Will Ferrell regrets awkward Texas restaurant visit after co-star booed for trans rights toast
visit to a Texas restaurant after his trans co-star, Harper Steele, received an awkward response from diners. It happened while Ferrell and Steele, a former “Saturday Night Live” head writer, were filming their new Netflix documentary, “Will & Harper,” which follows their 17-day road trip across the country “to bond and reintroduce Harper to the country as her true self” after Steele came out as transgender in 2022.They received what they described as an unexpected and uncomfortable response from diners at a Texas restaurant after Steele mentioned the state hadn’t done enough for trans rights, the New York Times reported.“I’m from Iowa, but I will raise a glass to your great state of Texas,” Steele said to a receptive audience of diners at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, where Ferrell and Steele planned to attempt the restaurant’s famous 72-ounce steak challenge. “I wish you guys would do more for trans rights in this state,” Steele added, which silenced the cheers and was met with a few groans from the audience, Chron reported. “Cheers to Texas and trans rights, right?” Ferrell added.
The toast didn’t make it into the documentary, but Steele and Ferrell shared their responses to the moment afterward. “The room started to feel very wrong to me,” Steele said in the film. “I was feeling a little like my transness was on display, I guess, and suddenly that sort of made me feel not great.” “The saddest part for me is … I just feel … I feel like I let you down in that moment,” Ferrell said in response.“I didn’t really have a grasp on how intense it was going to be and felt responsible for not properly vetting the situation we were putting ourselves in,” Ferrell told The New York Times. “That felt like it was going to be this benign place where you eat a big steak in the amount of time, and then you walk in and it’s a thousand people seated in this room and I was like, ‘Oh, why are we here?'”Steele described the feeling of being “on display” in that moment.“We gave.
