Unless you’ve been living under a dark, damp rock, then you probably already know that now is one of the most important times in history when it comes to trans rights and representation.
On one hand, conservative legislators from districts all over the country are making it harder and harder for trans youth to simply exist, attacking everything from their right to use the bathroom to play the sports and games they know and love. But while trans youth’s ability to thrive is being questioned every day by hateful politicians, the past few years have proven that trans artists and creator are not backing down when it comes to sharing their truths, and we are currently living in an era where amazing trans storytellers are showing people that their stories have always mattered and will continue to matter.
Rain Valdez, Emmy-nominated actress and filmmaker, is one of those storytellers, and with the help of an amazing troupe of actors, writers, and other creatives, she is putting her directing hat on to helm a new TV project called One For the Team, a new series that tells the story of a transmasculine teen named Nico (played by Kassian Drake) who just wants to play and excel in his favorite sport, lacrosse.
After facing some challenges at his previous school and with a possible Ivy League scholarship in jeopardy, Nico transfers to a new school where he can play on the boys team and hopefully make an impact, both on and off the field.
Combining the look and feel of the teen television dramas from the ’90s and early aughts that we love so much with the timely message of trans inclusion in school sports, One For the Team (which premiered earlier this year at the Dances With Films festival) couldn’t be coming to the world at a more perfect time.
Gold Envelope got the chance to sit down with Valdez to talk all about what crafting a story like One For the Team meant for her, what some of the show’s inspirations were, and what she hopes viewers take from such a timely and important story about a trans kid who just wants to play his favorite sport!
Gold Envelope: So as we see in the pilot, Nico is going through some struggles, but he does have a support system with his family and friends, his mom and dad, which I think is so refreshing to see in media about queer and trans youth. Was that an intentional choice? And can you talk about making that decision, not having to have Nico be just the typical sad sack that we have seen so much in queer media before?
Rain Valdez: It was definitely intentional. We wanted this story to be aspirational and we wanted queer, trans, and nonbinary people watching this to have a character that they can aspire to be, a normal kid who just happens to play sports and have supportive parents. It’s an intentionality that I have had since the beginning of my career. A lot of my content is about a sense of belonging in a way that, like we’re not trying to validate our existence. We are valid because we exist, you know?
A lot of what we see in the media is because it’s not created by trans people, necessarily. There’s a lot of cis people behind it. There’s always this invitation to validate our existence. But from from where I write and where I thrive is telling stories where we just exist and therefore we are valid. And so that’s one of the reasons why I was very attracted to the script and and championing Nico’s story, because it reminded me a lot of the stories that I write for myself and for my community.
And the parents, we did want to create sort of a conflict in a way that when you watch it, they’re both sort of in different places of the relationship with Nico. Dario, the dad, is still sort of grieving the loss of his daughter and so you can see him kind of be a little bit more protective and a little bit more emotional in the story. Whereas Yvette, you can kind of see the joy of gaining a son. So we wanted to kind of tell those emotional stories that are so rooted and truthful in a household where there is a trans kid growing up, what the parents also have to go through and that. And we wanted to kind of differentiate what the polarity of what the emotions can be.
In any family dynamic where you want the best for your kid, but it’s hard to navigate what that is when emotions are involved and when attachments are involved, especially when you care a lot. These two parents want the best for Nico, and so we kind of see them both doing that in the ways that they think is the the next step forward.
One For the Team is reminiscent of those teen shows from the 2000s, which I love. That’s one of my favorite subcategories of media. Do you have any fave shows or films from that era that maybe you and the writers probably drew inspiration from, or that you were just trying to channel or evoke in a way?
Yeah, totally. I think for me, it was Friday Night Lights. The dramedy of Friday Night Lights! There’s a lot of drama, but there’s so much comedy and there’s so much… the dynamic between the families is to me, so unique and so truthful and so chaotic and so real. That was such a strong comp for us as we were developing it. Kyle (Puccia) and Darryl (Stevens) also really loved My So Called Life. The Wilson Cruz character was a huge inspiration for them growing up and and it was for me too, though I saw My So Called Life a lot later. I didn’t see it when it was on air. The idea was to have sort of that like Wilson Cruz character, but be the center and be the protagonist of the show. So those are the two main comps from that era.
The other comp that we used as well that’s a little bit more modern day, was Sex Education. We kind of wanted it to be very, very queer, very unapologetic and sort of modern day in terms of how the kids speak.
So in the pilot episode, towards the end, Nico makes his Instagram profile from private to public. In TV shows of the past, they would have drawn the whole coming out process and made it like the season finale kind of thing. But I like that Nico, even though his mom told him to try to be careful about his “gender history,” in her words, he actually is trying to be brave and taking a step forward, actually putting it out there. Was that an intentional thing, too?
Yeah, it was intentional. There’s a difference between people who write our stories, who aren’t within our communities, and then people within our communities who write our stories. I think there’s the main difference being that we get sort of bottlenecked into the coming-out story. But I feel like we have so much of that already. We have a plethora of coming-out stories. I’m more interested in the journey and the experiences after transition, after coming out, because those are the stories that I rarely see, and how those relationships sort of interact, you know, post coming out.
I’ve been out as a trans woman for a really long time. So personally for me, coming out and transitioning is the least interesting thing about me. And we want to get to the parts of Nico where we’re actually diving into the most interesting things about him, that it’s not just tied to his transition. It’s not just tied to his journey of being a transmasculine human being, there’s so much more to him.
