Trace Lysette has no children but she is a mom. Or was: For about a decade she reigned as mother of the House of Mizrahi, a legendary house, as the voguers will tell you, in New York’s ballroom scene.
The children she was a surrogate parent for still gush over the night in 2012 when she walked a ball dolled up like Marilyn Monroe, her hair bleached blonde and her fake fur cinched with a borrowed Comme des Garçons belt. A YouTube video from that evening shows her in command of a swooning throng.
In the new film “Monica” (in theaters), Lysette is consumed by a less fierce but equally potent expression of motherhood. She plays the title character, a transgender woman who reunites and uneasily reconciles with her estranged family as they care for their ailing mother (played by Patricia Clarkson), who doesn’t recognize her daughter, at first.
“It’s not just a trans story, it’s a family story,” Lysette said in a recent video interview from Los Angeles.
Leisurely directed by Andrea Pallaoro, the film is a big break for Lysette, herself a transgender woman and an actress best known for playing a stripper in “Hustlers” (2019) and a yoga teacher on “Transparent” (2014-2019), Amazon’s dark comedy about a baby boomer transgender woman, played by Jeffrey Tambor.
“Monica” made waves at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it premiered to acclaim as the first movie with an openly transgender lead to compete there. Lysette is in almost every scene, captured by Pallaoro’s camera in sometimes jarringly extreme detail.
Lysette said her favorite moment in the film is a tranquil one: Dressed in a bathing suit, Monica sits on a dock holding a baby in sunlight.
“It’s such a beautiful portrait because it’s so rare that you get to see a trans woman being maternal and being carefree,” she said. It’s one of many moments in “Monica” that Lysette hopes might change at least one mind as the film hits theaters during a politically treacherous moment for the transgender community.
“The only way we are going to get past this hate and messed-up legislation is if the other side can see themselves in us,” she said.
In a phone interview, Clarkson said she quickly connected with Lysette, and the two developed an intimacy as near to mother and daughter as two strangers can be. In one heart-rending scene, as Monica bathes her mother, the two women have a nonverbal moment of recognition — an example of how Lysette is “capable of a piercing stillness,” said Clarkson.
“Great actors, like Trace, when they’re called upon to enter incredibly deep and dark emotional places, have to be willing to let their unique selves come through,” she said. “The body can put up guards and filters every day. But when she arrived on set, she was completely available and breathtaking.”
When asked what people should know about Lysette, Alexandra Billings, Lysette’s “Transparent” co-star, said: “She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”
“When you look at her, because we are a culture so full of misogyny, we think there’s no way there can be a brain attached,” said Billings by phone. “Every single piece of advice she’s given me was spot-on.”
As for parallels between Monica’s life and her own, Lysette said that after a challenging few years, she’s in “a good place” with her own mother, who she came out to as transgender when Lysette was in her teens.
“The tool kit that parents had in the ’90s is not the same tool kit they have to deal with their children coming out as trans in 2023,” said Lysette, who gave her age as “on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial.” “What I realize is that my mom did the best she could. I forgave my mom a long time ago.”
Lysette was born in Kentucky but grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where she started doing drag in high school before performing at area clubs with drag queens and transgender women working in a drag context. Nightlife was where she met her transgender godmother of sorts, the entertainer Jareje Rashad, “the spitting image of Toni Braxton,” as Lysette put it, before moving to New York at 20. “It was a magical moment when I met her,” Lysette said. “There was a seed planted.”
In conversation, Lysette has an accentuate-the-positive outlook — remnants of a Midwestern politesse, perhaps — that she admitted to using to find good in even the darkest memories. That was the case as she discussed “Transparent.” Lysette was one of several actresses who in 2017 claimed Tambor sexually harassed her on set, accusing him in a statement of having “made many sexual advances and comments.” It was amid those allegations that Tambor left the show after the fourth season.
When asked to reflect on “Transparent,” Lysette took a long pause, then said: “I’m grateful that I got to be on such a critically acclaimed show. I learned a lot from watching Judith Light work. I think it’s part of the timeline of trans representation. Was it perfect? No. But it did open the door for a lot of other things.”
Yet when asked to assess the opportunities for transgender actors in a post-“Pose” world — in which the popular show about ballroom culture made transgender actors and characters household names — her grade was “D minus.”
“There are a lot of people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk in terms of greenlighting trans stories, with us creating them, producing them, starring in them,” she said. “I really think the industry as a whole doesn’t quite understand what they’re missing.”
Lysette is back auditioning, and as she enters each room she said she hopes to be seen “as a leading lady and not just as a trans actor.”
“I want them to say, she’s studied her craft, she’s put in the work and that it’s been a slow boil, not a microwave,” she said. “And that she’s ready for more.”
Erik Piepenburg
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