Will Ferrell says transphobia “stems from not being confident or safe with yourself”

Will Ferrell offered his thoughts on the source of transphobia in a profile published earlier this week.

“I think we fear what we don’t know,” the actor told The Independent.

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“That’s something I wouldn’t choose to do now.”

Ferrell and long-time best friend Harper Steele have been busily promoting their new documentary, Will & Harper, which is currently streaming on Netflix. The film follows the pair on a road trip across the U.S. and has been lauded by critics as a moving and quite funny portrait of their friendship.

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Steele, a comedy writer, came out as trans in 2021, later writing a letter to friend and long-time collaborator Ferrell expressing her hope that he would stand by her and speak up for her if she were ever misgendered.

According to The Independent, Will & Harper was inspired in part by Steele wondering if she would still be able to travel the country and make friends with strangers as an out trans woman. But on their road trip, Ferrell told the U.K. outlet, the pair met many people “who were just… ‘You do you – you’re not a threat.’”

“There is hatred out there. It’s very real and it’s very unsafe for trans people in certain situations,” Ferrell admitted. “But I don’t know why trans people are meant to be threatening to me as a cis male. I don’t know why Harper is threatening to me.”

“It’s so strange to me, because Harper is finally… her,” Ferrell said, returning to the topic of transphobia. “She’s finally who she was always meant to be. Whether or not you can ultimately wrap your head around that, why would you care if somebody’s happy? Why is that threatening to you? If the trans community is a threat to you, I think it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself.”

Steele said that the transphobia in ostensibly left-leaning media outlets like The New York Times is frequently “in the background of my head.”

“It’s why I first tend to ask reporters who interview me if they believe in me,” she said. “Do they believe that I exist? That I’m valid? Because that’s not always part of the conversation. I like to start there. Because there are many people in the liberal community who can’t seem to get their heads around it for one reason or another.”

Will & Harper director Josh Greenbaum told The Independent that everyone involved with the film was aware that it would be perceived as political considering the wave of Republican-backed anti-trans legislation that has swept the country in recent years.

“But at its core it’s a very pure, simple story of two friends,” Greenbaum said of the doc. “I think more hearts and minds can be changed and affected by that. In the climate we’re in now, if you smell an agenda, or you sniff out that someone is trying to convince you of anything, you lose half the audience. In no sense were we trying to avoid politics, but it didn’t feel central to the story we were telling.”

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