If you didn’t know, The Umbrella Academy Season 3 has arrived on Netflix, and it’s very much a treat for fans who have been enjoying the wacky and apocalyptic adventures of the Hargreeves family. However, a key change was made to one of the family members based on a real life event.
You might recall that the show started out with it starring Ellen Page as Vanya, but between seasons 2 & 3, Ellen went through a transition and became Elliot Page. The team respected their transition and so made Vanya…into Viktor. The moment of transition was handled very well in Umbrella Academy, and its creator broke down how they worked out how much emphasis to put on it, as well as the reaction to it by the other Hargreeves:
“It was so important that Elliot was part of that story telling,” Blackman revealed. “So once Elliott told me that in life he was going to make this transition, there was no pressure on me to not do it or do it, but it felt important to try to do that story. So I went to GLAAD, I talked to Nick Adams at GLAAD and then I went to this wonderful trans writer name Thomas McBee and in collaboration with Elliott, we sort of worked on what that story would be and how we would do it and it was really important to us not to make it the story of the show, which you could easily have done. We just wanted to be a beautiful moment that was sensitive, that was real and you know, in a world where there’s so much, you know, anti-trans (rhetoric) that we really wanted to tell a pro-Trans story, but it was totally collaborative right through.”
That’s good to know, and we hope many react positively to that scene.
Source: ComicBook.com