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With a new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation coming out of the first days of 2025, Laverne Cox is well aware of the cultural significance of her new show.
In Clean Slate, Season 1 of which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, the actress plays a proud trans woman named Desiree who returns home to her estranged father Harry (George Wallace) in Mobile, Alabama, after 17 years, telling Deadline they set the series in her actual hometown in attempt to “humanize Desiree” amid the ongoing battle for trans rights.
“I wanted it to just have that sort of authenticity, and I wanted to kind of have it be an exploration of what it means to come home, how difficult that is,” explained Cox. “I have such a difficult relationship with Mobile, honestly, to this day, and I thought that tension would be great. It’s my real life.”
And while their dynamic is ripe with generational divide on a myriad of issues, including trans rights, Wallace noted that Harry represents a more progressive parental figure who can “be educated, learn how to live and let live.”
“That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m all about, even in comedy. Let’s get together and have some fun. Let’s laugh. And with her, I think telling her story and coming back to me—” explained Wallace. “I don’t understand it, but then boom, there’s the answer there with a smile.”
As being openly LGBTQ so often does, Clean Slate inadvertently serves as a political message in the wake of a string of policies targeting the LGBTQ community, particularly trans people, implemented in the first days of Trump’s second term.
Read below for Deadline’s interview with Clean Slate‘s Laverne Cox and George Wallace, who co-created the series with Dan Ewen.
DEADLINE: It’s such a beautiful and uplifting show that I feel is very needed for the times that we’re in. Laverne, the show is set in Alabama, which is where you’re from. Can you tell me a little bit about the significance of that?
LAVERNE COX: We weren’t able to shoot in Mobile, but I wanted it to just have that sort of authenticity, and I wanted to kind of have it be an exploration of what it means to come home, how difficult that is. I have such a difficult relationship with Mobile, honestly, to this day, and I thought that tension would be great. And it’s my real life, and so much of what I wanna do with this show is just humanize Desiree, humanize all the characters, particularly trans representation. We’ve been so dehumanized, which has allowed the government to take away a lot of our rights, and so the more real it is, like setting it in my hometown, the more real stories from my life we can tell, the more human, and hopefully people will see themselves in these characters. Even if you’re not trans or Black or from the South, they’ll see, the more specific you are, the more universal you are. So hopefully, we’ve done that by making these really intentional choices.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me, George and Laverne, about building that fractured father-daughter bond behind-the-scenes and how you reconnect through the show?
GEORGE WALLACE: Well, I think the most important thing is — like, she’s from Alabama, I’m from Georgia, two different states, but same life, church, same parents, mom and dad in the house, which a lot of kids don’t have today. So, we came up with that …
COX: See, this is the thing. It’s like characters, real life, it all blends and this is, for me, magical even when it’s annoying.
WALLACE: So, what I say is that, I just work everything on love and basis of what her life is, and I can play Harry to be educated, learn how to live and let live. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m all about, even in comedy. Let’s get together and have some fun. Let’s laugh. And with her situaation, I think telling her story and coming back to me with a little twist — we like to use the formula 12C or AB3 with a little twist — whatever she’s going through, we come back. I don’t understand it, but then boom, there’s the answer there with a smile.
DEADLINE: I loved that part of it too, that it doesn’t really approach any of this as a joke, but it also doesn’t approach it as trauma or anything. It’s just about educating and loving. Tell me a little bit about bridging the generational differences on those issues.
COX: That’s where so much of the comedy comes from. And it’s a generational thing, but it’s also that I’ve lived in New York for 23 years and he’s been in Mobile. And so the cultures are so — whenever I go back to Alabama, it’s like a different world. It’s like 10 years, 20 years behind, and so all of that, all of those things make for great comedy. When you just tell the truth of that and who she is as a vegetarian, a person in therapy who does trauma resilience work and resets her vagus nerves.
WALLACE: She’s just a total mess. Why is it everybody goes to New York think they know everything they go back home, aint that the truth? Everybody goes to New York, they go back home. This is terrible. This is a mess. You gotta change. You gotta do what we do in New York.
COX: Well, I think those are pretentious people who think that way. I certainly don’t think I know everything. I don’t think Desiree thinks she knows everything, but I would say she’s elitist and classist, for sure, even if she’s broke. The irony, she’s classist and elitist and broke, and that’s also funny. How many people in life do we know who are classist and elitist and broke? That actually used to be me. I’m not broke right now, but I’m working on my class stuff. I’m a work in progress.
DEADLINE: Another thing that I loved about the show is the depiction of a welcoming church in the South. Can you tell me about the importance of showing faith in this community as well?
COX: Every church is different, and it really even depends on the pastor. Some of the church stuff came from my life, girl. But we’ve had different pastors at the church I grew up in, and different pastors have had different relationships to being welcoming. And so, what I love is that there’s a lot of Christians out there who are about love and who understand the way I read the Bible, that God is the one who judges and it is our job to love. And certainly, conversion is also a part of Christianity, which is one of the more problematic parts of it, honestly, because that conversion obviously has led to a lot of colonialism all over the world and etc., but I digress. But when it’s about love, it’s everything. And I do feel like I wanna say this too because I feel like I’m disparaging Christianity, and I am a little bit. But even though I grew up Christian and I’ve left the church, I’ve never left God. I’ve never had a moment in my life when I did not feel the presence of a power greater than myself guiding me, and that is the truth that I know in my bones. For me, that’s also what it’s about, that it’s about love, but it’s also bigger than us. There is something bigger than us and sometimes,what that higher power can be is the way that we’re united as human beings. If we can make it not about ourselves and about something bigger, that bigger thing could be our shared humanity and that can be a really beautiful thing. And I know I’m an artist and that sounds all sort of hoity-toity in this super divided world, but I think that is what the best of Christianity teaches us.
WALLACE: And what we’ve got to learn about the churches that always know that. It’s an inside job. It’s between me and the man upstairs.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me about the importance of representation with this show, not just representation, but representation of trans joy and healing as opposed to just one dimensional representation during Trump 2.0?
COX: For those people who’ve seen our documentary Disclosure, available on Netflix, we assert very strongly that representation matters, but it’s not enough. It has to extend into the lived experiences in the real lives of everyday trans people. Representation is incredible, but it’s only part of the equation for liberation. We have to see it to imagine it, so that’s where representation comes in. Representation that is multidimensional, not stereotypical, not depending on tropes. All that is so crucial, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any character like Desiree, and probably definitely not a trans character. And representation matters because what so much of why we are in the predicament we’re in with trans rights being taken away at the state level and now the federal level is because of media propaganda. So then, consent has been manufactured in the media to dehumanize and discriminate against trans people. How can we manufacture consent in the media to rehumanize and love trans people? But then that needs to be paired with a political agenda from a Democratic party that just has not led, has not had any clear message, that they’ve just been asleep while the right wing has been very organized and strategic. So we have a lot of work to do on a systemic level. Representation is only part of it though. We need systemic change, and I think that means it’s not coming top down. It’s coming from masses of working class people of all races, genders, class, sexual orientations, coming together across our differences, not despite the racism and transphobia, not forgiving that, having an intersectional approach, letting go of racism, transphobia, misogyny, coming together across classes. I’m talking tens of millions of us. That’s what we’re gonna need to overthrow the oligarchic plutocratic regime that we’re now living under. And we can do that with love, and representation that models that it can be helpful.
