Eliana Willis

“Trump is, in effect, a king,” Bee joked on Wednesday. “Not like King Arthur — more like a Burger King.” More

The former “Nanny” is back with a new NBC sitcom, “Indebted,” young fans like Cardi B and an arsenal of GIFs. “I’m kind of an influencer,” she said. More

There is “Atypical,” on Netflix, a coming-of-age comedy that features young adults on the autism spectrum, and “This Close,” on Sundance Now, about besties who are deaf. Both shows are part of a gradual trend toward the authentic casting of characters with disabilities. But according to new research, they are also anomalies.A new white paper from the Ruderman Family Foundation reports that some 80 percent of all disabled characters on the small screen are portrayed by non-disabled actors. The imbalance is an indication, the report’s sponsors say, that efforts to diversify Hollywood are far from inclusive. And even with examples of authentic casting on “Atypical,” the lead character, who is autistic, is played by an actor who is not.“We wouldn’t accept it with other minorities,” said Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation, which published the report. “But with disability it is still routinely accepted. And that’s wrong.”The research, covering about 280 network and streaming shows from 2018, found that roughly half featured characters with physical, cognitive or mental health disabilities. Yet, the report said, “even where disability is present in television and films, it is almost always portrayed as an undesired, depressing and limiting state”There were signs of shifts. Of the Top 10 Nielsen-rated shows from 2016, just 5 percent of disabled characters were played by disabled performers. In 2018, that figure jumped to 12 percent.Still, the raw figures tell a less rosy story. In 2018, there had been just two authentic castings in the Top 10 shows: Gavin McHugh from “9-1-1,” and Chrissy Metz from “This Is Us.” (McHugh has cerebral palsy; and Metz was included because obesity is considered a disability.) That was up from 2016, when there had been just one.Ruderman said the low representation had far-ranging implications in shaping attitudes. Shows like “Will & Grace” and “Ellen” have been credited with widening the popular embrace of people who are LGBTQ.Disabled people — who face an unemployment rate that is more than twice as high as their non-disabled peers — have little clout in the entertainment industry. Ruderman faulted the historic isolation disabled people have faced. While that is slowly changing, he said, most decision makers in the entertainment industry do not see disability as part of general life.And having that personal connection is key. For his show “Ramy,” Ramy Youssef, who recently won a Golden Globe for best comedy actor in a series, cast his close buddy Steve Way, who has muscular dystrophy, as his character’s best friend.The foundation has been pressuring studios and networks to include more disabled talent, and is partnering this year with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a series of initiatives toward that end.Last year, CBS Entertainment became the first — and so far only — studio to sign a pledge with the foundation to audition disabled actors for series that get picked up (CBS had more authentic castings than any other network or streaming platform).“This is an issue of fairness,” Ruderman said. “This is an issue of over 20 percent of the population not being seen.” More

What’s on TVLEGO MASTERS 9 p.m. on Fox. Pop quiz: What’s the plural of Lego? That question is addressed at the start of this competition series, which has aired in different forms overseas but is now coming to United States audiences. Will Arnett (known in certain circles as the voice of Lego Batman) hosts the United States version of the show, alongside a pair of Lego designers. The competition pits teams from around the country against one another in a variety of brick-building challenges. The contestants’ first assignment: to create a model theme park. Their time limit? 15 hours. The prize for winning the competition at large is $100,000 — though surely any contestants who make it through without stepping on a brick can be considered successful.MONEYBALL (2011) 6:47 p.m. on Starz. The New York Times’s co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis recently wrote an article arguing that Brad Pitt has been undervalued as a performer. Pitt was nominated for an acting Oscar this year, but that’s a relatively rare thing — the last time he was up for one was toward the beginning of the 2010s, when he was recognized for his performance in this baseball drama. In it, Pitt plays Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics manager whose innovative methods helped the A’s compete against teams with far higher budgets in the early 2000s.FENCES (2016) 10 p.m. on BET. Baseball also plays