It’s not difficult to get an idea of what Harper Steele was like before she became Harper Steele.In a chic hotel in London, she and best friend, Anchorman star Will Ferrell, are telling PinkNews about their evenings out in years gone by, when they worked together on US sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the 90s.
Steele was the person who would “just sit in the corner of the bar with [her] beer,” Ferrell recalls.
She smiles at the memory: she’d always be away from the bustle, trying to “stay out of the spotlight”.
Josh Greenbaum, long-time friend of both Ferrell and Steele, also remembers that.
He’s the director of their new Netflix film, Will & Harper, in which the pair head out on a road trip across the US. The reason being that after 27 years of friendship, Steele came out to Ferrell as a trans woman, by email in 2022, at the age of 61.
The trip was a way for them to reconnect and work out their new relationship dynamic, and for Steele to revisit some of the hyper-masculine places she loved as her old self – dusty dirt tracks, grungy dive bars – to see if she’d still be welcome.
“She’s someone who has spent a life avoiding being in front of people and on camera,” says Greenbaum.
Steele met Ferrell when she was a writer on SNL and he was the new kid on the block trying to be funny. According to some, he wasn’t very good at it. She whisked him under her wing and convinced the bosses to give him a chance.
After all, Steele had some sway at SNL, not that there’s much evidence to prove it. “She was there for 13 years. She was the head writer of the show [for four years] and I found [just] two photos of her,” says Greenbaum. “In most of them, she’s running out of the frame or hiding in the deep background.”
At its heart, Will & Harper is a film about the power of transformation, in the literal sense, obviously, but in other ways, too. What happens when someone with such deep-rooted fear of being themself can, finally, be themself? Is there a future that involves trans people being treated as just that, people, rather than political fodder? How might the allyship of one of Hollywood’s most famed white, cisgender funny men help change public opinion?
Ferrell can pinpoint the moment in the documentary where he saw the real Harper Steele. The pair had wound up in an Illinois karaoke bar with Dana, a 65-year-old trans woman they met in the city of Peoria. “This is basically the first time I’ve ever done this. I can’t sing,” Steele told the crowd, before Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” started to ring out.
“My friend here… what I loved about her, in her dead self in a sense, was how grumpy she was,” Ferrell says. They pause for a mischievous chuckle
“Now we’re in this karaoke bar and she’s addressing this crowd in such an effortless way and I’d never seen that before. I’d never seen her being so front-facing as truly herself. That was a joyful moment for me, like: ‘Oh, this is who you truly are. This is incredible’.”
The trio had no planned direction for the film, other than in the literal, geographical sense. Steele was even hesitant at first, and it took numerous conversations with Greenbaum over beers to convince her it was worth doing.
At the beginning of the film, Steele reads the letter she wrote to Ferrell, lamenting the intense fear and self-doubt she feels around her transition. But, as one day’s filming slipped into the next, Steele felt the weight lift.
“Waking up knowing that I’m going to be comically battling with [Ferrell] in a fun way, that just brings me joy,” she said. “But then to wake up as Harper Steele every day and be able to do it, I didn’t do it that way for many years.”
#lgbtq #willandharper #willferrell #transgender #netflix
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