Nip/Tuck's Sex-Change Shocker
You can try to guess Nip/Tuck's twists in advance, but the FX plastic-surgery drama just keeps augmenting fans' expectations. In this week's jam-packed season finale alone, they had Joan Rivers, that serial stalker The Carver, and an over-the-top revelation: Ava Moore, the sinister sexpot played by X-Men's Famke Janssen, is really a man! Actually, it's more correct to say she's a male-to-female transsexual. Now that we didn't see coming.
"I always had [Ava's gender secret] percolating in the back of my mind," admits series creator Ryan Murphy, who had top-secret meetings with Janssen before proceeding with the story. "It was tricky. It's not every actress that you can [tell], 'By the way, you're a man,' and have them go, 'OK,' and commit."
After some initial concerns, Janssen took the plunge. "She... paused," Murphy recalls. "She just wanted to make sure it was done with grace and as a love story, which we did. She was also concerned about what I was going to show on the operating table [during Ava's genital surgery], and I told her not to worry.
"So after she approved it, I made her do a pact of silence, then I told Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon, and that was it. The scripts were a big-secret thing. They were numbered and you had to sign for them."
Even guest star Alec Baldwin was kept in the dark until he received the final episode's script. Before that, he'd only been told he was playing Famke's ex-husband, Dr. Barett Moore. Once he read it, he called Murphy to praise him for the story line's clever takeoff on Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams. "Alec said, 'I have two requests — an ascot and an Indian manservant,'" Murphy laughs. "I bought him the ascot."
You may still be wondering why Murphy chose to give Ava gender issues. "I loved the hypocrisy of a life coach who's transforming other people's lives really being the ultimate creature of transformation [herself]," he says. "She's the villain you love to hate because she was so extraordinary and had so many secrets."
Murphy feels it would've been unoriginal to "just have [Ava] shot between her eyes by her son, Adrian, over the incest thing. I wanted to really humanize her. I cared about her character and I knew that there was something she was running from. Famke played that subtextually from the beginning. Everything [on Nip/Tuck] relates to the world of plastic surgery, so this fit the theme perfectly."
Look for Ava — who fled to Paris after Adrian's suicide — to return in the third season. "If you go to the fan websites, she's an overwhelming favorite," Murphy enthuses. "People are obsessed with how bad she was every week. Famke loved this show so much, she cleared almost an entire year of her schedule and turned down movies to do it! We were quite honored to have her, and she said, 'If you want me back for one or two episodes [next season], I would love to do it.' So I'm sure she'll come back."
