Lilly Wachowski has confirmed fan speculation that The Matrix movies, which she wrote and directed alongside sister Lana, were always meant to be an allegory for the trans experience.
After Lana came out as trans in 2012 and Lilly followed suit in 2016, critics and fans have wondered if the hero’s journey of protagonist Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) was a metaphor for gender transition. In her 2019 book Females: A Concern, writer Andrea Long Chu breaks down the theory: Anderson has a double life and a “maddening sense that something is off about the world.” Once he finds a new group of friends who introduce him to a new reality, he adopts a chosen name: Neo.
“Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. The agents are transphobia,” Long Chu proposes, before going on to suggest that the “red pill” could symbolize hormones.
In a new video interview with Netflix, Lilly Wachowski opened up about the implicit trans narrative throughout the legendary film trilogy and how “the corporate world wasn’t ready” for more overt nods to queer and trans identity.
“I love how meaningful these films are to trans people,” she said, “and the way they come up to me and say, ‘These movies saved my life.’ Because when you talk about transformation, specifically in the world of science fiction — which is about imagination, it’s like world-building and the idea of the seemingly impossible becoming possible. I think that’s why it speaks to them so much.”
“I’m glad people are talking about The Matrix movies with a trans narrative, and I’m grateful I can be a part of throwing them a rope along their journey,” she continued. “I’m glad that it has gotten out that that was the original intention. The world wasn’t quite ready for it. The corporate world wasn’t ready for it.”
You can watch the full video below.
Wachowski went on to explain that the character Switch (Belinda McClory) was originally written to be explicitly genderfluid, but the idea was ultimately thrown out by Warner Bros.
“The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view,” she said. “We had the character of Switch, who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix, and that’s where [both of] our head spaces were.”
“I don’t know how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing it,” Lilly added, “but it all came from the same sort of fire that I’m talking about.”
Lilly’s sister, Lana, is currently working on the fourth installment of the Matrix franchise, which does not yet have a premiere date. Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss (who plays Trinity), and Jada Pinkett-Smith (Niobe) are set to reprise their roles, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen (Watchmen) and Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) confirmed to join the cast.
Though she’s not joining Lana on the forthcoming project, Lilly did address the right-wing appropriation of the “red pill”earlier this year. After Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump tweeted about the meme, Wachowski replied, “Fuck both of you,” before boosting a Chicago LGBTQ+ health center.
Wachowski also recently appeared in Disclosure, the Sam Feder-directed documentary about trans representation in Hollywood, in which she talked about The Matrix and her love for Bugs Bunny as an early positive representation of a genderfluid character.
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