When it took the prize for Best Film — Musical or Comedy at the 2025 Golden Globes ceremony, director Luca Guadagnino, whose film Challengers (2024) was also nominated, left the room.
Upon its release, the film was criticised for the absence of native representation among both its cast and crew and for neglecting details such as the use of 'Cárcel' instead of 'Penitenciaria' in a scene set in a prison, or the line "la pinche vulva", even though the word "vulva" is a medical term not used informally. Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez said it was odd for a director who speaks neither English nor Spanish to helm a film in those languages set in Mexico without understanding the culture, adding that American actors speaking Spanish without a proper grasp of the vocabulary was distracting and lacked authenticity.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) described the film as "a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman" and said it "recycles the trans stereotypes, tropes, and clichés of the not-so-distant past." Members of the Latino community, particularly Mexicans, also voiced their displeasure at the film's stereotypical depiction of Mexico and its people, accusing it of romanticising the drug cartel and of showing disrespect towards its victims.
Like her character in the film, Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón is a trans woman off-screen. This is the first film she has appeared in as an actress since announcing her transition in 2018. Prior to that, she enjoyed a lengthy career presenting as male in Spain and, particularly, Mexico, mostly in soap operas.
Jacques Audiard has said he did not research Mexico while writing this film, explaining that he already knew a little about the country and felt that was adequate. He also recounted that when he travelled to Mexico to scout possible locations, it did not match the image he had in mind, so he chose to shoot in a studio in Paris because it was more economical. Audiard speaks neither Spanish nor English, and none of the actresses speak French; it was never clarified who translated the screenplay from French into Spanish and English for him.
On 14 January 2025, director Jacques Audiard pulled out of a scheduled Q&A for Emilia Pérez at the Cineteca Nacional de México (National Film Archives of Mexico) in Mexico City just hours before the event, amid backlash in Mexico over the film’s depiction of Mexicans and the drug‑trafficking crisis. Adriana Paz, the sole Mexican cast member, was the only person to attend the Q&A after the screening. The session went smoothly and the audience praised her professionalism. Audiard was criticised for leaving Paz alone at the event.
The film's female cast were jointly awarded the Best Actress prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, with Adriana Paz becoming the first Mexican actress to win it, and Karla Sofía Gascón becoming the first trans actor to receive an acting prize at Cannes.
The Academy was criticised for the film's thirteen Oscar nominations, owing to its controversial depiction of Mexican culture, grammatical mistakes in the Spanish spoken in the film, the use of artificial intelligence to augment the lead actress's singing voice, and the film's offensive portrayal of transgender people.
Jacques Audiard has said he drew the idea for the musical from a chapter in Boris Razon's 2018 novel 'Écoute' ('Listen'), which centres on a drug trafficker who longs to assume a different identity. Audiard initially regarded the protagonist's sex reassignment as a comedic plot device; it was Karla Sofía Gascón who suggested the former cartel kingpin should genuinely be depicted as suffering from gender dysphoria.
Zoe Saldaña's accent in the film shifts between American, Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican, despite her character Rita being Mexican. To account for her accent and the halting Spanish, the character says her family moved to Mexico from the Dominican Republic when she was young. However, Spanish is the official language of the Dominican Republic, and Rita is shown to have lived her whole life in Mexico; she even refers to herself as "Mexican" and uses Mexican slang throughout the film. Mexican viewers criticised the lack of a Mexican accent and the rather robotic pronunciation of her Spanish.
Mexican trans director Camila Aurora González made the short film Johanne Sacreblu (2025) as a response to Emilia Pérez. Filmed entirely in Mexico with no French nationals among the cast or crew, the film is a musical set in France that portrays a number of stereotypes about France and the French. It amassed over a million views within two days — more than Emilia Pérez's box office in Mexico during its first week in theatres. In under a month it reached 3 million views, three times the box office take of Emilia Pérez in France.
