking and feeling on a deeper level, fueled by Schafer’s powerful authenticity. Not only did she draw from her own experiences as a young trans person to further flesh Jules out as a person through her performance, but she also played a major role in shaping her character’s development from behind the camera.
Although I haven’t been in high school for some time, Jules’ coming-of-age strikes a personal chord with me. Euphoria takes young people’s struggles and fluctuating identities seriously, allowing the actors to breathe elements of their lived experiences into their characters. As a genderqueer, pansexual person who is a bit of a late bloomer, watching a character who outwardly seems as confident as Jules still figuring things out is all the more validating as I also grow into myself; with queerness, you never really seem to stop “coming of age.” Schafer’s episode is a shining example of why queer and trans involvement by queer creatives throughout every stage of production is critical to equitable and realistic representations of our lived experiences. Schafer is one of a very small group of burgeoning queer and trans voices in television—if you look at LGBTQ+ TV statistics from 2020, you’ll find that there are so few of our voices in the mix. We receive very limited representation, and even then, who is writing and telling our stories?
While struggling with her mental health during quarantine, Schafer found a positive outlet in co-writing the episode with Levinson. This led to an all-encompassing collaboration, in which she also used her talents as a visual artist to build the vision of the episode alongside Levinson and DP Marcel Rév, assisting with storyboarding, shotlisting, and blocking. She interweaves her own story into Jules’ by incorporating poetry and writings from her teen years into the script (i.e. Jules’ monologue about the ocean’s vast femininity), as well as sprinkling her own original paintings throughout scenes. In a behind-the-scenes segment, she discusses how the agency she had in the making of her episode empowered her to venture into these mediums with a new sense of confidence.
“In the same way that I didn’t see myself being an actor, I did not see myself being a writer,” she explains, “But the whole experience of Euphoria has kind of let me reform myself as an artist.”
By giving her the opportunity to bring so much of herself into it, she was able to defy the male gaze in a revolutionarily honest way. When trans creators have ownership of their own stories, their characters can exist as more than characters and achieve some universality. Jules doesn’t feel like a tokenized character, she feels like a real person.
We pick back up with Jules’ story during Christmas time, as she is back home and in her first session with a new therapist. Drawing from her own experiences and philosophies, Schafer explores her character’s depths as she monologues about gender, identity, and sexuality. Jules reveals that she is considering going off of her hormones, or at least off of her blockers, explaining:
“I feel like I’ve framed my entire womanhood around men, when in reality I’m no longer interested in men. Like, philosophically. Like what men want. What men want is so boring and simple, and not creative. I look at myself and I’m like ‘How the fuck did I spend my entire life building this?’—like, my body and my personality and my soul, around what I think men desire. Just like…it’s embarrassing. I feel like a fraud.”
This is a tricky subject to explore, one that I personally have never seen anyone approach on TV, but Schafer’s personal insight, gained from a lifelong journey dissecting gender and what it means to her, makes it work. Jules realizes how she has internalized hypersexuality and hyperfemininity, performing them to the point where much of her self-worth was derived from male validation for so much of her young life. Imposter syndrome rears its ugly head as she processes how her concept of herself, her desirability, and her own perceived desires have been shaped by our patriarchal society—underneath all of this, she fears that she has no true sense of self. She elaborates,
“My entire life I’ve been trying to conquer femininity. And somewhere along the way I feel like femininity conquered me.”
For her, this is about reclaiming herself and her identity, for herself; figuring herself out on her own terms with new clarity, taking back what was stripped from her by leering eyes and people trying to put her into boxes they can understand.
I’m still trying to disentangle my gender and femininity from what has been enforced upon me, and Jules’ spiritual philosophy of her gender identity and her complicated, evolving relationship with femininity really hit home. For me, realizing these distinctions was the beginning of a journey towards my most authentic self, who I am when societal expectations and conditioning are stripped away and I am left with my Self. Jules’ reflections reminded me that my queerness is my own; queerness isn’t about getting other people to understand you and see you as you are, it’s about you understanding yourself and accepting yourself as you continuously discover your own intricacies.
Although Rue and Jules’ relationship is tumultuous and very much rooted in codependency (Jules even tells her therapist “I feel like [Rue’s] sobriety is completely dependent on how available I am to her”), it was healing to see a sapphic couple expressing their love on-screen without it being completely mired in heartbreak for once. There is one exceptionally tender moment in which Rue injects Jules’ estrogen for her—this brief act of trust framed Jules’ transness as a special and beautiful part of her, and she can choose how and with whom she shares that part of herself with. Seeing two young, queer women love each other so purely, and getting to just exist outside of their trauma even for just a little bit, was such sweet relief. Their organic chemistry was refreshingly intimate, sensual and romantic, untainted by salacious misconceptions of lesbianism.
We’re seeing cis women in love on television and in movies more and more, but we rarely see WLW relationships in which one partner is trans—and when we do, the trans partner’s transness is often made out to be a source of conflict or drama within the relationship. Seeing different kinds of queer love and relationships being so thoughtfully explored demonstrates the beautiful limitlessness of queerness; in so many ways, this representation was healing and affirming for my inner child. Schafer’s significant authorship of this story brought more life to Jules and her relationship with Rue, treating queer teen love as just as natural and special as hetero teen love stories.
What makes Euphoria such a special show is how the creators, behind and in front of the camera, continue to foster heartfelt and respectful understandings of its young characters. As Schafer’s major contributions to the show illustrate, collaboration is at the core of its representational success; her increased agency and creative control is reflected as Jules finds her own agency. Her achievements as a multifaceted storyteller empowered me as a queer/GNC creator myself—it showed me how my and my friends’ experiences could be represented in TV, and it emboldened me to create more honest work regardless of mainstream palatability. We don’t exist to give cis, straight people lessons in empathy; they will connect with our work because our lives and existences are human experiences that anyone can find parts of themselves in. Seeing characters like us, portrayed by actors more or less like us, is so incredibly validating, and sets a precedent of what inclusive participation can look like in TV going forward. Being a queer creative is exciting in part because our fluidity and queerness shines through in our daily lives and artistic practices, and envisioning ourselves in control of how our stories are told allows us to put that back into the world.
Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp (she/they)is a Long Beach-based filmmaker, photographer, and music journalist, with a Bachelor of Arts in Film & Media Studies from UC Irvine. Formerly a college radio DJ and the creative director of the online magazine More Color Media, they now write for the music publication Atwood Magazine. A multimedia artist who hopes to write and direct films professionally, their work typically explores queer and intersectional stories with touches of camp, satire, and magical realism. You can reach them at Sophie@thelightleaks.com and learn more about them at their website.