Hunter Schafer on ‘Cuckoo’ and Queer Representation in Movies
metroweekly.comCuckoo. “It’s not necessarily my end goal to be an actress. But I’m having so much fun!”The 25-year-old New Jersey native made an impressive acting debut in 2019 on HBO’s hit series Euphoria, playing a transgender high school student.
In the years since, Schafer has veered away from talking about her own queer identity in the press, as she doesn’t want it to define the roles she’s offered.Still, one thing that can be safely revealed about Cuckoo is that her character, a sullen teen named Gretchen who is forced to spend time in an eerie Austrian mountain resort with her father, stepmother, and younger, mute half-sister, is exploring her sapphic side.“I understand the significance of us taking up space in these narratives that ultimately do affect culture in really tangible ways,” she says of LGBTQ representation in cinema. “That’s what art should do.
I think it’s important for queer people to see queer people in movies.“I also think it’s really important for people who have no ties whatsoever to the queer community to spend real time with a character that’s queer, and relate to them and have moments where they find themselves in a character that they might think they have no resemblance to.
Because I feel like those are the people that can really benefit from just spending time with queer characters. That’s one of the most exciting things to think about as far as how representation can shift culture.”Written and directed by German filmmaker Tilman Singer (Luz), Cuckoo is a progressively intense and insane affair, with Schafer’s Gretchen put through a brutal wringer by the film’s… well, we’ll leave that tidbit for you to discover.“This was my first project outside of Euphoria,” says Schafer, whose second movie appearance, as Tigris in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes landed in theaters first, in 2023. “So I was coming into it already with the anticipation of having no idea what this is going to be like.