a role in “Fences,” August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about love and contention in a 1950s Pittsburgh household. This film adaptation stars Denzel Washington as the protagonist, Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues player who might have been a Major League star if he’d been born in a different decade. The plot hinges on Troy’s struggles to accept the athletic potential of his teenage son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), and the sometimes strained relationship between Troy and his wife, Rose (Viola Davis). “If the sound were to suddenly fail — or if the dialogue were dubbed into Martian — the impact of the performances would still be palpable,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times.EXPEDITION UNKNOWN 8 p.m. on Discovery Channel. Josh Gates has explored many exciting places as the host of this travel series: He’s visited an archaeological dig site in Egypt, a sinkhole in Siberia and Australia’s Shipwreck Coast in his mission to investigate historical mysteries. In the first episode of the new season, debuting Wednesday, he’ll be in Normandy, where he follows historians studying D-Day and tours a newly discovered World War II bunker. Don’t expect him to stay there long, though: By the end of the season, he’ll be in the Bermuda Triangle.What’s StreamingMcMILLIONS Stream on HBO platforms. The life and death of a scam in six parts, this new documentary series revisits an elaborate real-life scheme that involved a former police officer defrauding McDonald’s out of $24 million. The first episode aired on HBO on Monday; it’s available to stream for those who want to catch up before next week’s episode. More

Gene Reynolds, an Emmy-winning producer and director who was a force behind two of the most acclaimed television series of the 1970s and early ’80s, “M*A*S*H” and “Lou Grant,” died on Monday in Burbank, Calif. He was 96.He wife, Ann Sweeny Reynolds, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Reynolds started his prolific career on the performing side of the camera, appearing in some 80 films and television shows, beginning when he was a child. He developed an unusual sort of specialty: playing the younger versions of characters played by top film stars of the 1930s.He was the adolescent version of Don Ameche’s character in “Sins of Man” (1936), and of Ricardo Cortez’s character in “The Californian” (1937), and of Tyrone Powers’s character in “In Old Chicago” (1938), among others. A breakthrough was when he played the young version of James Stewart’s character in “Of Human Hearts” (1938), an MGM movie that earned him a contract with that studio.Mr. Reynolds racked up dozens more TV and film acting credits, including more than 40 in the 1950s, but by the end of that decade he had shifted his focus to directing and, soon after that, to producing.In the 1960s, he directed numerous episodes of television comedies, including “Hogan’s Heroes” and “F Troop,” both of which found humor and absurdity in military settings. That experience served him well in 1972, when, at the instigation of the producer William Self, he helped Larry Gelbart develop “M*A*S*H,” the sitcom about an Army hospital during the Korean War. (Robert Altman’s film, based on Richard Hooker’s novel, had come out two years earlier.)The series, addressing serious themes with a mix of slapstick and dark humor, is still considered one of the finest in television history. Its final episode, in 1983, set a ratings record. By then, though, Mr. Reynolds had moved on and already had another acclaimed series to his credit: “Lou Grant,” which he helped create in 1977, the year he left “M*A*S*H.” The show, about a fictional newspaper, with Ed Asner as the title character, twice won the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series.Mr. Reynolds directed episodes of each of those series (including the first episodes of both), winning two Emmys himself for outstanding direction of a comedy for “M*A*S*H.” He won six Emmys in all, including one for “M*A*S*H” for best comedy series and one for an earlier show he developed, “Room 222,” which was named outstanding new series of 1969-70.One of the most memorable moments of “M*A*S*H” that he directed was not a specific episode, but the opening sequence, which shows two helicopters landing at the medical unit, presumably with casualties aboard. Mr. Reynolds had wanted a shot of nurses running to help. Several assistant directors tried but failed to get the effect he was after, as the actresses were “just kind of trotting along,” as Mr. Reynolds put it in an oral history recorded for the Directors Guild of America (of which he was president from 1993 to 1997).He took over and gave the women a simple direction.