Transparent a Transformative Show, Says Series Star Judith Light

Judith Light, 66, who became a household name on a sitcom (Who’s the Boss) and a soap series (One Life to Live) says Transparent marks a huge shift from those days. “[Creator] Jill Soloway said she wanted to change the world. I think she’s doing it,” Light says about the award-winning Amazon series, which revolves around a Los Angeles family who learns that their father (Jeffrey Tambor) is transgender. “The gay community taught us about sexuality and that we are sexual beings. It’s the transgender community that is really teaching us about gender-fluidity and gender presentation.”

To go back to the beginning of your career, when you were doing Who’s The Boss in the 1980s, was a show like Transparent hard to imagine?

Never would we have thought that would have happened, ever. It was so far from anyone’s purview at that point in time. You have to remember you’re talking about the height of the AIDS pandemic. You’re talking about a country that was filled with fear; a community desperately trying to save its own and rise above. We were dealing with people dying. We weren’t thinking about whether there would ever be a show on television. It was long after that when Will and Grace [TV’s most successful prime-time sitcom with gay lead characters] came to be.

There were movies of the week at the time that were about some things like that, but it was very minimal. It wasn’t until 1988 that I did The Ryan White Story [about the Indiana hemophilic teen who became a poster child for HIV/AIDS after contracting the disease from a blood transfusion]. At that time, people told me they’d never watch me again.

[Transparent marks] a cataclysmic shift in consciousness, a huge paradigm shift. That’s what [creator/writer/producer/director] Jill Soloway said she wanted to do with this show. She said she wanted to change the world and transform the way people relate to [the transgender] community. I think she’s doing it.

See the two-time Tony winner onstage opposite Keira Knightley in Thérèse Raquin, a new adaptation of Émile Zola’s classic tale of love and in the new season of Transparent, out on Amazon Dec. 4.

Judith Light: On Broadway, Transparent and Fighting Flu