Despite being titled "Emilia Pérez," Zoe Saldaña’s Rita has more screen time than Karla Sofía Gascón’s eponymous character, and the film centres on Saldaña’s role — a cisgender heterosexual woman. Saldaña was also given top billing ahead of Gascón in the credits. The picture was heavily marketed as a film about a trans woman, and during awards season Gascón was campaigned in the lead category while Saldaña was campaigned in the supporting category.
Official submission from France for the 'Best International Feature Film' category at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025.
At the end of its screening at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the film was greeted with a nine-minute standing ovation, making it the second-longest ovation for a Jacques Audiard picture at Cannes, surpassed only by Rust and Bone (2012), which enjoyed a ten-minute standing ovation in 2012.
Emilia travels from Mexico to Israel to undergo gender-reassignment surgery, although Israel has only one medical centre that performs such procedures — the Sheba Medical Centre in Ramat Gan (not in Tel Aviv as the film depicts). Before going to Israel, Rita visits a clinic in Bangkok, Thailand to enquire about the surgery's cost, but it is implied that it would be too expensive. In reality, Thailand is one of the most popular and most affordable destinations for gender-reassignment surgery and is generally less expensive than many other countries, including the United States. Mexico, meanwhile, ranked third in 2023 (when this film was shot) for the number of gender-reassignment surgeries, behind the United States and Brazil, with 1.7 million such procedures performed that year by patients from across the world.
Jacques Audiard's first film to be in the Spanish language.
Karla Sofía Gascón plays Manitas in brownface make-up, with a prosthetic nose and dark hair, portrayed as a dirty brown-skinned Mexican drug lord. After her gender-reassignment surgery and transition to Emilia Pérez, she is presented as a blonde, light-skinned woman (Gascón is a natural blonde, light-skinned and blue-eyed in real life, even before her transition). Gender-reassignment surgery does not change skin colour.
In an interview with CNN Mexico on 15 January 2025, Jacques Audiard expressed regret to Mexico for not having become better acquainted with the country and for the film’s insufficiently serious treatment of Mexico’s missing persons crisis. He said that cinema does not provide answers but raises questions, and conceded that perhaps the questions posed in Emilia Pérez are mistaken. Addressing criticism about the shortage of Mexican actors in principal roles, Audiard explained that casting choices were partly dictated by financial considerations and that selecting Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana was a strategic decision to secure funding.
The total on-screen time for each cast member:
- Zoe Saldaña — 57:50 minutes (43.69%)
- Karla Sofía Gascón — 52:21 minutes (39.54%)
- Selena Gomez — 27:14 minutes (20.57%)
- Adriana Paz — 11:17 minutes (8.52%)
- Edgar Ramírez — 6:21 minutes (4.80%)
- Mark Ivanir — 5:38 minutes (4.26%)
In an interview with the YouTube channel of France's CST — Commission supérieure technique de l'image et du son (Higher Technical Commission for Sound and Image), Emilia Pérez's sound designer Cyril Holtz explained that the film used technology to deepen Karla Sofía Gascón's singing voice prior to her transition because the actress was unable to achieve the pitch of a male voice. Holtz added that a voice‑cloning tool merged Gascón's vocals with those of French singer Camille (who wrote the film's songs) for the scenes in which she sings as Emilia, since the actress could not reach certain notes. The AI voice‑synthesis software Respeecher is credited in the film.
Selena Gomez was raised speaking Spanish but lost much of her fluency once her entertainment career took off. She has said she spent six months studying Spanish for this film, though she acknowledged being unhappy with the final result. The role was originally written as Mexican but was changed to an American character because of limitations with her Spanish. In the film she frequently switches from Spanish to English, using her natural American accent when speaking English. Native Spanish speakers — particularly Mexicans — heavily criticised her Spanish pronunciation, claiming they often could not understand what she was saying.
Although the film would almost certainly have been prohibited in the Middle East and North Africa because of its LGBTQ themes and content, distributor Front Row Filmed Entertainment, with the agreement of the film's producers, opted to release the unrated and uncut version of "Emilia Pèrez" on demand across all global platforms.