“I said, ‘They need you,’” he recalled, referring to whoever was aboard the helicopters. “They came flying out of that goddamn tent. They came flying out.”The resulting shot, which shows five determined women racing straight at the camera, is among the show’s signature images.Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal was born on April 4, 1923, in Cleveland and grew up in Detroit. His father, Frank, was a businessman who later went into real estate, and his mother, Maude (Schwab) Blumenthal, was a model before becoming a homemaker.“I was a very energetic child,” Mr. Reynolds said in an interview for the book “Growing Up on the Set: Interviews With 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television” (2002), by Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, “and my mother mistook that for talent.”She took him to an acting group for children, and soon he was appearing in radio commercials and amateur plays. After the family moved to California when he was about 11, he began working as an extra in TV shows and movies. One of his first roles was in the 1934 Laurel and Hardy film “Babes in Toyland.”He appeared in movies with other child and teenage stars, including Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. He set aside his film career when World War II broke out, enlisting in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and serving on ships including the destroyer-minesweeper the Zane.“Herman Wouk was the senior watch officer,” Mr. Reynolds recalled in “Growing Up on the Set,” “and he would get up every morning very early and would write.” In 1951, of course, Wouk published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Caine Mutiny,” which drew on his experiences on that ship.After the war ended in 1945 Mr. Reynolds earned a degree in history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and resumed acting. He landed few leading roles, though, and became frustrated with his career progress. Soon he was directing episodes of some of the most popular series of the 1960s, including “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and “My Three Sons.”Among his biggest television successes before “M*A*S*H” was “Room 222,” a comedy-drama about a black teacher, for which Mr. Reynolds served as executive producer. It ran for more than 100 episodes and tackled subjects including prejudice, drugs and dropouts.“It was a tumultuous time, and I think we took advantage of it,” he said in an oral history for the Television Academy Foundation, “but unfortunately ABC looked at numbers and said, ‘This could be funnier.’” He was shown the door, right when Mr. Self was looking for someone to bring “M*A*S*H” to television.Mr. Reynolds’s first marriage, to Bonnie Jones, an actress, ended in divorce. He and his wife, also an actress, married in 1979 and lived in Los Angeles. In addition to her, he is survived by a son, Andrew.“M*A*S*H” is a classic example of ensemble acting, and members of the cast often credited Mr. Reynolds with the chemistry that made the show work.“It started when Gene Reynolds was producing the series,” Mike Farrell, who starred in the show for most of its run alongside Alan Alda, Loretta Swit and others, told The Boston Globe in 1979. After a table read of the week’s script, he said, Mr. Reynolds would invite the cast members to offer suggestions.“This is unheard-of in television,” Mr. Farrell said. “On most shows they not only don’t care what the actors think, they would prefer actors who don’t think.” More

Monday night’s episode of “The Bachelor” seemed to be going well, drama and head injuries aside. The contestants dating this season’s eligible man, Peter Weber, spent a group date modeling for a Cosmopolitan magazine photo shoot in the Costa Rican jungle. They picked out swimsuits, posed alongside a scenic backdrop of trees and waterfalls — and one woman, Victoria Fuller, was chosen to adorn the magazine’s March cover.And then, trouble in paradise.The magazine — in a letter from the editor, Jessica Pels, posted minutes after scenes from the date aired — said it would not publish the cover with Ms. Fuller, citing an ad campaign in which she modeled “White Lives Matter attire.”“Unequivocally, the White Lives Matter movement does not reflect the values of the Cosmo brand,” Ms. Pels wrote. “We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and any cause that fights to end injustices for people of color.”When “The Bachelor” premiered in January, photos circulated on Twitter showing Ms. Fuller, 26, a medical sales representative from Virginia Beach, Va., posing in a blue “WLM” hat. Other apparel from the same, now-defunct Instagram account featured an altered version of a Confederate flag — which, in place of stars, featured tiny fish — the words “White Lives Matter” and a web address: “MarlinLivesMatter.com.”George Lamplugh, who began selling the apparel out of his store on the Ocean City boardwalk in Maryland, said in an interview Tuesday via