Rain Valdez Talks About The Importance Of Building Community With Q26
Rain Valdez is an actress, an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of ActNOW, the first and only acting class in Los Angeles, prioritizing a safe space for LGBTQIA actors and teaching beyond the binary. She recently starred in a Paul Feig directed, half-hour comedy pilot for Freeform TV, guest stars in Amazon's Sneaky Pete, and can also be seen in the CBS All Access new show Why Women Kill. Jasmine D. Lowe, the Managing Editor at Q26, got the chance to interview her via Zoom.
Rain Valdez
Jasmine D. Lowe: I want to talk about how you became interested in acting and how you became an actress.
Rain Valdez: Well, I think it started for me at a very young age. I think I was like five when I discovered television. I'm from the Philippines. That's where I was born, but my family and I immigrated to Guam. That's where I grew up. And so, my grandmother where we stayed, she had a television, and I was very fascinated by it. I kind of just started seeing a bunch of female representation that I felt like I identified with and a few of them were like Jacqueline Smith on Charlie's Angels, Whoopie Goldberg, and Michelle Pfeiffer. I used to tell people that I'm the cross between Whoopie Goldberg and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Jasmine: [laughs]
Rain: And that usually gets a laugh, so I'm glad you laughed. Cause everyone is like, what? Those are completely two different people, but I was a kid back then, and I just loved them both.
That's kind of when I realized there was something in the art of acting because, as a young trans kid, I wasn't really allowed to express the way I wanted to express. I wasn't allowed to express in a feminine presentation the way I naturally wanted to, and people, the decision-makers of my life, my parents, mainly my oldest sibling, always tried to police my behavior and my gender. I was an effeminate anyway, so they couldn't stop that. But there were just certain times when I just knew that I couldn't express the way I wanted to. And so, acting and the arts were just a way for me to have an outlet where I can express myself.
Jasmine: What led you to that point where you were able to say, "I'm an actress. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life?"
Rain: I think it was acting class really. I started acting classes early as a 19 or 20 and with very little experience about acting or what I was doing, but as soon as I got on stage and did my first scene, I was told that I had a natural ability. So, I consider myself a film buff. I watched a lot of television and TV growing up. So, I kind of used that as sort of like my training ground in a way, because I couldn't get into an acting class as a kid. I couldn't afford it. I was a child, and my parents weren't going to spend the money to do that for me. But when I got into an acting class, I just remembered some of the choices that my favorite actress would do or make, and instead of just applying them to my work.
Learning the craft of it just opened up a whole other level of my acting ability, which I didn't really know I had. It was very validating to have a teacher who sees you for who you are and sees you for the talent that you have and was constantly encouraging me to try different roles and try different things, try different genres, and it was fun. It was kind of like a playground. And I remember just thinking that I can do this for the rest of my life if only people would hire me to do this. That was the challenging part, was trying to get people to hire you. As an Asian American trans woman, that has its own roadblocks.
So, that part was challenging. What really solidified it for me in terms of like, okay, I can do this in terms of a career is when I wrote and shot, and acted in Ryan's, which is a short film. It's a romantic comedy. And I star in it, and it's about a trans woman who doesn't date anybody by the name, Ryan. So, I got to be funny. I kind of got to be the transgender Sandra Bullock, and it allowed me to like showcase my talent as a writer and an actress, and in my favorite genre, which is a romantic comedy. And since then, that short film brought in other opportunities to act. It helped me find a manager. Help me find an agent and help me find my biggest role, which was on TV Land, Lopez. So, I think training is a great way to find out if this is something you want to do and just do it and not wait for anyone to do it for you.
Jasmine: I wanted to talk about ActNOW and how you got that going. What prompted you to start it in the first place?
Rain: It was about a few years ago when Scarlett Johansson was announced that she would be playing a trans masculine character in this movie called 'Rub & Tug.' When the news of that came out, we were at a point where we were tired of hearing cis people playing us for the sake of performance or for art, because when it comes to our life, it's so much more than that. There's so much more to consider when you're playing a character that's trans. Everyone in the community went up in arms about it, and I was one of the people who did, and I was interviewed on the Hollywood reporter. So, we talked about it. The thing that we kept hearing was that, well, there just aren't any like bankable trans actors or actresses.
For me, I took that as, Oh, they don't know where to find us, whether we're bankable or not, they just don't have access to the resources to a pool of talented trans people. I created the acting class because I saw an opportunity to create space where we could be the majority. Trans people, non-binary people in a classroom where you can learn the craft of acting, be the majority instead of being the one and only, which was my experience when I was in an acting class, it was always the only trans person in the room. This allowed for us to just, you know, focus on the craft, focus on technique and focus on the work, as opposed to having to do emotional labor and constantly explain who you are and what you represent, cause that can be challenging and can take away from the actual work of learning the craft. What I love about my class is that we teach beyond binary and my kids, my students, they're allowed to play any role that they want, as long as they're able to bring the essence of themselves into that role, then I'm all for it. We focus a lot on casting, meaning not in terms of your gender casting, but in terms of the essence that you have as an individual and what you can bring to a specific character.
Jasmine: I remember Scarlett Johansson saying that "I should be able to play any person, tree, or animal." There were a ton of tree memes. It was really silly of her to say because we weren't saying that actors couldn't play other roles. It's just that, right now, there are hardly any trans people playing trans roles.
Rain: We're also rarely afforded the opportunity to play cisgender roles. Until it's at an equal playing field, then maybe you play a trans person. Maybe it'll be okay, but until then, Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry and everyone who is a key player in Hollywood must advocate for trans actors and actresses to play trans roles.
Jasmine: Yes! And at the end of the day, it's also about sharing stories that other people don't really run into. So, I really like that you started an organization where you make sure that those voices are heard in the world and that they have that platform.
Rain: When you hire a trans person to play a trans role, we don't have to play the transness of it all. We don't have to try to be more feminine or try and be more masculine or go through this whole process of figuring out where this character came from; why they're trans. They just have to play the role and bring all of our experiences into the character. It's not about the transness of the character. It's about the essence and the experience and the beauty and the tragedies that we can portray without having to do so much research or work about who a trans person is or why they are trans. Why did they transition? It's something that we don't have to do.
Jasmine: What advice do you have for young people who want to do what you do and be out there as an advocate for other people in the community and who want to share their art with others?
Rain: My advice is to keep looking out for the people that inspire you because we are out here. I know when I was a kid, there weren't any representation that I could find. For a kid who is transitioning or looking into getting into the arts, there's such a huge community. And it's whether you're in Wisconsin or in Portland there's always community. So, my advice is to find you within your community and start moving mountains with each other and start moving mountains for the people that are like you and the people that you care about because inevitably you'll be doing great work together and you'll be supporting each other. I think community and support are so important in our community. But I also think that self-love is very important. We may feel like the role hates us because of what's happening with this administration and policymakers taking away our healthcare and black trans women getting killed by the numbers. It may feel like there's no hope, but there is a lot of love that you can find within yourself. And there's a lot of community as long as you search for it and you find it.
You can follow Rain Valdez's work on the show, Razor Tongue, a web series that's available on YouTube.
Rain: It's about a trans woman who started calling out the misogynistic behaviors of certain men around her for her own personal fulfillment, but then finds herself in a crossfire of consequences when she's antagonized into calling out someone she loves. It's a spoof on call-out culture. It's also a romantic comedy and a little bit of a thriller. It's got a lot of everything, and it's something that I'm very proud of.
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