I’m late to meet Rebecca Root at the British Museum. I text my apologies and instantly receive a reply. She’s waiting for me by the totem pole in the main hall, she says, adding, “The museum is full of school parties. I suspect I may need a G&T afterwards.” I crawl through the adolescent crush, scanning ahead to find her. From her agency shot I know she’s tall (6ft), brunette, striking. In the only full-length photograph I’ve seen of her she’s wearing full makeup, a miniskirt and knee boots, but it turns out that picture was taken in character, “when I was playing a trans Venezuelan sex worker”, she laughs. Today, she is casual, in jeans and a leather jacket, and greets me warmly amid the chaos.
We are meeting to discuss her role in Boy Meets Girl, a new BBC show airing next month. “It’s the first mainstream UK sitcom to cast a transgender actor in a lead transgender role,” Root says, as we sit down with our coffees. “But also the first in the UK to feature romance – and sex scenes – between a trans actress in a trans role and a cisgender man [someone living the same gender as they were born].”
Root plays Judy, a transgender woman in her 40s, who meets a younger man, Leo (played by Harry Hepple), in a bar. “He is actually very mature in his reaction when she breaks the news that she is transgender,” she says, “and the show is about how they navigate that, how he navigates the reactions from others.” In the US, multi-award-winning show Orange Is The New Black has broken similar ground, featuring trans actor Laverne Cox as inmate Sophia Burset; last year, Cox made history as the first transgender woman to receive an Emmy nomination for the role. Root hopes Boy Meets Girl will have a similar effect here. “We’ve had cisgender actors in trans roles for too long,” she says. “It’s about time we had trans actors in trans roles.”
Root, 46, has just finished filming a small part in the upcoming Eddie Redmayne film, The Danish Girl, about Lili Elbe, one of the first recipients of gender realignment surgery. “I try not to get angry about, for example, a cisgender actor like Eddie being cast as Lily Elbe, when there are so many great trans actors. He’s done a brilliant job. It’s not a criticism of him, it’s a criticism of directors and producers.”
Root grew up in Surrey, the second child, with a sister either side. Her mother is a fine artist and her father a composer, “although they both had to take on other jobs to supplement their income,” she says. They were all close. “Mum is a big-hearted Dubliner, while Dad is more English, reserved,” she says. But even as a child, she was aware she didn’t fit into her role within the family: “I knew from the very earliest age, from the moment I had any kind of understanding of gender, that I wasn’t a boy. I played with dolls, I read my two sisters’ Jackie magazines. I didn’t, ever, feel I was male in any way.”
But this was the 70s, in suburban Surrey. “Gender fluidity wasn’t a concept my parents were familiar or comfortable with. It was pointed out to me that my behaviour wasn’t what was expected – so I consciously started playing with Action Man figures and climbing trees.” How did that go? “Not well,” she smiles wryly.
Acting in school plays gave her a way to “legitimately” be female. “One year I was cast as a male cook who disguised himself as a nanny to escape an evil king despot – not strictly a female role, but it required me to put on a frock,” she says. “Suddenly, I had permission to dress up as a female in front of 150 people.” She was always first in the queue for the panto dame parts after that. “It’s impossible to explain to a cisgender person what it feels like to just know you are in the wrong body.”
As a teenager, she occasionally felt so low she contemplated killing herself. “I think it was Eddie Izzard who said that just at the moment you’re feeling most insecure, you’re struck by a plague of discomfiture. It was like screaming, out of control, the wrong way down a one-way street. All around me my girlfriends were blossoming...” Did she ever talk about how she was feeling? “God, no. At one point I thought I could just get through whatever it was by dressing up in private, but gender isn’t defined by what’s next to your skin.”
Root dated women and struggled on through drama school and the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London. “I was always so angry,” she says. “I’m much more forthright now, but also softer and relaxed. You could ascribe the latter to the hormones I take, but I don’t think it’s that; it’s simply because I’m now who I’m meant to be. I’m not fighting myself any more.”
