Hypable sat down with Transparent‘s Judith Light and Jeffrey Tambor to discuss the life-changing experience of telling one of TV’s most compelling stories.
“You may be laughing at her, but your heart may be breaking too.” This single line from Jeffrey Tambor sums up Amazon Prime’s Transparent. Entering its third season, the break out comedy from writer, director, producer Jill Soloway pulls you into the Pfefferman family and delivers a gut punch straight from the start.
This is nothing new for the streaming series, but somehow you keep going back for more. Season 3, now available on Amazon Prime, is no different. In fact, the first episode alone demands you to pause the auto-play feature and take a deep breathe to process. The entire show is about processing, reflecting, and growing. Actions are quick, mistakes are lofty, but the aftermath, where the processing begins, is where the show lives and thrives.
Nothing is done for a laugh. Rather the laughs of this “comedy” arrive out of discomfort, the kind of laugh that breaks the silence at an awkward family dinner because your mind and body don’t know what else to do.
Ahead of Tambor’s second consecutive Emmy win for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, Hypable sat in on a roundtable conversation with Jeffrey Tambor and Judith Light. They both spoke with such care for the show and gratitude for their characters Maura and Shelly. “Maura is not a character you just put down and walk away from. She stays with me and it’s invited,” said Tambor.
The comfort and trust that filled the space between the two actors was palpable. The duo began their careers together over 30 years ago and yet it took Transparent to push them both well beyond their comfort zone with the infamous bath scene from season 2. Slight spoilers for season 2 ahead.
“I went to Jill and told her I was terrified,” Light said. The scene takes place one night in the midst of Maura and Shelly’s cohabitation as the pair are going through their nightly routines. Maura’s transition left Shelly without the one person she felt cosmically bound to and yet here she was in her bathroom. Trying to recapture the sexual spark of their relationship, Maura crosses a personal boundary she didn’t know she created with herself and gave Shelly a fleeting feeling that maybe everything doesn’t have to change.”
In order to create that feeling of intimacy and close in on just Maura and Shelly in that moment, Jill Soloway cleared the entire building, including video village.
“Before we started, [Jill] had us all stand there and take a moment of silence that the scene would be received in the way we wanted to give it. Which was to talk about something that was not talked about forever, as far as I can tell, in the way of mature people and their sexuality,” said Light.
Light, Tambor, and Soloway all wondered how an audience would react to such a scene. Those fears were quickly put to rest as Light explained, “People responded from every generation in the most excited and generous way. We think we know what people want to see and then you have a show like Transparent and you realize they really do want to see that.”
History plays a large role in the Pfefferman family dynamic. Not just the shared history of long nights around the dinner table and cancelled bat mitzvahs, but rather inherited family trauma. Shelly and Maura dive into their personal histories and the history of their shared relationship in season 3, exploring through flashbacks what drew them together.
Season 3 leaves room for a noticeable change in focus, leaning on Shelly finding her voice. While this may be something that will cause viewers to cringe at the mere thought of, it was a shift that Tambor embraced for his counterpart.
“Freedom is very powerful and when it does happen sometimes you don’t know the boundaries… Of course [Shelly] is going to go on Twitter, of course she is going to go on the back of a motorcycle because she is free,” said Tambor.
Light expanded to include, “[Shelly] doesn’t see that everyone is rolling their eyes at her in some way or another, but that is what I think is so powerful about the show and Jill’s brilliance in the show — creating somebody who is very human and very flawed in so many different ways… This is one of those stories where somebody is coming into one of their own their own voice and doing it very clumsily and very badly.”
Freedom to explore her own transformation in light of Maura’s move to pull away from her leads Shelly to give temple talks and explore what her personal rebranding under the handle, “To Shell and Back” could do for her. Tambor continued, “This is a woman who could not make up her mind to what channel her husband would like, so thank God she is on Twitter and making these mistakes.”
There is an important conversation both Light and Tambor agree needs to come of the relationship between Shelly and Maura — acceptance of other’s true authentic self, whatever that may mean. Light explained, “Maura has allowed herself to be oppressed by society and live in an oppressive society. It took her 70 years to come out and be her authentic self and it’s something we need to be discussing more because it’s the topic of how we relate to each other or how we relate badly to each other.”
Going forward into season 3, Transparent places Mort and Shelly in pre-transition life where the kids argued over the name of a pet turtle and even further back where Mort, at age 12, began to realize the weight of the struggle that comes with feeling trapped in the wrong body.
Echoing his earlier sentiments about playing Maura, Tambor explained what it was like going back and playing Mort, a task he had not done since season 1. “I found myself saying, ‘I have trouble doing it.’ I felt very actory, but I felt very, very comfortable as Maura… these are not characters you put down at night or during the summer, they stay with you.”
Tambor carries Maura with him every day, opting to wear her ring on his pinkie all year round. “She’s so profound and it’s such a profound change in all of our lives.”
What else can we expect to see in season 3 between Maura and Shelly? Light revealed a takeway about their relationship saying, “They always have their eye on each other. They are always on each other’s radar. I don’t think that is going to go away… When Maura says the things that she does, they either hurt or they remind Shelly of how much love there is between the two of them.”
Transparent seasons 1-3 are now available to stream on Amazon Prime.
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