Talent Agent Ann Thomas Seeks to Cast Trans Actors on a Global Scale
Glee in 2015. In an episode in the final season, Unique (Alex Newell), a trans student, brings a choir of hundreds of trans people to sing with her to the show’s William McKinley High in a move to support the newly transitioning Coach Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones).
Thomas was one of those choir members.She recalls looking around the room and realizing she’d never seen that many trans people in one place.
She also noted a unique networking opportunity and began collecting information. Soon she had a private Facebook group with about 100 trans actors in it.“I realized there is no way for Hollywood to find us,” she says. “So that’s when I created the company.
Because we needed a safe place for transgender people to go and list with. By that time, I had heard a mountain of horror stories about bad experiences in Hollywood from people who tried to get into it.” Initially, much of her work consisted of reading scripts to discern if they were even suitable for auditioning trans actors.
