(L-R) Ivory Aquino – Photo via Twitter; Alysia Yeoh – Image via DC Comics
Transgender actress Ivory Aquino has made history after being cast in the upcoming HBO Max Batgirl movie.
Aquino will portray the first ever transgender character in a live-action DC Comics film, Alysia Yeoh, the best friend of Batgirl.
Yeoh is a groundbreaking character, having been the first major trans character in a comic book at the time of her debut in 2011, Daily Beast reports.
Leslie Grace, who will star as Barbara Gordon — aka Batgirl — in the film, previously teased Aquino’s casting on her Instagram story earlier this month.
Sharing a photo of the characters crossing a street and holding hands, Grace wrote: “Barbara and Alysia 😍🦇” and tagged Aquino in the post.
HBO Max has yet to set a release date for Batgirl. The film will also star J.K. Simmons as Gotham police commissioner and Barbara’s father James Gordon, Brendan Fraser as sociopathic pyromaniac Firefly, and Michael Keaton — reprising his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman after previously portraying the character in Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns.
Aquino publicly came out as transgender in 2017 during the press tour for ABC docuseries When We Rise, about the history of LGBTQ rights advocacy between the 1970s and 2010s.
Aquino told People that she had considered quitting acting prior to When We Rise, as she “didn’t feel at the time that there were any roles” for transgender actors.
Speaking to NBC News, the Filipina-American actress said, “As soon as I was born, I was always a girl; I was just assigned differently at birth.”
“At some point in high school that desire to express that need in me was so strong that one summer I ended up plucking my eyebrows and colored my hair, and I walked into school and there was a collective gasp in the classroom in the change of appearance,” Aquino said.
She added that being transgender was “nothing to be ashamed of, in fact it’s something to be happy about.”
“I think trans kids are so great amid all of that society tells them,” Aquino said. “They are courageous enough to speak their truth.”
The hit HBO Max series Heated Rivalry is drawing more online search interest than many real-life NHL stars, underscoring the show’s breakout popularity beyond traditional hockey audiences.
According to Cyd Zeigler of Outsports, Google Trends data from the past 30 days reveals that searches for the show’s fictional romantic leads, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, consistently outpaced searches for several prominent NHL players throughout most of December.
More strikingly, searches for "Heated Rivalry" briefly surpassed searches for "NHL" itself in late December, coinciding with the release of the Season 1 finale.
Brock McGillis, the first openly gay professional hockey player, told PinkNews that he "wholeheartedly" disagrees with the idea that HBO’s Heated Rivalry will encourage more hockey players to come out.
McGillis, 42, played in the Ontario Hockey League and United Hockey League during a nine-year professional career from 2001 to 2010 and came out publicly in 2016. While he now advocates for greater LGBTQ inclusion in hockey, McGillis said the series -- which has drawn attention for its steamy gay sex scenes -- is just as likely to keep gay players closeted.
Documentaries generally don't need an onscreen host. The camera can play host, and real-life stories can tell themselves, with offscreen prompting from research and production, and shrewd direction and editing providing context.
If a filmmaker wants to put the prompting onscreen, there's a delicate art to inserting themselves or an on-camera host into the story without stealing the spotlight from their subject.
Ryan Ashley Lowery, director and creator of the LGBTQ doc Light Up, is anything but delicate in inserting himself and two on-camera host-interviewers -- Michael Mixx and Maurice Eckstein -- into the film's still-compelling portrait of Atlanta's "community of Black same gender loving men and trans women."
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