Facebook Messenger that the “White Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” items were “designed to promote the conservation of white and blue marlin” among the sport-fishing community.Both phrases have been used to discount the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and the clothing raised questions about the appropriateness of the name and whether it concealed another meaning.Ms. Pels acknowledged the reports of the campaign’s origins in the letter, but said that did not change the decision: “In my view, the nature of the organization is neither here nor there — both phrases and the belief systems they represent are rooted in racism and therefore problematic.”Representatives for ABC and “The Bachelor” did not comment. As of Monday night’s episode, Ms. Fuller was still a contestant on this season, which was filmed last fall.Ms. Fuller will still appear inside hard copies of the magazine, which have already been printed, Ms. Pels wrote. She also appears in two photos on Cosmopolitan’s website, accompanying the magazine’s interview with Mr. Weber.“The Bachelor” has had issues with its contestants’ pasts before. Last year, with Hannah Brown’s season of “The Bachelorette,” the show began releasing the list of contestants in advance of the premiere, in what seemed to be an attempt to crowdsource contestant background checks. Thirty-three names and photos were released for Mr. Weber’s season, but only 30 women remained by the premiere.“I think, for lack of having a better process, two seasons into trying it this way, it’s as good as we have,” Chris Harrison, the show’s longtime host, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in January. “We’re trying to evolve as well, and giving everybody a chance to see who’s on the show and hear anything that’s out there; we do our best to do our due diligence.”Ms. Pels, who went to Costa Rica for the photo shoot, wrote in the letter that she did not know much about the contestants while filming the episode — details about the season, she wrote, were as “closely guarded as nuclear codes.”“When my team and I flew down to Costa Rica for our challenge, we weren’t told who our models were going to be,” she wrote. “We didn’t even meet them until we were all on camera on set, ready to start our shoot.”All she knew about the contestants, Ms. Pels added, “were their first names and the energy they conveyed through the camera lens.” More

Lucy Jarvis, a groundbreaking producer in television and theater who was especially known for gaining access to hard-to-crack locations, including the Soviet Union and China at the height of the Cold War, died on Jan. 26 in Manhattan. She was 102.Scott McArthur, her longtime producing partner, announced the death.In the late 1950s and early ’60s, when television’s top producing ranks included few if any other women, Ms. Jarvis helped bring about some remarkable programming, including gaining access to the Kremlin for a 1963 television special about that Moscow complex. In 1964 she took television viewers on an extensive tour of the Louvre in France, a documentary that won multiple Emmy Awards. In the early 1970s she got permission to film in China, giving American viewers an inside look at ancient sites there at a time when that country was still largely sealed off.Her work in theater was just as internationally adventurous. In 1988 she collaborated with Soviet producers to take a production of “Sophisticated Ladies,” the Duke Ellington musical revue, to Moscow. In 1990 she brought the first Soviet rock opera ever seen in the United States, “Junon and Avos: The Hope,” to City Center in New York.In a 1999 interview with The Daily News, she explained her longstanding interest in introducing one culture to another.“If I can bring about an understanding of people whom we consider our enemy and know very little about,” she said, “I can justify the space I occupy on this very crowded planet.”Lucile Howard was born on June 23, 1917, in Manhattan. Her father, Herman, was an engineer and a hotelier, and her mother, Sophie (Kirsch) Howard, designed clothing patterns for the Singer sewing machine company.Ms. Jarvis credited her mother with instilling in her the confidence that would later allow her to go head-to-head with world leaders. Her mother, she said, made her study elocution, piano and dance and schooled her in how to enter a room with poise.