The 1991 classic thriller “Silence of the Lambs” includes a villain named Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who murdered women and skinned them so he could make a suit for himself.
The film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, won five Oscars including Best Picture of the Year.
When transgender actress and consultant Jen Richards first saw the film, she said she didn’t really think too much about the character until she began exploring her own identity.
“I never really thought of him as a trans person, but I also didn’t really have a sophisticated understanding of what that meant. It was only later when I started to accept the fact that I might be trans, and started to check in with some colleagues and some friends and see how they would feel about my transitioning, and I was trying to figure it out, when I had one of my colleagues, after I disclosed to her that I might transition, she responded with, ‘You mean like Buffalo Bill?'” Richards remembered.
“It was her only touchstone for what it meant to be trans, was this psychopathic serial killer. And at that point I started to realize that other people might view me through a monstrous lens simply because they had no other reference point for what it meant to be trans,” Richards said.
Richards shared that experience in the Netflix documentary “Disclosure” which came out last year and the creators of a television show saw it.
That CBS show, “Clarice,” picks up on the life of an FBI agent one year after the events that happened in "Silence of the Lambs."
Jen Richards was hired to be a consultant on the show and eventually was tapped to play a transgender character named Julia Lawson.
In one scene, Lawson confronts Clarice Starling about the legacy of Buffalo Bill, saying, “I don’t know what their story was, but they got labeled transexual and whether it’s true or not, that word was then in every headline, every story, every gruesome tabloid photo right next to ‘murderer,’ ‘maniac.’"
“It truly was a full-circle moment for me, having come from that moment that marked the beginning of my transition and the realization that other people might see me as someone like Buffalo Bill,” Richards said of shooting that scene. “It was healing, it was cathartic.”
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