Trailblazing trans actress Candis Cayne warns: ‘Studios aren’t writing new trans characters’

Candis Cayne, the actress and transgender trailblazer, has changed the time of our interview because she’s got a Spanish lesson.

She started learning two months ago, she begins telling me. “Oh my God, I’m going to move to better lighting. This is not cute,” she interrupts with a laugh, before carrying me on her laptop into a walk-in closet bursting with patterned kaftans and shelf upon shelf of (very) high heels.

Why Spanish? For one, she lives in California, surrounded by native Spanish speakers. “I feel like a total dumb American,” she says, flashing a pearly Hollywood smile. Then there’s reason two: “Ummmmm, I was just thinking about where I would wanna live if I had to flee the country.” Another laugh, at the absurdity. “I’m like, Spain! Spain will work.”

At 54, Candis Cayne has been a US resident for her entire life, having been born in Maui, Hawaii, moving to LA, then New York, LA again. But with Trump back in the White House, his views on trans rights ever more vociferous, a future in her own home feels less and less tenable.

“We know a lot of dictators and horrible people in the past started their reign of terror by othering immigrants and othering queer people, so it is scary,” she says.

She’s pleased to be in relative safety in progressive California, and wants to stay to help others in the country’s more oppressive states. “I definitely will hold on until I can’t hold on anymore and then what? Do you fight from out of the country? That’s difficult but it’s better than, you know, being labelled a crazy person and thrown in a cell.” She shrugs a sigh.

It’s a bleaker start to our chat than I planned. We’re ostensibly here to talk about her role in Jane Clark’s new sapphic romance fantasy film Witchy Ways. She plays Penny, a mostly over-the-phone confidant of twitchy protagonist Eve (Cobra Kai star Diora Baird), who falls in love with Danni (Marem Hassler), a fey witch with a troubling family secret. It’s clearly low budget – magic powers illustrated via purple sparkles and shimmering chimes – but charmingly so.

Cayne herself is a “crystal-y, tarot-y, witchy girl,” she says, searching for a tarot deck among her shoes and bags.

During a winter solstice in the pandemic, she and some trans friends performed a conjuring around a fire in the middle of the night. “Not like cursing anyone, but it was kind of amazing – the power of the feminine, the female energy getting together and conjuring up things.” Queer women have a tightly entwined history with witchcraft, perhaps as women dubbed witches historically were done so for perceived flouting of social norms. 

“You can look outside yourself, your reality, your political drama, the annoying things that happen in your life, and focus on something spiritual but yet that is based in nature and the wonders around us,” Cayne theorises as to why queer people have disproportionate interest in the occult. Succumbing to the idea that the world is bigger, more unexplainable and more transcendental than we realise, can be a balm that soothes, she thinks. “Trans youth especially right now need to know that.”

Much of our conversation springs back to the trans community and what it needs right now, unsurprisingly so given how Cayne’s star is wrapped into her identity. In 2007, she made history as the first trans actress to play a recurring trans character on US primetime TV, playing – predictably, given the era – a mistress, Carmelita Rainer, to William Baldwin’s senator Patrick Darling in Dirty Sexy Money.

It rocketed her into the mainstream; for a time, she says, she was the second most-searched actress on IMDb. But the one-two punch between 2007 and 2008 of the global financial crash and Hollywood writers’ strike resulted in Dirty Sexy Money getting binned after two seasons.

In the aftermath, Cayne made appearances on Ryan Murphy’s medical drama Nip/Tuck and Lifetime fantasy drama Drop Dead Diva, “but no one knew where to place me,” she says. “Nobody knew what to do with me. I couldn’t find an agent at first. None of the big agents would sign me, even though I was on a primetime show, you know? I had one agent say, ‘other clientele just wouldn’t understand if we took you on.’”