One of the opening scenes depicts a jury trial in Mexico, although in reality Mexico does not use jury trials.
In the screenplay, male pronouns are still applied to Emilia even after she reveals that she's a trans woman and has been on hormone treatment for two years while awaiting gender-reassignment surgery. In the film she is likewise misgendered by Rita and by the Israeli doctor who later carries out the gender-reassignment surgery; both use male pronouns for Emilia when discussing the procedure in Wasserman's office in Tel Aviv.
The film is set in Mexico with Mexican characters, but it was filmed entirely in a studio in Paris, France, and the only Mexican among the principal cast is Adriana Paz. Her role is small — she appears for just 11 minutes of screen time — and she is not featured on the film's official poster alongside the three other actresses. During the press tour, marketing and awards season she received scant mention and was the only cast member who did not receive an Oscar campaign. Paz did not walk the main red carpet at the Golden Globes ceremony and was not given a seat at the table beside her co‑stars and the director.
After its theatrical release in Mexico, dissatisfaction with 'Emilia Pérez' was so severe that a government body was obliged to step in and begin discussions with the country’s largest cinema chain to deal with the substantial number of patrons requesting refunds after seeing the film. Screenings in Mexico played to almost-empty auditoria, and the picture was a box-office failure.
For her role in Emilia Pérez, Karla Sofía Gascón became the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, for a Screen Actors Guild Award in an individual category (Best Female Actor in a Leading Role), for the Critics' Choice Award for Best Actress, and for the BAFTA Film Award for Best Leading Actress.
The marketing and Academy Awards campaign strategist for 'Emilia Pérez' is Lisa Taback, who worked on campaigns for Harvey Weinstein's Miramax and The Weinstein Company for films including The English Patient (1996), Life is Beautiful (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chicago (2002), The King's Speech (2010) and The Artist (2012).
Karla Sofía Gascón was the first trans actress nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role. Gascón was also the first actress nominated at the SAG Awards for a non-English-language film since Marion Cotillard for Rust and Bone (2012) in 2013, which was likewise directed by Jacques Audiard. Although Gascón had never worked on a US production (Emilia Pérez is a French–Belgian production), and only actors who are members of SAG are eligible for nomination, it was never explained whether she had become a member prior to the nomination.
After a backlash in late January 2025 over a series of resurfaced racist and xenophobic tweets aimed at various minorities by Karla Sofía Gascón on Twitter between 2016 and 2024, together with her daily social posts and an unauthorised 55‑minute interview with CNN en Español in which she denied being racist, Netflix moved to distance itself from Gascón less than a week later — no longer inviting her to awards‑season events, refusing to cover her travel and styling costs, and removing her image from its Oscars campaign and "For Your Consideration" promotional material for the film. Director Jacques Audiard also told Deadline that he no longer wished to speak with Gascón and said he could not understand why she appeared to be on a self‑destructive course that was harming the film.
Emilia's son, who believes she is his aunt, tells her she smells just like his father (i.e. Emilia before her transition). Hormone treatment can alter body odour, so trans women may not smell the same as they did prior to transition. That scene was criticised for being transphobic.
By the film's end, Emilia Peréz is literally elevated to sainthood and venerated by crowds who carry a statue bearing her likeness, even though she had murdered, or been responsible for the disappearance and deaths of, several people connected to those now worshipping her. That sequence was criticised as a mockery of Mexican people's culture and the Catholic religion.
The SAG Awards were criticised for honouring a film that used artificial intelligence to generate the lead actresses' singing voices, particularly after SAG-AFTRA went on strike in 2023 partly over the use of AI in the film industry.
The track "El Mal" bears a close resemblance to "Vos Ya Sabes", a song by Argentinian pop group Teen Angels which was released in 2011.
Received 13 Academy Award nominations, the most for any non-English-language film, surpassing the ten nominations apiece earned by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Roma (2018).
Inside a Tel Aviv doctor's surgery, framed photographs of Israel Defence Forces soldiers are displayed on the wall behind the doctor portrayed by Mark Ivanir, who in real life served in the IDF.
