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Bill Condon & Tonatiuh discuss Kiss of the Spider Woman's trans themes

Bill Condon & Tonatiuh discuss Kiss of the Spider Woman's trans themes

Tonatiuh, Jennifer Lopez and Bill Condon
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

The writer-director and star of the film spoke about it at the film's grand premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Editor's note: This article contains mild spoilers for Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Following the premiere of Kiss of the Spider Woman at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Bill Condon and actor Tonatiuh talked about the film's trans politics and how they fit in the current world.

Kiss of the Spider Woman stars Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, and Tonatiuh. The film focuses on two prisoners in an Argentinian prison in 1983. Luna plays Valentin, a Marxist revolutionary, and Tonatiuh (he/they) plays Molina, a gender-nonconforming window dresser arrested for public indecency with a man.

While Molina is never explicitly called "nonbinary" or "transgender," the character clearly expresses a desire to be like women and not want to be seen as a man. Over the course of the film, Luna's character, Valentin, makes a lot of progress in terms of understanding where Molina is coming from and treating her properly.

Even though the film is more relevant now than ever, Condon explained that he always knew the impact this project would have — going on to say that there was even a consideration of releasing the movie prior to the 2024 presidential election.

"It had been clear already. Before the election happened, for years, trans people were being used as the latest victims of the culture war," Condon said in a Q&A after the film's Sundance premiere. "The promise of this film is that, somehow, people can go beyond that, and see each other as individuals."

The director also noted that Albert Kinsey's most "revolutionary idea" was that someone's sexuality is as individual as a fingerprint and that "true liberation would be seeing someone as an individual and not as a label."

According to Condon, the most important scene in Kiss of the Spider Woman is one where Molina and Valentin connect and truly see each other. In the scene, Molina says that she felt like she "wasn't a man or a woman," but instead "was nothing and everything," and that they both just "see into each other's soul and fell in love and that still seems like the most revolutionary idea."

Tonatiuh mentioned that he grew up as a femme Latine kid — but upon entering the film industry, they chose to stamp down any femininity that could potentially hurt an acting career. When Tonatiuh got the script for this film, however, he "knew this person spiritually" and related to the journey of "feeling like a loser" and finding oneself "to be the hero of your own story by falling in love, and once there, got to show the entire spectrum, from feminine tom masculine and everything in between."

"What I took away from it was, no one can tell you who you are. You get to decide that gender is simply a construct and it's something that we play with and have fun with and get to explore," they said. "And at a time that people tell us that things are inherently binary, in a time when there is violence out of that binary exists, I hope that people find solace and know that they are not alone."

Kiss of the Spider Woman premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and is expected to have a wider release later this year.
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Mey Rude

Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.

Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.