In 2013, with Laverne Cox’s role in Netflix behemoth Orange Is The New Black, doors began opening for trans actresses. TV shows examining the trans experience through different lenses – such as Pose and Transparent (in which Cayne briefly starred) – followed. Then came shows that allowed trans characters to be more than their gender identity, like Yasmin Finney’s Elle Argent in Heartstopper and Hunter Schafer’s Jules Vaughn in Euphoria. 

Cayne’s career enjoyed a rebirth of sorts too. She recalls heading out to auditions with other trans trailblazers including Alexandra Billings and Jamie Clayton, eagerly aware that there was more than one part to go for.

Throughout the 2010s, she found a late millennial audience through numerous appearances on RuPaul’s Drag Race; in role as the ruthless, white-faced, black-eyed Fairy Queen in The Magicians; by getting a vaginoplasty in character on Grey’s Anatomy; and as a frequent guest on I Am Cait, the docuseries chronicling the transition of Cayne’s former best friend Caitlyn Jenner (in 2024, Cayne disavowed Jenner for her long-documented support of Trump).

“We were starting to get roles. Yes, you see it in different television shows and a couple of movies and it seemed incredible. But, you know, we’ve been around for thousands of years and so we’ve finally got some sort of place at the dinner table,” she says. But the trend of studios gamely hiring trans talent has been ephemeral, Cayne says. 

“There’s nothing being written for trans people”

“There’s now notes going around the companies saying that ‘we’re not hiring any new trans characters’. There’s nothing being written for trans people. Like, the entertainment industry is at a hard no right now for trans people because of the administration,” she says, referring to Trump’s crackdown on DEI.

Last week, GLAAD reported that only 12 per cent of trans characters on TV in 2025 will return next year. “There aren’t any auditions. There’s nothing going on,” Cayne says.

She has resorted to making her own content, launching trans-led production company Mary, It’s Mary Productions last year, and starring in indie films like Witchy Ways. “It’s fun to do these films on a relatively low budget and make something really kind of magical.”

Penny is a mother hen type character, a role that Cayne – known among her friends equally for her even-keeled steadiness as for being a fizzy party host – nestles into nicely. Penny is also from New York, a city Cayne was “entranced” by when she lived there for 18 years, through its tumultuous, supernova era in the ‘90s. The havoc of the AIDS crisis cast a long shadow, but the city was equally bright with big clubs and bigger community spirit.

“It was so weird. It was so big, but it was such a community. If you left the house and missed the phone call, you were on your own, but you were in New York and you always had a place to go where you knew everybody,” she says wistfully, combing her hands through her perfectly preened blonde locks.

Her eyes widen as she recalls the “magical” time pre phones and social media, when the biggest currency for a star hoping to rise was to look “as fierce and as gorgeous as you possibly could, every second of the day – when you walked out of that house, and into that club.”

The big clubs were for partying and performing at weekends, while some of the city’s big LGBTQ+ names had slots in bars on weekdays; Cayne’s haunt was the famed gay bar Barracuda in Chelsea, which closed this year. She moved between cliques, hanging around trans folk and drag queens, including Lina Bradford, Sherry Vine, and Mistress Formika, and maintaining a presence in ballrooms and with club kids.

“I was just hungry and I just wanted to work”

It was in NYC that she got her on-screen start too, starring in queer cult classics including Wigstock: The Movie and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Imagine her gallivanting about Manhattan with the city’s other tastemakers, like RuPaul, Debbie Harry and Leigh Bowery. “I could give you a couple of those stories. Maybe I’ll save it for the book,” she laughs. “I was just hungry and I just wanted to work and be a star. That was my goal.”

And here she is. Almost 20 years on from making waves as TV’s first regular trans character, and she’s playing Penny, a woman whose gender is entirely inconsequential to her role in the movie. “I do feel honoured that I was at the forefront of this trans movement into film and television. Me along with other girls made our mark on history,” she smiles.

It’s time to go: that Spanish lesson is starting. “Ciao. Oh…” she says, her eyelashes fluttering, knowingly. “That’s Italian.”

Witchy Ways is available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV.

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