MTV’s show Faking It, about two high school best friends, Amy and Karma, who pretend to be lesbians in order to gain popularity, only to have one realize that she’s queer for real, is putting out a call for new actors. They’re not just looking for any for any actors though; they’re looking for trans and gender non-conforming actors to play both background characters and speaking roles in the show’s upcoming third season.
In a video released on Friday, the show’s stars — Rita Volk (Amy) and Katie Stevens (Karma) —join showrunner Carter Covington to announce an open casting call for trans actors. “Our show is all about inclusion,” Covington starts off. Volk adds, “We have characters who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning…” with Stevens finishing off: “And intersex, don’t forget Lauren.” They continue to say that this season they want to expand that inclusion to trans and gender non-conforming actors on camera both in speaking roles and in background.
If you’re a trans actor over the age of 18, but you look like you could be a high school student, they want you to make a one minute or less audition tape where you tell a story about your best friend, whether it’s funny, scary, heartwarming or something else and submit it to the casting website. Both new and experienced actors are welcome. The deadline for submitting your video is November 13.
Faking It already has more of LGBTQI characters than your average TV show. Amy is definitely attracted to women, but she might also be attracted to some men; Karma is attracted to men, but she’s also got feelings for Amy; Amy’s step sister Lauren is probably the first example of positive intersex representation on TV since Freaks and Geeks; Shane is gay; Reagan is a lesbian; Wade is bisexual and a few other lesbian and gay characters have been on the show. Even Laverne Cox showed up for an episode, to play the school’s drama teacher.
Laverne Cox on Faking It
I’ve been desperately hoping for another chance for positive teenage trans representation on a TV show after the disaster that was Glee’s abuse of Unique. I’ve also even hoped that this specific show would include a trans character, guessing that maybe Lauren was trans before she came out as intersex. However, this show has often done a really terrible job of representing lesbian, questioning and bisexual characters (just read Riese’s wonderful recaps to see how), especially this season, and oddly seems to be about a school that is incredibly liberal and open-minded, yet only contains one confirmed not-straight female student (Amy).
But it has done a really great job with Lauren’s intersex identity, even working with the intersex youth advocacy group Inter/Act, to make sure that they do right by the intersex community. Hopefully some of these actors will see their speaking roles expanded to recurring roles on this show and to more roles down the road in other projects. Ideally, next season will do better by all its LGBTQI characters.
The Faking It season two finale airs this upcoming Monday on MTV.
i’m really glad they are reaching out and trying to cast trans actors, but it’s disappointing that they haven’t done better by the gay, lesbian and bisexual characters they already have on the show. it would be amazing if they have a trans lesbian character who amy could date although i shudder to image what shane would have to say about that
this is what i’m hoping for too! and like, if they can handle it well, it would be so amazing to see a trans girl be dating a girl who’s attracted to her as a girl, but I’m also so worried that they would use a storyline like that to further explore amy’s questioning her sexuality.
I don’t think the point of Faking It is for the characters to look good. They’re caricatures. That’s what makes the show funny. You can’t take it too seriously. I think as long as everyone is equally terrible, it’s all good.
I’ve never seen an episode of Faking It, but maybe I should start! Shout out to them for looking for (shocker) actual trans people to play trans characters! It shouldn’t be as amazing as it is, but you know…
Getting closer to ripping off every letter in LGBTQIA+ through queerbaiting and stereotyping more like it.
All about inclusion except not really. Covington is so disingenuous. Trying to reach Ryan Murphy levels.
This might be very selfish of me but I hate when people define the Q as questioning instead of queer. Queer is how you include all the other things, as well as the people who identify by the term queer primarily.
I’ve always thought “Q” meant “queer”? People say it means “questioning”? questioning isn’t a sexual orientation that’s just a stage of life
That’s what some people say about being bi!
well anybody who says that bisexuality is just a stage of life is an idiot
i mean, i guess, correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t “questioning” a verb, not a sexual orientation or gender identity? like questioning is the thing that we do to figure out if we are lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, pansexual, queer, etc. or if we are straight, cis, allosexual, cisgender, etc. w/r/t the acronym, i’m just saying i always thought Q stood for “queer”!
saying “that’s what people used to say about [x]” doesn’t make sense to me though… like if i said “unicorns don’t exist” and you said “that’s what people used to say about global warming!” that doesn’t make unicorns real.
anyhow sorry i didn’t mean to start a thing, i just was saying that i thought the Q was for queer
Yeah, we’re all on the same page here. I agree that just because some things are dismissed wrongly doesn’t mean that everything that is dismissed is actually real. I just thought it was funny that you used such a familiar turn of phrase. Like you could say, “You just haven’t met the right man yet!” to a lonely straight woman and not be off-base, but that sentence still has a special ring to it.
I definitely grew up only hearing that it was Questioning. I don’t think I heard someone self-identify as queer (other than in the heat of an argument to take the power away from someone) until high school or even college. Before that I only saw the Q mean questioning. But now I never use it to mean that, I only mentioned it bc they did in the video.
When I was in middle school (~2002), we were told that Q stood for questioning. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I grew up with it in the late 90’s-early 00’s as “Questioning” before Queer really had it’s comeback in the mainstream…at least with people my age.
“…a school that is incredibly liberal and open-minded, yet only contains one confirmed not-straight female student.”
<- I'm constantly annoyed at how freaking unlikely this is.
Speaking of including all the letters… I think it would be pretty great to have an asexual character. I know that doesn't fit in with the whole "everyone has sex with everyone or pretends to have sex with everyone" thing they've got going, but that's not really doing the show a lot of good anyway so…
And that's one badly represented group in the TV world.