“She said, ‘I am giving you the tools so that you can walk into a room anywhere in the world and feel perfectly at ease,’” Ms. Jarvis said in an oral history recorded for the Television Foundation and New York Women in Film and Television in 2006. “She made me believe that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted to. That was Self-Esteem 101.”At Cornell University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1938, she was involved in the drama club, but her major was nutrition. Her first job was as a dietitian at the Cornell Medical School.A doctor there recommended her for the food editor’s job at McCall’s magazine, where she went to work in 1940. In that capacity she was encouraged to give talks around the country, and that led to invitations to appear on television in its very early days.Even those primitive TV shows were reaching more people than the magazine did, or soon would be. “I thought, ‘I’m in the wrong place,’” she said in the oral history.Ms. Jarvis married Serge Jarvis, a lawyer, in 1940 and earned a master’s degree at Columbia Teachers College in 1941 while working at McCall’s. Later in the decade she left the magazine to raise the couple’s two children.She re-entered the work force in 1950s, taking jobs at radio and television stations and then, in 1955, with the talk-show host David Susskind’s company, Talent Associates.In 1957 Ms. Jarvis met Martha Rountree, the wife of one of her husband’s clients and a creator of the long-running radio and television series “Meet the Press.” They started a program for the WOR-Mutual Broadcasting System that year called “Capitol Close-Up,” which profiled powerful figures.Their first interviews were with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, “who had never before, or since, done a program,” she said in the oral history.In 1959 Ms. Jarvis joined NBC as an associate producer (she later became producer) of a Saturday night debate program, “The Nation’s Future.” It featured two people on opposite sides of an issue, with the newsman Edwin Newman as moderator. One of her jobs was making sure the studio audience was evenly balanced between supporters of each position.One contentious episode was on American policy toward Cuba, where Fidel Castro had taken power in 1959, leading to increasingly hostile relations and an embargo.“We had fistfights in the hallway,” Ms. Jarvis was quoted as saying in the 1997 book “Women Pioneers in Television,” by Cary O’Dell, “but the most difficult chore was finding enough pro-Castro people.”Perhaps even more volatile was an episode on whether fluoride should be added to the water supply.“That one almost got us all killed,” she said.One of Ms. Jarvis’s greatest coups came in 1962, when she used persistence and connections to get permission to film inside the Kremlin for an NBC special broadcast.“We went into areas denied Russian TV cameramen,” Ms. Jarvis, who was credited as associate producer, told The Boston Globe. “About the time we were concluding our filming, the Cuban situation” — the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 — “broke out. We finished rapidly and got out fast.”The special, “The Kremlin,” was broadcast in May 1963.For “A Golden Prison: The Louvre,” the French, protective of the museum’s artworks, put almost as many obstacles in Ms. Jarvis’s path as the Soviets did for “The Kremlin.”“They were afraid of lights,” she said in the oral history. “They were afraid of the reaction. And they were just very stuffy about it.”It was a time when the producing ranks, at NBC and the other networks, were virtually all male.“Most of the women who worked at NBC in those days,” Ms. Jarvis said, “when I came on as producer, were stenographers, gofers; on rare occasion they worked their way up to researcher.” She would hire women as associate producers when she could, she said.Not all of her work was focused overseas. One powerful NBC News special she produced, broadcast in 1965, was “Who Shall Live?,” which reported on the vast number of patients who needed kidney dialysis, the limited number of machines available to provide it and the punishing cost of the treatments.The program, The Globe wrote, was “a penetrating look at the frightening impasse reached when scientific advances have outdistanced the conventional laws of economics.”Ms. Jarvis began filming in China in August 1972, becoming “the first American since 1948 to be admitted to China to film news documentaries,” one news report said. The documentary, “The Forbidden City,” was seen on NBC in January 1973.Ms. Jarvis left NBC in 1976 and founded her own production company, Creative Projects. (She later started a second, Jarvis Theater and Film.) Among Creative Projects’ first productions was Barbara Walters’s first special for ABC; broadcast in December 1976, it featured interviews with the president-elect, Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, as well as with Barbra Streisand.In addition to “Junon and Avos,” which Ms. Jarvis produced with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin, her later projects included a 1981 made-for-TV movie, “Family Reunion,” which starred Bette Davis.Ms. Jarvis’s husband died in 1999. A daughter, Barbara Ann, died in 2001. She is survived by a son, Peter, and a granddaughter. More

