From Emmy Award nominee to Golden Globe winner, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez captured our hearts with her lead role in Pose. After the series ended, she expected her career to stall, but it turns out that was just the beginning…
Words Mickey Rapkin Photography Dennis Leupold Creative and styling Joseph Kocharian
Last year, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez won a Golden Globe for her searing work in Pose, the Ryan Murphy-produced drama about the queer New York City ballroom scene and the Aids crisis. Rodriguez was the first trans person to win a Globe, and also the first to be nominated for an Emmy in a major category. Less importantly, today it’s fair to say she will become the first person (trans or otherwise) to roll up to this random, Pasadena breakfast joint in a chauffeur-driven black Escalade.
“I don’t drive,” she tells me with a laugh. “Do you see the struggle?”
This isn’t the struggle she expected when Pose concluded its run in 2021 after three seasons. Actually, the 32-year-old actress thought she’d never work again, fearing she’d be typecast, or, worse, that there’d be no great roles for trans women. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Last year, Rodriguez joined the cast of Apple TV+’s Loot, a comedy about a clueless billionaire (played by Maya Rudolph), who is forced to find purpose in life after weathering a high-profile divorce; Rodriguez co-stars as the by-the-books COO of Maya’s non-profit. When season 2 on Loot wraps, Rodriguez will reunite with Ryan Murphy on the next season of American Horror Story (reportedly a feminist take on Rosemary’s Baby). Not to mention having voiced a robotic ninja called Nightbird in this summer’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. There is also the matter of a long-simmering album or EP (more on that below).
Rodriguez grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of a hospital administrator and a carpenter. At 14, she was introduced to the ballroom scene, but she never let her work slip. “Girl was having fun,” she says, “but I definitely came home at one o’clock on the dot. I wanted to pursue a career.” She studied at the Newark Arts High School and continued at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston (whose alumni include John Mayer, St. Vincent and Charlie Puth). After starring as Angel in an off-Broadway revival of Rent in 2011, she formally transitioned.
Which makes her role in Transformers all the more noteworthy. There’s a Nightbird toy on supermarket shelves now, which seems g
