Emmys 2016: ‘Transparent’ Wins Directing and Actor Emmys; Soloway Calls Trump “Dangerous Monster”

Transparent took home pair of trophies at the beginning of the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards telecast, with statues for series creator Jill Soloway in the Outstanding Director category and one for star Jeffrey Tambor in the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series. The series is also nominated in the Outstanding Comedy Series category.

Soloway and Tambor, together backstage after respectively accepting their awards, told press how the Amazon series, which premieres its third season on September 23, is changing how people see transgender men and women in everyday life. “When you put these people at the center of the show,” Soloway said, “it allows people who are watching the show to start to feel like the protagonists in their own lives and when trans people see trans lives on television as the subjects instead of the objects, the world changes including laws change.”

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Tambor, who is a cisgender male playing a trans role, urged the Hollywood community to start hiring more trans talent. “I’d be very excited to be the last cisgender male playing a female transgender role,” He said. “We are there now, and I think the powers that be, the agents and the writers, need to tell these stories and hire these people.” Added Soloway: “It’s time to hand out the keys to the kingdom, open the gates and let more people into these roles of writer, director, producer, protagonist.”

The second season of Transparent included flashbacks to the Pfefferman family in Germany just before the Holocaust and Soloway drew a correlation to our current presidential campaign. “Jews were otherized in Nazi Germany to gain political power for Hitler and right now Donald Trump is doing the same thing. He’s otherizing people [and] he needs to be called out at every chance we get as one of the most dangerous monsters to ever approach our lifetimes. He’s a complete, dangerous monster and any moment that I have to call Trump out for being an inheritor to Hitler, I will.”

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Of previewing the upcoming new season, Soloway said, “Maura is going to evolve, everyone in the family evolves. Gender is not that simple. In Season 3, you see a new evolution of Maura in relationship to her femininity and we want to allow Maura to keep evolving.”