1. First Time I Saw MeLast August, at a premiere party at the NeueHouse on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the actor Brian Michael Smith was biting into a slider when he turned around and there was Oprah Winfrey. Several years before, as a black transgender man struggling to break into Hollywood, Smith saw no obvious trajectory to a meaningful career. Even a college acting teacher said no one would cast him. “I saw zero representation of transmasculinity,” he says, using an umbrella term that means different things to different people but often describes trans men and nonbinary people who identify more with masculinity. “It was very isolating to grow up and have these dreams. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to do it.”This is how dreams are murdered, but instead of succumbing, Smith told himself “to Oprah this situation” — meaning create his own path. And so he did. He now plays a trio of distinct trans characters on TV: Toine, the gentle cop on OWN’s “Queen Sugar,” whose 2017 coming-out episode coincided with Smith’s public coming out; Pierce, a political strategist on Showtime’s sequel to “The L Word,” which debuted in December; and a firefighter on Fox’s new “9-1-1: Lone Star.” At the premiere, Smith saw his opportunity to thank the woman whose name had become his own inspirational verb. He swallowed the slider, extended his hand — and you know what Oprah said? “I know who you are.”Smith, 37, tells me this story in a Los Angeles hotel lobby on a rare day off. He keeps his head shaved, his beard trimmed and a polished stone from a yoga retreat in his pocket. Something he talks about — something all the trans male and nonbinary actors I interviewed for this story talk about — is why visibility matters. “It’s necessary for people to see themselves onscreen,” says Shaan Dasani, who appeared in two 2019 web comedies, “These Thems” and “Razor Tongue.” “It’s necessary for people to see multiple versions of masculinity.”In 2014, Laverne Cox appeared on Time magazine’s cover with the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Since then, trans women have been working in Hollywood in increasing numbers, but that tipping point is only coming now for trans male and transmasculine actors and story lines. “We’ve been invisible,” says Nick Adams, the director of transgender representation at Glaad. He keeps an unofficial tally of trans men in film and television, dating back to a 1987 episode of “The Golden Girls.” The next entries come in 1999: an episode of the CBS series “L.A. Doctors,” about a teenager who abuses masculinizing hormones, and “Boys Don’t Cry,” about the life and murder of Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank. “Five years ago, the kind of roles I’m doing would have gone to cisgender actors,” says Theo Germaine, 27, of their recent parts as young trans men on Netflix’s “The Politician” and Showtime’s “Work in Progress” (Germaine identifies as nonbinary and uses both male and gender-neutral pronouns). Germaine is correct, but the reality is starker: Five years ago, these roles mostly didn’t exist. When a transmasculine character did pop up, he was often a victim, his story limited to and by trans trauma; Smith describes seeing “Boys Don’t Cry” while in high school as both affirming and terrifying.But in the last year, we’ve witnessed more trans male and nonbinary actors onscreen than ever before. Even more important is what the actors and their roles represent. They are reflecting back the reality of trans male and nonbinary lives while mainstreaming long-marginalized characters and narratives. They are introducing multidimensional characters whose gender intersects with other facets of identity — race, class, sexual orientation, disability. Through their performances and social media, the actors are updating and expanding the very idea of the leading man.Why is this vital? Let me start with the most basic reason: survival. The actors are creating characters that audiences have never seen before at a time when right-wing politicians are trying to strip trans people of not only their rights (the military’s recent restrictions surrounding transgender troops and recruits, for example) but their humanity (think of all the so-called bathroom bills). A paradox of America 2020: There’s been a swift advancement of trans visibility and equality, even as anti-trans violence has become what both the Human Rights Campaign and the American Medical Association call an epidemic, and an unprecedented acceptance of trans folks, even as the Supreme Court considers whether someone’s gender identity is grounds for termination from employment. More than half of trans male adolescents have attempted suicide, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Pediatrics. “There’s a reason for that,” says Scott Turner Schofield, who stars in Amazon’s new “Studio City.” “We’re raised to believe there’s something