Beyond the Tipping Point is Them's Spring 2022 cover package about how Black trans actresses are reshaping Hollywood. Featuring Laverne Cox, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, and Eva Reign — three actresses at pivotal moments in their careers who represent hard-won progress and the future of entertainment. Read more here.
A little after 3:00 a.m. one morning last July, Eva Reign rolled out of bed, turned on her bluetooth speaker, and dropped the needle on Crime Mob’s 2004 femme anthem, “Stilettos.” Soon, she was dressed and driving through the darkened streets of downtown Pittsburgh, letting her thoughts drift from the magnitude of the moment awaiting her. Half an hour later, the young actress arrived on the set of Anything’s Possible, the summer-slated romantic comedy from debut director Billy Porter. As her van pulled up to the high school where they’d be filming that day (Porter’s own alma mater), a production assistant slid open the door, greeted Reign, the movie’s lead actress, then whispered into her walkie talkie, “Kelsa has landed.”
As Reign ate her breakfast, she went back over the three-page climactic monologue she’d be shooting later. It was the second day of filming. She had barely wrapped her mind around the fact that she’d be in the movie, let alone starring. It had been barely three weeks since she learned she got the part. Reign’s manager called her with the good news on a Monday afternoon. By 7:30 p.m. the next day, she was on a flight to Pittsburgh. Even sitting on the plane, she didn’t feel it was real. “They must have made a mistake. There’s no way that they want me to do this,” Reign recalls of the whiplash effect of getting the part.
“It’s ironic: The movie’s called Anything’s Possible, but I didn’t believe it,” she tells me. “My whole life, I’d wanted to be an actress, but even after I got that call I was telling myself, I’m a Black trans girl — I’m not going to be the lead in a movie. That’s not feasible. I’ll be lucky to play someone’s friend.”
Back on set, Reign was so nervous that she practically forgot to breathe. But when Porter yelled “Action!” Eva was ready — she’d been preparing for this moment one way or another since studying the Meisner acting method as a child. The camera sprung into focus. The room went silent but for Reign, who had transformed into Kelsa, the animal-loving 17-year-old at the heart of Porter’s ambitious and personal project. All eyes turned to her.
She nailed the speech in a single take.
A stunned silence held the set. Porter spoke first: “Damn,” he cooed, “I don’t even do that… Everyone give this bitch a round of applause.”
When the celebration simmered, Porter pulled his star aside. “Eva, I want to play this [scene] back for you so that you can see your power,” he said, then paused. “Are you breathing?” She realized she wasn’t. “Breathe,” Porter told her, “Please, breathe.”
Over a year has passed since Reign delivered the monologue. She and I are sitting on a blanket in New York’s Prospect Park when she tells me, “I feel like I’m just now exhaling, at least I’m trying to in this moment.”
It’s a sunny, windy spring day in Brooklyn. Reign queues up the new Syd album as we share some wings. “I can look at chicken and know how well-prepared it is,” she says, shooting a downward glance at her meal, deciding whether it’s worthy of consumption. We laugh. I tell her a story about once refusing to eat boiled, pink chicken at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by white people I’d never met. “That’s a fucking crime,” she correctly observes.
Reign and I share more than a disgust for unseasoned meat. We are both Black trans women who were brought up in the Midwest. We both spent some years as girls trying to survive NYC’s often cutthroat media scene — myself at Paper and Eva in the early days here at Them.
And we both adore the R&B divas of the ‘90s, from Whitney Houston to Toni Braxton. Braxton in particular is one of Reign’s idols, specifically because of her commanding lower vocal register — how it defies the misogynistic (and transphobic) notion that women can only sing in high, dulcet tones.
Reign herself speaks in luxe textures of butter and velvet, summoning both the giddy sonics of children at play and the sage aura of wise elder women. Her gift is an ability to connect with many kinds of people. And soon after meeting her, it’s clear that this is a power she commands with ease.
But as a trans woman, Eva’s rich resonance often got misconstrued as failure — failure to sound feminine, failure to try hard enough to pass. “People would say shit like, ‘Oh, she needs to work on that a bit more,’ or ‘Oh, she hasn’t found her voice yet.’”
She continues, “When a cis woman has a strong, resonant voice, people love that fullness. Just look at Viola Davis, Sandra Bullock, Oprah, even Meryl Streep. We can list them for days. But when it comes to the girls, we’re supposed to sound like a Disney princess who just took in a bunch of helium.”
Before transitioning, Reign was bullied mercilessly for not only how she sounded, but also a speech impediment that caused her to stutter when forming certain sounds. Cruelly, a sentence like, “Please show me the respect I deserve,” could be difficult for Reign to say. Throughout grade school, she had to fight to defend herself, often without the support of teachers, whom she recalls sometimes laughed along to the rude comments made by her classmates at her predominantly white school.
“Being someone who was bullied for gender stuff and racial stuff and then not being able to speak, it was really debilitating,” she reflects. “And so I say all of that to say my voice is something that I value. It’s something that I’ve worked hard for.”
Still, these old wounds have continued causing Reign pain and doubt. She shares that part of the reason she left singing and acting to try her hand as a writer and editor was to avoid being heard (and the risk of being clocked); that she spent the entire plane ride to Pittsburgh worrying about her sound — whether she’d have to undergo training to change it to be the star she dreamed of becoming. Then she met Billy. Sitting down with her director for real for the first time, all she could hear was the sound of her own heartbeat. When she eventually met his gaze, the first thing he said to her, unaware of the history his statement strummed, was “Eva, your voice is powerful. It’s strong, and it’s unique. I hope you don’t feel that you have to alter it at all.”
The director continued to explain that it was Reign’s sound that had, in fact, gotten her the role.
Throughout our interview, Eva holds me with a fierce gaze, which she jokingly labels her “resting bitch face.” I see it more as hard-earned wisdom from a woman who’s seen some bullshit and can tell it when she smells it. She speaks with authority, lacing soundbites with if-you-know-you-know sarcasm. But when she reflects on Porter’s direction to speak with her full range, tears well at the corners of her eyes.
“He sees the girls,” she says, a quiver to her tone.
The sun has dipped considerably since I met Eva hours ago here in the park. We're surrounded by chicken bones, screaming children, and the scent of Jasmine flowers floating on the breeze as she tells me about a new idea she’s trying to conjure in her life. “Tranifestation,” or the particular way trans people reach their destiny — “because what’s a man ever done for me,” she laughs.
Reign practices the concept by writing down what she wants in life, then setting the page on fire. “That shit works,” she says, explaining how a former colleague had once called her “lazy.”
"[That] was so anti-Black," she recalls. "Everyone who knows me knows the last thing I am is lazy."
She gave her notice soon after, but not before casting a prophecy: “The next time I walk through these doors, it’s for a cover shoot,” she told herself. Et voila; that shit works.
Cover shoot shot and debut feature film on the way, Reign is struck by how she’s still finding inspiration from Kelsa, the sassy 17-year-old fashion girlie she plays in the film that’s poised to prove anything is, indeed, possible. Importantly, the movie treats Kelsa’s transness not as something she has to learn to accept, but as just another part of her multifaceted identity.
“It’s like bam, bitch, here I am,” she says.
The wind is blowing Eva Sade Reign’s long blonde braids back as the sun glistens on her heart-shaped bronze face. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and lets it out.
Here she is.
Photographer: Myles Loftin
Stylist: Shibon Kennedy
Set Designer: Jeremy Reimnitz
Hair and makeup: Amy Galibut
Production: Hyperion LA
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