Toni Collette is a queer icon in that she's a cinematic diva that LGBTQ+ audiences have long worshipped. Be it her offbeat humor in Muriel's Wedding, her maternal intensity in Hereditary, or her smoking hot party girl theatrics in Velvet Goldmine, we're obsessed. So when Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko sat down with the cast and creator of Netflix's new queer drama Wayward, she asked Collette about being an icon.
"I have been told this from time to time," Collette said in a group interview with co-stars Sarah Gadon and Mae Martin, "What an honor!"
From there, Martin, who also created Wayward, dug into what it means to have a mini-series with queer characters in which their gender identity or sexual orientation isn't an issue. In Wayward, Martin stars as Alex, a trans man who's recently moved with his wife, Laura (Gadon), back to her former home in Tall Pines, Vermont.
There, the local reformatory school, Tall Pines Academy, is run with an iron fist by a beguiling matriarchal figure named Evelyn Wade (Collette, of course). Twisted practices within the school have besties Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) desperate to get out. But for all the behaviors this reform school is looking to break its students from, queerness isn't among them. So, bi Leila can explore new romances with relative freedom. Likewise, Alex and Laura are embraced by the cheery townspeople of Tall Pines. In fact, Laura's pregnancy has not only the expecting parents excited, but also Evelyn, and everyone else in town.
While creating the mysteries and drama of Wayward, Martin offers LGBTQ+ representation without falling into the tropes of conflating queerness with tragedy through painful coming-out stories or harmful homophobia. They said of this, "I mean, in my life, I feel like my queerness is one of the least interesting things about me, probably. I always want to reflect that," adding, "If you break people's walls down, then they can really relate to other aspects of the character's lives. Then you can kind of secretly sneak in your subversive stuff."
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For Martin's onscreen role in Wayward, they said, "I think for my character, Alex, being in this town that is so progressive and welcoming on the surface, I'm really interested in how desperate he is to be accepted and belong and how badly he wants that heteronormativity and what he's willing to sacrifice."
Collette added that the queer content in Wayward "is not sensationalized. Everyone is just a person making their way, no matter what their preferences are or who they identify as."
In a separate interview with Alyvia Alyn Lind and Sydney Topliffe, the former spoke to how it was "awesome" to play a bi girl for whom sexuality was an element of but not an issue for the character. "It's not her main struggle," she explained, "It's not the reason that she's having problems in her life. She has a lot of problems in her life, but none of them really stem from that. It's not her trauma."
Lind continued, "I had a conversation with GLAAD recently, just about the statistics of bi representation in TV, and it's very unrepresented. So getting to play the character was just so incredible."
Wayward is now streaming on Netflix.