It is the lowest-rated film among the nominees for the 2025 Academy Award for Best Picture. It has a 72% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 70 out of 100. It also records the lowest audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, at just 16%.
At 5.4 (as of March 2025), this film holds the lowest IMDb user rating of any film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Eleven company logos appear in the opening sequence, one of which is Netflix.
During a SAG-AFTRA panel, casting director Carla Hool said she and her team "conducted an extensive search" for performers across Mexico, the United States, Spain and "throughout Latin America", but were unable to find any Mexican actors they felt were right for the principal roles. Director Jacques Audiard later explained the casting choices were intentional, intended to secure funding by featuring Hollywood names in the line-up; however, they never explained why they selected a relatively unknown Spanish telenovela actress for the title role instead of casting a Mexican performer.
A Saint Laurent production, the film showcases dozens of Saint Laurent pieces by Anthony Vaccarello as part of its costume design. Even the rucksacks the children wear are Saint Laurent.
The film earned only $15 million worldwide at the box-office against a $25 million budget. It underperformed in every country where it received a cinema release, including France, its country of origin. Netflix doesn't disclose box-office figures, so Emilia Pérez has no verifiable ticket sales in the US, the UK or Canada. The film has also not ranked highly on Netflix.
Soon after its premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Netflix secured the distribution rights for the US and the UK for a reported $12 million.
Zoe Saldaña was the ninth actor in the 21st century to win an Oscar for a performance in a musical, following:
By winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Zoe Saldaña has become the first American actress of Dominican descent to receive the award. In addition, Saldaña has become the 11th performer to win an Oscar for a non-English language performance (she speaks Spanish in this film). The other winners are: Sophia Loren, Robert De Niro, Roberto Benigni, Benicio Del Toro, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Christoph Waltz, Youn Yuh-jung, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. Shortly after Saldaña's victory, Adrien Brody secured his second Oscar for Best Actor for The Brutalist (2024), making his win the 12th overall (his performance is partly in Hungarian).
It is the ninth musical to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in the 21st century, following Moulin Rouge! (2001), Chicago (2002), Ray (2004), Les Misérables (2012), La La Land (2016), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), A Star Is Born (2018) and West Side Story (2021). Of those nine, only Chicago has won the award.
Zoe Saldaña's win for Best Supporting Actress at the 97th Academy Awards provoked controversy, with many arguing the Academy had awarded her the prize as little more than a consolation or career accolade after years of overlooking her for nominations (this film was her first nomination). In response to the backlash, Saldaña apologised to Mexicans who were offended by her involvement and maintained that the film's heart is not about Mexico but about the women who drive the story and the trans journey Emilia Pérez goes through. That defence sparked further criticism and renewed claims that her victory was undeserved.
The characters Emilia Perez and Rita Moro Castro were initially conceived as women in their thirties. It was only after Jacques Audiard discovered Karla Sofía Gascón that he realised the characters would be better served by being older and possessing a little more life experience.
Karla Sofía Gascón insisted on playing her character prior to the transition.
Songwriters Camille and Clément Ducol composed the songs not in their native French but in Spanish, with assistance from a Mexican translator.
Unlike many film musicals, in which the numbers are recorded as pre-recorded backing tracks, Jacques Audiard opted to have his cast sing live on set.
The part of Jessi was originally written as a considerably more hard‑bitten character. However, once Selena Gomez was cast, the role was toned down to mirror the actress's own personality.
Although the screenplay is credited to four writers, Jacques Audiard penned the original draft on his own.
Camille and Clément Ducol composed sixteen original songs for the film. The song-writing process, developed alongside Jacques Audiard's script, lasted about two years.
Filmed over the course of two months in France.
Variety reported that Netflix expended in excess of $50 million on this film's awards campaign.
Seeking inspiration for composing Selena Gomez's centrepiece solo, 'Mi Camino', director Jacques Audiard recommended that Camille and Clément Ducol view the documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me (2022).
