Comedian Will Ferrell teams up with longtime friend and Saturday Night Live writer Harper Steele for a heartwarming new Netflix documentary, 'Will & Harper'. The film follows their cross-country road trip as Steele navigates her transition as a transgender woman.
Saturday Night Live writer Harper Steele came out as a trans woman in 2022 at the age of 61. Her friend of 30 years Will Ferrell had questions. So what else to do but jump in a van, cross the US, and make a documentary about itsays to Harper Steele , his longtime collaborator. “I’m not trying to exploit your exciting, wonderful, joyous news.” His tone isn’t defensive; Steele, sitting beside him, smiles at this echo of a conversation they’ve obviously had many times before.
For a few months, Steele ruled it out. “I don’t like being on camera, so my initial decision was just based on that,” she explains. “But transitioning is a process, and so I started to feel a little more comfortable with who I was. And the fact is, there was a lot of legislation and bills being introduced across America that were very restrictive and very damaging to my community.
Still, for Steele, the film was an opportunity to demonstrate the value of active support at a time when the trans community needs more than passive sloganeering and social-media endorsement to defeat widespread prejudice. “I think there’s a kind of Facebook version of allyship,” she says, “which is people saying: ‘I support you and I love you,’ but what does that mean?”
For Ferrell, meanwhile, the film allowed him to demonstrate that such allyship still affords room for error and correction: many of the conversations he and Steele have on their trip see them re-establishing the terms of their friendship in a judgment-free space. “It made it a safe arena for me to stumble my way through,” he says.
Ferrell admits some of their SNL output wouldn’t fly today. “I look back at some things and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I would never do that again,’” he says. “But I think, for a lot of the stuff we’ve created, we’re not into punching down. We love silly and we love absurd.” That tension can be felt in Will and Harper, too, though sometimes the star misreads the moment. One filmed set-piece in a Texas steakhouse was meant to be light comic relief.
Documentary Will Ferrell Harper Steele Transgender Netflix
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