After coffee, Root suggests a wander around the shops. She wants to look at watches. “I’m obsessed,” she says. “If the big time comes, I’m going to need a room just for my watch collection.” Home at the moment is a rented flat in Highgate, north London. “If my career really takes off, I’ll buy my wonderful parents a nice little house and a buy-to-let investment for myself.” Anything else? “A vintage, bottle green, convertible, MGB sports car and a nice Longines or Rolex watch. Vintage, not blingy.”
She is still very close to her family. She remembers vividly the night when, staying at her parents’ holiday home in Brittany, she told them that she could no longer go on living as a man. “I was 33, with a day’s growth of beard and a flat chest. I was trapped in a tall man’s body and I was in despair. But my parents didn’t judge me. I knew they still loved me.”
It’s a great regret, however, that she avoided her paternal grandmother for the last two years of her life, only finally visiting when she was unconscious on her deathbed. “I wish I could explain to her it was because I was terrified she would shun me as I was transitioning,” Root says. “Now, I wonder if she would have done. But I never gave her the chance to show me.”
Her transition began in earnest in 2000, when she met a psychiatrist at London’s Charing Cross hospital to undergo assessment. This was followed by the two-year real-life test, a period in which she had to live full time as a woman, legally changing her name and telling everyone of her intent. “I was 34,” she says. “Probably the hardest part of the process was simply making the decision to do it. I had spent years seeing all sorts of therapists and psychiatrists, but it was doing my head in, going round in constant circles. I knew I couldn’t live somewhere in between any more… that I needed to be as fully female as I could.”
Her family have been hugely supportive, she says, but “they miss my voice. It had a smooth, chocolatey bass tone, and it was a very distinctive part of me. They said, ‘Everything else, fine, but we’re going to lose your gorgeous voice, we’re going to lose the essence of you.’” Nevertheless, Root visited a speech therapist for six hour-long sessions, before having an operation on her vocal cords to remove the lower notes of her range. Now, she works as a voice coach, specialising in transgender voice adaptation. She’s also spent time on the standup circuit.
The show has been given a (just) post-watershed time slot. How does Root think the nation will react to the first kiss on mainstream TV between transgender and cisgender actors? “The kiss is the least of it,” she says. “There’s plenty of sauciness after that. I hope the nation is ready for it. It’s about time we had an honest show like this.”
Unlike her character, Root says she doesn’t date, finding the whole experience “too fraught”. “Being chatted up as a woman is an extraordinary feeling, but I always worry that the guy is going to turn ugly if he suspects I’m T,” she says. She enjoys male attention, however. “When I get tooted or wolf-whistled, or – only too rarely – chatted up, I feel like I’ve achieved something. I know lots of cisgender women hate it, and I know it’s a bit shallow, but as someone who has struggled all her life with my identity and presentation, it feels good. Feeling just a tiny bit sexy, which I never did as a male, feels incredible.”
We discuss Caitlyn Jenner’s recent Vanity Fair cover. “She totally owned it! Part of me wishes I had the nerve to do what she’s done – to wear really glamorous clothes,” she says. “It’s funny: when you transition, you have to go through puberty all over again. You hit womanhood, only you’re in your 20s – or mid-30s in my case – and you have to make all the mistakes and wear all the terrible clothes other girls do when they’re 13 and everyone expects it.”
Her older sister helped, she says. “But it was a steep learning curve. I remember going to a party early on, thinking I looked fucking awesome. But when I got on the night bus home people laughed openly at me. It was devastating, crushing. I sat there sobbing, and a nice girl asked me if I was OK.”
At least they were laughing at her and not beating her up, she says. “I mentor young people going through transition, and I told this story to one the other day. She said, ‘I don’t want either of those things to happen to me.’” Root says it was hard to know how to reply, especially as she’s had far worse experiences – she once had stones thrown at her in public, and on another occasion she was Tasered by a man in a park.
Is she worried about the extra attention that being in a prime-time show might bring? “That shit happens to trans people all the time. It’s just normal, everyday life.”
She’s off to Edinburgh via New York next, to perform in a play called TransScripts, about the real-life experiences of four transgender men and women. “I just hope I can use any fame that comes my way to show the public that trans people like me are just like them,” she says. “So that the girls I mentor don’t have to go through what I have.”
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