Emma Thompson & Christopher Eccleston Join Trans Marriage Drama 'Hear Me Roar'

For all that a particular segment of the population likes to complain about the shallow nature of the entertainment industry, it's hard to understate film and television's power to shape and inform our society. The most recent example is Mr Bates vs The Post Office, whose dramatization of a real-life story of injustice sparked government action. By bringing marginalized characters and stories to life, television and film can familiarize and humanize what is most different from us*. Given the steadily increasing public vitriol levied at trans people in public life, a movie like Hear Me Roar feels both incredibly timely and very necessary.

(*It's hard to overstate what a big deal it was to have a show like Will & Grace airing during NBC primetime back in the early 2000s, for example.)

Hear Me Roar will depict the story of a transgender woman who took on the British government in a legal battle over her marriage that ultimately changed the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the U.K. The film follows the story of Elizabeth Bellinger, who married her husband, Michael, at a South London registry office in 1981. He was the only person who knew she was transgender, and they kept this secret from everyone for nearly 20 years. In 2000, Bellinger launched a campaign to have her marriage legally recognized, and the case went to court.