He’s a complicated high school kid, and so we want to explore that and we want to explore how that affects his different crews, his lacrosse team, as well as the queer kids that he’s hanging out with… how those two different crews, kind of they think differently, they socialize differently, and they kind of are constantly in conflict with each other. Having Nico be the center of that and be in the in the middle and have him reconcile the complexity of both of his worlds that he loves so much… for me, that’s where the stories really, really get very exciting, get very funny, and get very dramatic. And so I’m looking forward to what the pilot episode does, so that we could actually get to the rest of those stories.
What was it like working with all these young, up-and-coming actors, especially the the lacrosse boys? Was there like a learning curve some of them had to go through when it comes to queer stories? And what was it like dive into that hetero culture of the lacrosse world and bringing that to One For the Team?
We were very lucky that a lot of the actors that we hired are very progressive, and so we had no issues with the content at all. With the talent, they did all have to learn how to play lacrosse. I think Carson, who plays Brett, was the only one who was very, very experienced in lacrosse. He actually played lacrosse in high school and college, so he was part of the the training team to get Kassian and Deon well-versed in the world of lacrosse. And I got to be a part of it, which was actually really fun. So yes, there was a learning curve for for everyone, particularly for me as a director, I really had to kind of figure out, ‘Okay, what is this game?’ In order for me to figure out what those beats are like in the game, like where the ball goes where, like where it goes when it’s thrown. It was a learning curve for me, but it was actually really fun. And the funny thing was I play fetch with my dog all the time, and, you know, he loves the checking, and so I’ll pick up the ball with a checking. I would throw in. I brought him to one of our lacrosse trainings, and he was running after the lacrosse ball because he thought we were playing checking. So I found a way to connect to the game just through playing ball with my dog, which is so funny, and that gave me a little bit more comfort that this is just a game. It’s just a game that you come in and you love to play, and kind of like acting, it just drops you in the present moment when you’re playing it. And I found that connection as well, because when I’m acting, when I’m in a scene, or when I’m directing my actors, and we’re completely dropped into the moment, receptive of what’s arriving for us in that moment. That’s the beauty about filmmaking. And it’s the same thing with lacrosse or any game. It drops you into the present moment and you just gotta play.
You said you’ve been aware of this project for years, but I feel like it’s really timely, especially in this climate, with all the debates about trans inclusion in sports. How are you navigating those kinds of discussions? Did you have any discussions about that kind of thing especially with the importance of a project like this?
Yeah, it’s really interesting that working on this project is coinciding with the political debate and conversation about trans athletes. I never really imagined that I would be in a position where I would have to speak on it. When I first read the script, I just really fell in love with the story and Nico has such a strong passion for lacrosse in a way that I have a strong passion for storytelling and filmmaking and having to navigate my trans identity in a way that can inform my art, but could also influence the people around me and what they think about me. When I read that in the script and the story, I was thinking of it in that way. I was like, ‘Oh, I relate to this character because I’ve had to navigate those challenges and those conversations as an out and proud trans woman, and he’s having to do that in sports.’ I never in a million years thought that I would have to speak on it in the real world, because it’s happening so blatantly and in front of us.
Trans people are having to bear the brunt of the world debating our existence and our ability to play sports, but at the end of the day, it’s really all about play for me. Filmmaking, writing, directing, my art has always been about play and reconnecting with my inner child and moving around the world with intention and compassion and purpose. So with One For the Team, I’ve told myself there’s nothing really I need to worry about, because it’s also just about play. It’s just about a kid who wants to play sports. He’s very passionate about it. He’s very purposeful about it. He’s very compassionate about it. For me, I’m just hoping that the majority of liberals will watch this and just kind of recognize it for what it is. It’s just a kid who wants to play sports, and the sport of choice for him is lacrosse.
What do you hope audiences feel when they watch One For the Team for the first time? And what do you hope they take away from it?
I hope that they fall in love with Nico and this world. I hope that they fall in love with sports. And I hope that it gets them excited about seeing a show that’s reminiscent of the shows that they loved, like if they were a fan of Friday Night Lights, if they were a fan of My So Called Life, if they were a fan of Sex Education, that this is something that they would also eventually love, but can appreciate that the protagonist is. They could have been the sidekick or the supporting character in those shows, and in this story, we get to center that protagonist and we get to see a different side of this genre, a story told from our own specific lens.
That’s another thing too. Those stories in the past, a majority of them are told from the the lens of a cis-hetero writer or showrunner or director. This story, particularly, is told from the authentic lens of trans people behind the scenes, myself included, Silas Howard included, and Kassian Drake, who plays Nico. What the writers did for us is kind of give us a world where we could all shine and we can be just as messy as any television series that’s out there, but it’s our mess. It’s our authenticity, and it’s our love, it’s our community, it’s our chosen families and the dynamics that we have with our origin families.
It’s a universal story, and that’s the main thing that I want people to walk away from. Yes, it’s a trans protagonist. Yes, it’s a queer story. But it’s a universal story about love, about finding your own sense of belonging and and claiming your own validity, no matter what anybody tells you. And I think anybody, regardless of how they identify, can relate to that.
Watch the trailer for One For the Team in the video below. And follow the series on Instagram for more information.
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