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What a woman!

Rebecca Romijn doesn’t want to be a spokeswoman for LGBT people. But with her transgender role on ABC’s hit series Ugly Betty, that’s what she’s become. It couldn’t happen to a nicer girl. PART ONE

By Brantley Bardin

A shorter version of this story appeared in The Advocate May 8, 2007

Like most sensible people in the United States, actress Rebecca Romijn—the 34-year-old former Victoria’s Secret model who became a major movie icon as the wicked, blue-skinned Mystique in the X-Men film trilogy—became addicted to Ugly Betty, the hit comedy from ABC about an unfashionable but loving and sensible young Latina woman who finds herself working as the assistant to the editor in chief at a viper pit of a New York City fashion magazine called Mode.

When Romijn’s own TV series, Pepper Dennis, wasn’t renewed last year, the leggy blond (who divorced John Stamos in 2005 and is very much in love with her fiancé, actor Jerry O’Connell) actively went looking for a new gig. “So I begged for a meeting,” says the actor. “I came in going, ‘I want to be Betty’s friend—I want to help Betty.’ I mean, who doesn’t want to help Betty? But they said, ‘We have a different idea.’ ”

That idea was for Romijn to play Alex, the presumed dead older brother of Mode’s editor in chief, Daniel Meade (played by Eric Mabius). The hook? Alex returns as a fully transitioned transsexual now known as Alexis.

“It took me about a second,” bubbles the blue-eyed Romijn, “and then I was like, ‘I love it.’ I don’t know any other characters like this on prime-time network TV. She’s a revolutionary character, and I think the show is so great with the way they handle anything that has to do with being different.”

Judith Light, who plays Alexis and Daniel’s mother, Claire Meade, agrees: “It’s such a valuable story line because it really gives tremendous support to the transgender community. I love the fact that Alexis has been brave enough to take this stand—I love that she’s a transgender. And when you do it in the context of this kind of [light comedic] show, people actually listen and learn.”

So until next week’s lesson, sit down and have a beer as The Advocate chats with Miss Romijn. It’s Friday for the almost six-foot-tall “goofy, giggly giantess” (her words), and she’s celebrating having wrapped up another week on the show by ordering her second Dos Equis at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe in Los Angeles. Romijn loves the show’s humor, heart, all-inclusive humanity— and Mark Indelicato, who plays Betty’s nephew Justin. (And come on, where else can you see a latently homosexual—and totally cool with that—12-year-old such as Justin?) It is on the topic of Mark/Justin that Advocate writer Bardin and Romijn begin their interview.

ROMIJN: When I first started working here, one of my very first days working here, and I was still getting to know the cast—and I’ve worked with child actors before, and sometimes you feel like—when they’re being home-schooled and they’ve left any sort of normal semblance of a childhood to be an actor, you feel bad for ’em. You feel like, “Oh, this poor kid is missing out on everything,” so Lynn, Mark’s mom, was telling me that they had moved out here from Philadelphia and they are living in Burbank [near Los Angeles’s Hollywood]. And that his dad is still back East, and she took him out of school and now he’s out here—and at first I was like, “Oh, great—another kid having…missing out on normal childhood.” And then he turned away to talk to someone else, and then she said out of the corner of her mouth, “I had to get him out of there; you know how kids can be.” And all of a sudden she, like in a flash, in an instant, she went from being just another stage mom, to being one of the best moms ever. So she was like…OK, she took him out of a situation that maybe was uncomfortable, where he felt different from everybody at school, maybe he was being made fun of—into a position where he is now pioneering this character for all these kids across the country [who] feel different from everyone else. It’s the revolutionary position that she’s put him in. and it’s so exciting and he’s such an awesome person—I mean, she’s awesome for doing that, and he is so awesome for—

BARDIN: The only thing I guess I need to know is, How does [Lynn] feel? Well, she said it.
No, she, I think—

I know, I know all! I really am sensitive.
She knew that he was different, and she was connected to that. And he was connected to that, and it’s obviously a bunch of conversations they had about it. I’m sure they talked about it a lot.

What Eric [Mabius] said to me was—’cause that’s the first thing I noticed, was the kid character. I was like, “Very interesting and cool!” I was gay at 10. And I would have been grateful for it.
Right, huh?

People keep saying it’s terrible. And [Mabius] said, “We’re not making him do anything.” So that’s been in The Advocate already. But why do you love hanging with Mark?
I just find him very easy to hang out with; he’s just such a personable person. He’s…well, we like talking about our favorite reality TV. Shows and comparing notes on that. Things like that!

It’s nice you can talk to him! Well, see, that’s the way I was. I’m not that much different from when I was his age, and [at that age] you’re so grateful.
That’s how you stay young.

Everyone was always older than me.
He’s handling it so well, and he just hangs out with us day in and day out. This group of adults!

She saved him!
I think so.

Fantastic.
I know.

Happy to see you do so well. It seems to me that since I met you [for an interview in Elle], April 2002 that issue was.
Five years ago, wow.

I was thinking, She was only 29 or 28. You didn’t seem like a baby.
I know, and I’d already been working [as a model]. I mean, I started working in ’91.

You’d done X-Men and everything, but it wasn’t fully formed that you were going to be this kick-ass bad girl. Because that’s kind of what your persona is at this point—
I think ’cause I’m a giantess.

But the funny thing is that, unless you’ve changed dramatically, in real life you’re actually a good girl. I remember you telling me stories about, like, “In modeling days nobody asked me to do any coke!”
Nobody asked me to do any drugs! Tyra [Banks] and I would sit reading excerpts out of that Michael Gross book, the supermodel book that he wrote [published in 1995, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women]. And it was all these stories of all these girls doing all these drugs on these jobs—we’d be like, “Has anybody ever offered you drugs? What’s the matter with us?” Model nerdettes.

And they just knew it somehow.
It’s true. You know how party people can sniff each other out. I did go through a partying phase…you have to get your ya-yas out at some point.

You do. And you have to continue to with—
In the most responsible way, yes. It’s much better to do it—

Everything in moderation, including moderation.
I love it!

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Photography: Jim Wright

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