Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer won’t play transgender characters anymore

Hunter Schafer’s biggest role to date has been playing the transgender high schooler Jules on HBO’s hit drama series Euphoria.

But the 25-year-old star is no longer interested in playing explicitly trans roles — and she even strives to avoid mentioning her gender identity all together in recent interviews.

The actress covered GQ for its Creativity issue, and she spoke about her hope for a future in which trans performers’ identity is no longer the focus of their work.

The confession about her new approach occurred alongside revelations about Schafer’s romantic life, as she confirmed that she had been involved with the Spanish singer Rosalía five years earlier.

Although Schafer acknowledged how much her role on Euphoria had done to raise awareness of transgender people and to improve cisgender viewers’ attitudes toward them, she didn’t want to be defined by the role going forward. 

Lately, she has been looking forward to when interviews won’t have to lead with the fact that she is transgender.

Schafer clarified that her attempts to move away from focusing on her identity had been a calculated decision. 

‘It has not just happened naturally by any means. If I let it happen, it would still be giving “Transsexual Actress” before every article ever,’ she said.

In fact, she now tries to avoid even saying the word ‘trans’ during interviews if possible.

‘As soon as I say it, it gets blastoff,’ she explained. ‘It took a while to learn that and it also took a while to learn that I don’t want to be [reduced to] that, and I find it ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do. 

‘Especially after high school, I was sick of talking about it,’ she continued. ‘I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.’

She added that it is a ‘privilege’ to even have the option of not focusing on being trans or taking roles as cisgender characters, but her strategy has ‘been very intentional.’

‘I’ve gotten offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it,’ she stated.

Despite her goals to diminish the importance of being transgender to her career, Schafer still feels a sense of ‘responsibility’ around the issue.

‘I know for a fact that I’m one of the most famous trans people in media right now, and I do feel a sense of responsibility, and maybe a little bit of guilt, for not being more of a spokesperson,’ she said. ‘But ultimately, I really do believe that not making it the centerpiece to what I’m doing will allow me to get further. And I think getting further and doing awesome s***, in the interest of “the movement,” will be way more helpful than talking about it all the time.’

Schafer confessed that years of foreground her gender identity in hopes of making a difference has also made her more cynical.

‘I’ve kind of lost interest in achieving some sort of utopia,’ she admitted. ‘I am totally cool with people hating me for being trans or calling me a man. I am not interested in trying to convince them anymore.’

Although Schafer is expected to return for a long-delayed third season of Euphoria, she has more recently starred in the popular Hunger Games prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes, and she leads the upcoming horror film Cuckoo. 

Despite her new position, Schafer made it clear that she used to be laser-focused on her gender identity when she was in high school. 

The magazine that in 2017 she became the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against North Carolina House Bill 2 (HB2), which made it illegal for transgender people to use bathrooms matching their stated gender, and instead forced them to use bathrooms that matched the sex they were assigned at birth.

The law was passed in 2016 and later repealed in 2017 after significant backlash from business and sports teams that vowed to boycott North Carolina as long as HB2 was in effect.

However, subsequent laws targeting transgender people have since been passed after Republican lawmakers gained a veto-proof majority to overcome Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, who took office in 2017 and was reelected in 2020.

Schafer recounted how artwork she created toward the end of high school referenced the political debate and her transgender identity.

One item she created was described as a set of red underwear with large hands blocking the crotch, with ‘Peel away every perception’ written on the hands and the underwear’s waistband.

‘I felt like I had to make my art a response to everything that was happening in North Carolina when that’s not really what I wanted to be making art about, necessarily,’ Schafer said. ‘I think I felt like, Oh, I’m trans. I should be making art about this.’

Schafer’s increased profile from the nationally reported lawsuit helped get her modeling gigs in her senior year of high school, and she ultimately decided to forego admission at a prestigious fashion design program in London in favor of taking modeling work in New York, though she now has a house in Los Angeles to accommodate her growing acting career.