wrong with us. We’re raised to believe we’re the only one.” So when Smith’s character came out on “Queen Sugar,” Twitter lit up with the hashtag #FirstTimeISawMe. Progress — social, cultural, political — always begins with the self.2. SuperheroesTwo and a half years ago, Leo Sheng was in Ann Arbor, Mich., about to start a master’s in social work when a casting agent messaged him on Instagram. “Acting was not on my radar,” he says. Sheng flew to New York for an audition. As he boarded the plane back to Michigan, his phone rang: He got the part. In “Adam,” which premiered last August, Sheng plays Ethan, a young trans man so emotionally grounded that he becomes the ballast for the cis characters flailing all around him, thus flipping a trans narrative trope. Soon after, he was cast in “The L Word: Generation Q” as Micah, an adjunct professor of social work.Sheng, now 23, recognizes the potential for social and political change in acting: Through characters like Ethan and Micah, he’s helping Hollywood revise its depictions of trans men, catching up to trans lives as they’re actually lived. Story lines are moving past transition into love, friendship, work, family — the everything-ness of a man’s life. Sheng and the other actors are portraying men not defined by crisis or fear, or hormones and chest-binding, but in the midst of full and (mostly) happy lives — “a type of happiness a lot of people want to know is possible,” Sheng says.Sheng uses social media to further complicate the narrative, engaging in an ongoing deconstruction of who and what defines the male self. He posts about going to the gym and his evolving relationship to muscles. He wants people to see trans male bodies as they are, whether ripped or soft, hairy or smooth, boyish or dad-ish, scarred or not. Sheng recently posted about his period, a frankness that drew praise but also online attacks about his identity.Something we can’t forget: Even as the actors appear in more and more celebrated projects, some people continue to deny their existence. The English actor, writer and director Jake Graf, 42, says in the past trans men were invisible, both onscreen and in broader society, in part because many could choose whether to disclose their identity: “Largely due to our physicality, we’ve been afforded the luxury of living that unseen, under-the-radar, stealth life.” Their reasons were complex and understandable (personal safety, social and financial stability, for example), but one consequence has been that there is now far less awareness of trans men than of trans women. Society has a long and unfortunate history of gazing at and fetishizing trans women, but that has been less the case with trans men. That’s a generalization, of course, but only in service of sharing a point many of the actors made to me: They now want to be seen; they now want people to know they exist. “Trans women have historically been more visible,” Graf says. “Trans men have been out there doing things much more quietly, which is great for them, but not great for visibility.”Graf used to audition without disclosing his identity, and casting directors saw him as another guy in the gaggle. Only after coming out could he stand out, booking roles in 2018’s “Colette” and 2015’s “The Danish Girl” (based on a novel I wrote). With his square jaw and British charm, Graf embodies the classic leading man while also subverting the very notion. He started making short films, highlighting the fine-grain details of ordinary trans lives: a young man visiting his gynecologist; an older man recalling life before the queer and trans rights movements — a multiplicity of stories Hollywood is only now incorporating.“There’s no one version of a trans guy in Hollywood anymore,” says Elliot Fletcher, 23. From 2016 to 2018, Fletcher took on three consecutive trans roles that, viewed together, proved groundbreaking. On MTV’s “Faking It,” he played a high schooler navigating his gender identity and sexuality. On Freeform’s “The Fosters,” he was the sweetly rebellious boyfriend. On Showtime’s “Shameless,” Fletcher plays an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who is simultaneously insulting, raunchy and endearing. The role he’d really love, though, is the next Spider-Man. With the right glasses, he could pass for Peter Parker. When I asked the actors about their dream roles, most said they want to play a superhero. A superhero implies someone elite, a status long denied to trans and gender-nonconforming people.3. I Am My Own MasculinityIn “The Politician,” Germaine’s character, James, toggles between running the student-body campaign of his best friend, Payton, and sleeping with Payton’s girlfriend. