Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón, a recent Golden Globe nominee for Emilia Pérez, will star in The Bad Ones, a film adaptation of the award-winning novel by Argentine trans writer and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize winner Camila Sosa Villada. 

The project is being directed by Argentine director/producer Armando Bo, an Oscar-winning screenwriter for ‘Birdman’ and helmer of established production company About Entertainment. The film’s co-producers include Infinity Hill (Argentina, 1985) and Spain’s  Suma Content, led by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (a.k.a  “Los Javis”).

The Bad Ones tells the story of Tía Encarna (played by Gascón), the leader of a group of trans sexual workers whose everyday life is disrupted when they find an abandoned baby in a park and decide to take him in, unknowingly endangering their community. 

“This project is one of a kind, it’s challenging and beautiful,” director Armando Bo said in a press release. “Especially working with such talented people in every role, which enables us to dream of a film of such scale that will hopefully make history,” he added. Bo, who recently produced Amazon Prime’s series Cromañón, is currently working on an adaptation of Dirty War, Dirty Secrets, a biography of Buenos Aires Herald-founder Robert Cox written by his son David. 

Karla Sofía Gascón began her career in Spain and moved to México, where she worked in series and films. Her jump to stardom came with the record-breaking feature-film Nosotros los Nobles (Us the noble ones) in 2013. The trans actress is on a winning streak, obtaining a Golden Globe nomination for Jacques Audiard’s musical drama Emilia Pérez, where she plays a Mexican cartel leader who transitions to become a woman. The film premiered at the Cannes film festival, where Gascón won for Best Female Performance.

A Cordoba-born writer, actress and playwright, Sosa Villada is also a co-producer in Bo’s project. The award winning author recently starred in Thesis on a Domestication, Javier van de Couter’s adaptation of Villada’s own novel of the same title. In that film, she plays a trans actress reveling in the prestige her writing career has wrought.

The grandson of a 1970s cult-filmmaker of the same name, Bo’s directorial debut The Last Elvis premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. A long-time collaborator of renowned Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, he co-wrote the script for Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance), which earned him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay together with co-writer Nicolás Giacobone.