Siobhan McCarthy and The Cast Talks She’s The He

Within every great storyteller is a story that is aching to be told, just waiting for the right time to reveal itself. For writer-director Siobhan McCarthy, She’s The He was just such a tale, and all it took to move forward was the world stopping.

“This movie is such a funny culmination of me,” McCarthy says. As a queer multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, they have been involved in various art forms ranging from trapeze to cinematography, but it’s their work as a writer-director that has the indie film world buzzing. She’s The He follows high school friends Ethan (Misha Osherovich, Freaky, The Goldfinch) and Alex (Nico Carney, Stick Bug, Comedy Central Originals), who, just before graduation, pretend to be trans women in a last-ditch effort to shut down rumors that they’re a gay couple, and to give Alex an opportunity to get close to his dream girl, Sasha (Malia Pyles, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, Cape Fear). Their plan takes an unexpected turn when Ethan realizes she truly is transgender, forcing both friends to navigate a changing friendship, identity, and the uncertainties of growing up.

For McCarthy, the idea emerged from an unusual collision of nostalgia and lived experience. During the Covid-19 lockdown, when they ended up back in their parents’ home revisiting the streets of their adolescence while rewatching the teen comedies that had shaped them. At the same time they were coming into their own as a trans person during an era when public debate over transgender people, particularly around bathrooms, had become a hot topic.

“I was in college when Covid hit,” McCarthy says. “I got stuck back in my parents’ house walking the same streets I walked in high school, watching all of those comfort movies I watched when I was young.” Those films and the frustration and fear that McCarthy was feeling over the intensity of the “bathroom politics” regarding transgender people converged in the young writer’s mind. “It felt like there was a clear connection between the two,” McCarthy says. That realization led McCarthy to reconsider the long tradition of gender-swap comedies.

They point to films like 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, and even Some Like It Hot as part of a storytelling lineage that has long explored gender through disguise and mistaken identity. “It felt like there was an obvious lineage within that that had this clear and trans subtext running all throughout it for hundreds of years,” McCarthy says. “It just suddenly felt like it made perfect sense to make that subtext text. I was surprised that no one had gone about and done it, especially in the context of this genre.” The screenplay came together almost as quickly as the inspiration struck. What began as an offhand joke to a friend soon became a completed script. “I wrote it in two days, sent it to them, and they in a very sincere way, said, ‘You should make this,’ and now we’re all here,” McCarthy says.

While She’s The He draws from McCarthy’s own experience of coming out as trans in high school, they also hope the film reaches audiences who may not expect to empathize with its characters. “This movie has a pretty unprecedented number of trans people in front of the camera, but also behind the camera,” McCarthy says. “One of the funniest meta jokes… would be if a conservative watched this movie and was like, ‘Hey, that sounds like my politics,’ and then watched the movie.” That possibility, they admit, is something of a dream scenario. “I would love it to feel like it’s a bear trap,” McCarthy says. “One that could catch one of those people and maybe reveal to them the humanity of transness, and tell them a story that might actually, hopefully, potentially change their mind, or at the very least get them to relate to and see themselves in a trans man.”

For McCarthy, that potential for empathy is central to the film’s purpose. “I do just think [it has] irrevocable effects of revealing the reality of the farce of binary and cis gender,” McCarthy says. “And also to create this, like, hopefully, little brainworm… maybe even just one of them a little farther towards our cause.”

With its blend of heartfelt coming-of-age storytelling and classic teen-comedy conventions, She’s The He aims to revisit a familiar genre while reframing it through a perspective rarely seen on screen. For McCarthy, it’s both a deeply personal story and an invitation for audiences to laugh, reflect, and perhaps see the familiar in an entirely new way.

Read more film interviews conducted by Patrick Gibbs:
Rod Davis Lurie Lights Up Lucky Strike
Pat Scola Hits A Bullseye with The Death of Robin Hood

To help SLUG continue covering upcoming films, consider becoming one of our donors!