Lilly Wachowski Says Hollywood Won’t Fund Her All-Trans Thriller
The Matrix filmmaker says financiers like The Hunted but won't back the $10 million political thriller because of its all-trans cast.
Lilly Wachowski is trying to get her latest project, The Hunted, into production. But the acclaimed filmmaker says no one in Hollywood wants to finance the film because of its all-trans cast.
“People like it, but they really don’t want to make it because it’s [got a] wall-to-wall trans cast,” Wachowski, who came out as transgender in 2016, told KCRW’s The Business podcast earlier this month. “I have to get creative and figure out different ways that I can get this in front of people.”
Wachowski is best known for collaborating with her sister Lana Wachowski. The pair directed the original Matrix trilogy, Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending, and co-created the television series Sense8. She co-wrote The Hunted, which has a budget of around $10 million, with her creative and romantic partner, Mickey Ray Mahoney, who is also transgender.
The Hunted is a dystopian political thriller set in a version of the United States where trans people are routinely brutalized and pushed to the margins of society, according to Deadline. When two trans women attempt to solve a crime, their search for the perpetrator takes them to the highest levels of government.
“This is a script that was extremely important for me to write,” Wachowski said. “It was a response to what is happening in the world for trans people, and it gave me a hugely cathartic receptacle to dump all of my anger and rage and frustration into.”
The project is in development with Wachowski’s Anarchists United studio and Ariadne, an independent studio founded by Natasha Lyonne, Sean Lennon, and Evan Ross. On Aug. 7 and 8, Wachowski staged live table reads at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles.
“I’m just going to go out and I’m going to grab that trans joy with all of my friends,” Wachowski said of staging the table reads. “It’s not the thing that I had imagined it was going to be, but the end result is the same.”
A recent analysis by the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD found no transgender characters among the 225 films released by 10 major distributors in 2025. Overall, 20.4% of the films featured at least one LGBTQ character, a decrease of nearly three percentage points from 2024. It marked the third consecutive annual decline since 2022, when LGBTQ characters appeared in a record 28.5% of films from major distributors.
Wachowski’s difficulty finding financiers for The Hunted comes amid a broader backlash against LGBTQ visibility and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives intended to increase representation of historically marginalized groups.
President Donald Trump’s administration has dismantled DEI programs across the federal government and pressured private companies to abandon their own, prompting several businesses to scale back or eliminate such policies.
That pressure has coincided with a broader backlash against trans athletes and gender-affirming care, as well as demands to eliminate transgender representation from media.
Disney erased a trans character’s identity from a Pixar series, while Elon Musk urged his followers to cancel Netflix over a transgender character in an animated series that ended in 2023. The FCC has even floated adding warning labels to programs that address transgender issues or feature trans or nonbinary characters.
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