A Look at What’s ‘Normal’ in a Marriage

Emmy Award-winning writer-director Jane Anderson tackled the cutthroat competition of teenager cheerleaders in “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom” and the pain and joy of adoption in “The Baby Dance.” In her newest film, “Normal,” which premieres Sunday on HBO, she focuses on marriage and love

“I wanted to throw the biggest challenge I possibly could at the marriage,” she says. And to Anderson, the biggest challenge a marriage could endure is the disclosure that the husband is suffering from gender dysphoria: He is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body.

“Normal” is based on Anderson’s acclaimed 2001 play, “Looking for Normal,” which premiered at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. Beau Bridges played a factory worker in a small Illinois town who confesses to his wife of 25 years that he is going to have a sex change operation.

In the touching film adaptation, Tom Wilkinson, an Oscar nominee last year for “In the Bedroom,” plays the sweet, hard-working Roy Applewood, who has finally come to the decision to have a sex change operation, much to the shock of his prim, orderly wife, Irma (Jessica Lange). Roy’s decision has repercussions in the town. He’s beaten up at work when he begins to use perfume and wear earrings. Irma kicks him out of the house. His teenage daughter, Patty Ann (Hayden Panettiere), who just had her first period, is very accepting of Roy’s decision. However, the couple’s minister keeps trying to find answers to Roy’s “problem” through prayer and the Bible, and accuses Irma of emasculating Roy by taking over his chore of doing the family’s taxes.

Anderson cast the British Wilkinson and two-time Oscar-winner Lange because she wanted two actors “who were very, very much their gender. Tom is so wonderfully male. He’s such a big guy. He’s such a bloke. But he also can portray an everyman. I knew after watching ‘In the Bedroom’ he could carry off an American accent.”

The British actor also comes from a farm family, “so he really understands that sensibility.” As does the Minnesota native Lange, says Anderson. “I knew she could connect to it. I also love that she is such a lady, which makes both of their journeys all the more impossible and delicate.”

Anderson chose to set “Normal” in the Midwest because she wanted to illustrate that “people in these little towns are buried in despair trying to figure themselves out. To me, that’s more interesting than having it take place in an urban area.”

She also loves the Midwestern character. “People who come from a farm culture learn not to look back,” she says.

“If something bad happens to them, whether it is a drought or a freeze or the locusts eating the entire crop, they don’t sit around and contemplate the horror of life. They simply pick up and go on. Your husband is turning into a woman comes under the same territory. You don’t torture yourself. I am a woman trapped in a man’s body -- I am going to plow that field.”

Though Anderson did extensive research and had transgender consultants on the set to help with the look and physical transition, Wilkinson deliberately shied from reading about transgenders or meeting the consultants until the film was nearly completed.

“Here is somebody who lived in the middle of nowhere and is coming to this sort of decision rather innocently,” Wilkinson says of Roy. “I wanted to do that myself. I wanted to just let each stage of the process happen to me in the way that it would happen to a guy in the Midwest. The script was very clear. I saw it as a challenge not as somebody who was afraid of his sexuality, but as a challenge as an actor to do something you had never done before and that possibly could make you feel terribly self-conscious.”

“Normal” can be seen at

10 p.m. Sunday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).

Cover photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.