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Comedian and actor Will Ferrell expressed regret after an awkward incident at a Texas restaurant during filming with his transgender co-star, Harper Steele.
While shooting their Netflix documentary Will & Harper, which chronicles their 17-day road trip to help reintroduce Steele as her true self after coming out as transgender in 2022, they encountered what Ferrell describes as an uncomfortable response from diners. The tension arose after Steele commented on Texas not doing enough for transgender rights, as reported by The New York Times.
“I’m from Iowa, but I will raise a glass to your great state of Texas,” Steele told a crowd of diners at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, known for their famous 72-ounce steak challenge. “I wish you guys would do more for trans rights in this state.”
The declaration by Steele was met with awkward silence and a few groans from the audience, with Ferrell sheepishly adding: “Cheers to Texas and trans rights, right?”
“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. 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?'”
“We gave a little toast, and I said something about passing a trans bill, and the room did a kind of reversal and a little bit of a boo and a woman shouted out, ‘We still love you.’ I hate the phrase,” Steele said. “I could be misinterpreting this woman completely, but this is the feeling I had in the room: The ‘still’ is conditional. You still love me when I finally give up being trans and give my life over to Christ. They still love me even though I’m some kind of sinner or something. I felt that.”
“I wished I’d walked in and said: ‘No. This is going to be terrible. Let’s just go,'” Ferrell said in response. “I was feeling that remorse and guilt of even going there.”
Will Ferrell and his close friend, former head writer at SNL, Harper Steele embark on a cross-country road trip together after Harper comes out as a trans woman in the documentary film, WILL & HARPER. In select theaters this September and on Netflix September 27. pic.twitter.com/FULaHVuMkR
— Netflix (@netflix) September 5, 2024
In an interview with The Independent, Harper Steele criticized The New York Times, describing it as “generally left-leaning, but sometimes very anti-trans,” calling the stance “odd.”
“It’s why I first tend to ask reporters who interview me if they believe in me,” Steele stated in that interview. “Do they believe that I exist? That I’m valid? Because that’s not always part of the conversation. I like to start there. Because there are many people in the liberal community who can’t seem to get their heads around it for one reason or another.”
“There is hatred out there,” Ferrell told The Independent. “It’s very real, and it’s very unsafe for trans people in certain situations… It’s so strange to me, because Harper is finally… her. She’s finally who she was always meant to be. Whether or not you can ultimately wrap your head around that, why would you care if somebody’s happy? Why is that threatening to you? If the trans community is a threat to you, I think it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself.”
So Will Ferrell and his trans friend Harper Steele chose a Texas Roadhouse for a scene where they primed the room off-camera with lectures on trans “rights” so as to make the response look like one of bigotry and not inconvenience? https://t.co/Vv1aJchHZb
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 3, 2024
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