“Pretty Little Liars” Star Vanessa Ray on Playing A Transgender Villain
Vanessa Ray at the 2015 Teen Choice Awards. Photo: Getty Images
This has been a big week for Vanessa Ray, who plays CeCe Drake on Pretty Little Liars. In the show’s summer finale, CeCe was revealed as “A,” the mysterious villain the series has been dancing around for five seasons. “It was a huge reveal,” Ray said on the red carpet of the Teen Choice Awards. “I went from relative obscurity to that huge reveal."
In the ever-complicated storyline of PLL, it turned out that CeCe is actually Charlotte, born Charles DiLaurentis, which will mean something to those of you who have followed the show since its inception. Ray found out her pivotal role in the plot earlier in the summer and was shocked. "I’ve always known that CeCe was doing more than being sassy,” Ray said. “But this explains where her sociopathic tendencies came from and why she is like this. Of course when I found out I was ‘A’ I went back and looked at every conversation and every line of dialogue. I was like 'Oh, I should have known all along.’"
The decision to make CeCe a transgender character was not that recent on the part of the writers, but ties into the strong presence of all things transgender in the media right now. For Ray, it’s important to get to be part of that. She’s also thrilled not to have to keep it a secret any longer. "The Caitlyn Jenner cover of Vanity Fair had just leaked when I found out,” Ray said. “This is a relatively new conversation in this country. We have some amazing people that are standing up for transgender people and it’s very cool to see that. I was bursting with the desire to talk about it and have conversations and see where the country is at. My only concern was that people were going to think it was calculated, but it’s not. This was a really bold move on [our creator’s] end."
"With everything on PLL, it’s not just a show that’s trendy that’s going to tell you what to wear next week,” Ray added. “They push the issues. They force families into conversation. What is family if you don’t talk about where you stand and why you believe what you believe? This is amazing for me. I’m just so grateful to get to be around all these people."
So what’s next for PLL? "Now we’re going five years forward in the future,” Ray revealed. “We’re going to see a lot about where the girls in the current state closer to their real ages. It’s cool for the girls to get to expand a little more and show the audience a little more of a mature version of PLL. It’s going to be fun to see this more mature side of the characters style-wise as well.”
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