Rob Lowe’s Co-Star On 9-1-1: Lone Star Is Scared About Being Trans
Rob Lowe's 9-1-1: Lone Star co-star Brian Michael Smith is the first black trans man to star in a network drama.
Although Holywood is making strides, LGBTQ representation can be hard to come by. Jared Leto in Dallas Buyer’s Club and even more recently, Nick Offerman in The Last of Us are both examples of cis, straight actors portraying queer or trans characters. According to an article from Entertainment Weekly, Rob Lowe’s co-star, trans actor Brian Michael Smith, had his reservations about coming out as a trans actor and struggled to find early footing in Hollywood.
In the article, Brian Michael Smith details his struggles with identity growing up and entering Hollywood. Rob Lowe’s co-star in 9-1-1: Lone Star recalls feeling alienated in high school and college as an athlete without access to hormones and as a young trans person without access to a large community of similar people who he could get information from. In the days of the early internet, he found himself using things like AOL and Ask Jeeves to find out information, noting that he had “never even heard the word transgender before”.
When debating or getting into arguments about trans awareness and experience, he said that he often felt frustrated having to convince people of things that were part of his lived experience, stating: “You don’t have to be trans. I am. Let me live.” He wants people to understand that he maintains autonomy over his own gender identity and presentation, reminding naysayers: “I never was a woman who became a man. I was me the whole time.”
When he started acting, Brian Michael Smith was initially disappointed by the roles available to him. He felt like many of them were “paint by numbers” roles that promoted a limited and often negative representation of trans identity.
Eventually, The actor was inspired by Inventing Anna actress Laverne Cox’s prominence in Hollywood to pursue his own “lane” as a trans actor and be a more visible figure and role model for people who may be struggling with issues surrounding trans identity and representation. With his casting alongside Rob Lowe in the firehouse drama 9-1-1: Lone Star, Brian Michael Smith has become the first out Black Trans man cast as a series regular on broadcast TV.
9-1-1: Lone Star stars Rob Lowe and Brian Michael Smith and centers on Lowe as an NYC firefighter tasked with helping a firehouse rebuild from the ground up after a devastating tragedy. Smith stars as Paul Strickland, a firefighter in the newly rebuilt Station 126 in Austin, Texas, whom Lowe has been called in to assist.
Brian Michael Smith, much like his co-star Rob Lowe said that it wasn’t until his mid-20s that he had a personal breakthrough that shifted his life around. For Lowe, it was transcendental meditation and sobriety; for Smith, it was beginning hormone therapy. As his body changed, he could express himself on the outside the way he envisioned himself on the inside.
The quotes come as part of Dotdash Meredith’s From Invisibility to Trans Visibility Week panel, which also featured ACLU Deputy Director for Transgender Justice Chase Strangio, Olympian Chris Mosier, and Our Flag Means Death actor Vico Ortiz. The panel was moderated by writer and actor Scott Turner Schofield.
Brian Michael Smith earned his first speaking credit in Season 4 of HBO‘s Girls opposite Jemima Kirke and Adam Driver, but it was his roles in the drama Queen Sugar and the drama L Word: Generation Q which catapulted Smith to stardom. Hopefully, Smith co-star Rob Lowe and the rest of the crew of 9-1-1: Lone Star can continue bringing positive trans and queer representation to the screen.