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, people are going to hate me because I’m not playing a nice person,’” Germaine says. In fact, James represents an evolution of the trans male character beyond hero, saint or martyr to someone allowed to be ruthless and deceitful. The character breakdown describes James as trans, but his gender identity is never explicitly defined — it’s so unremarkable, it’s never remarked upon. It’s what makes the character so transformational; James refuses to take on the burdens of definition or explanation. If you look at him only through the lens of gender identity, he won’t engage. He transfers questions of identity from him to you. As a nonbinary actor, Germaine says they still feel some pressure to justify and self-explain but hope audiences are ready to move past fixed ideas of how a trans or nonbinary person should look.Viewers seem to be. Germaine’s James takes us to a place beyond “passing” — a word the actors don’t like but also acknowledge as a real factor in how trans men are depicted. Hollywood still mostly employs actors who can be perceived as cis. On the one hand, this represents progress: The actors want casting directors to see them for any relevant part, whether cis or trans. But it’s also a privilege that excludes many. “There are so many different ways to express gender,” Sheng says. “I would love to see more nonbinary, genderqueer and trans folks who can’t ‘pass’ be given opportunities.”Recently Chella Man, 21, joined the cast of DC Universe’s series “Titans,” playing Jericho, who is mute, biracial and bisexual. Soon after, Man, who identifies as genderqueer, modeled for Calvin Klein flexing his biceps in black boxer briefs. It’s a radical act, he says, “to showcase my flat-chested, penis- less body.” He says he received a lot of love and a lot of transphobia, neither of which surprised him. He posted on Instagram from the shoot with the caption: “No visible underwear bulge. Jewish and Asian history and representation in my DNA and on my skin. Top surgery scars out and proud. Visible cochlear implants paired with my DEAF AF tattoo.” Man followed this with an older image of himself — in track pants and shirtless, pre-top surgery. A bicep tattoo gives the photo its caption and meaning: “I Am My Own Masculinity.” Man is saying through image and ink that he can define his own masculinity, rather than let it define him.This, then, is what comes next: shifting from a past where gender was handed to us by society’s cues and prompts to a future of expressing who we are in terms we control. “Masculinity stems from gender, which is socially constructed,” says Man. “Anyone has the potential to unlearn social constructs and/or redefine what they may mean to them.” Collectively, the actors are engaged in this conversation about gender and identity, leading us to a day when those conversations are no longer necessary.4. The Gates of ParamountAt the beginning of 2019, Jill Soloway, the creator of Amazon’s “Transparent,” invited Schofield, who declined to give his age, for a hike in Griffith Park. In the chaparral above Los Angeles, they discussed organizing a new group under the umbrella of 5050 by 2020, a strategic initiative working toward gender parity across all Hollywood professions that Soloway helps lead. Soloway, 54, who identifies as nonbinary, says that many trans men and nonbinary people have a unique perspective on the issues of equality, opportunity and the post-#MeToo discussion of masculinity and its privileges. Smith agrees: As he transitioned, he had to ask himself what kind of man he wanted to be, “examining that earlier on and more intensely than cis men.” He believes the importance society places on masculinity might be more problematic than masculinity in and of itself. Dasani, who also declined to give his age, echoed that with a story from his time in film school, before transitioning: In a study group with three film bros, he found himself ignored. After transitioning, he noticed what he said wasn’t devalued in a way he felt it had been before. “I remember clocking this — be the guy who makes room for other voices at the table.”In April 2019, about 30 actors, writers, directors and editors met in a boardroom on the Paramount lot. They gathered around an imposing executive table, the kind that has long excluded them. The cohort’s goals are both practical (networking, professional development) and inspirational (support, friendship). For some, it’s the only time they’ve been in a space with so many like themselves. As far as anyone knows, it’s a first for Hollywood. “There’s so much tenderness in the room,” says Dasani of the now monthly meetings. The symbolism of the Paramount lot isn’t lost: For a long time, those gates have been closed to many communities. When I ask Dasani about this moment of increasing representation, he corrects me. “I hope it’s more than a moment. I hope it’s a cultural shift.” A shift to ensure the gates never close again.Grooming: Christina Guerra and Hailey Adickes at Celestine Agency. More