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Thea Raveneau makes her feature film debut in A Savage Christmas, in cinemas now.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>James Brickwood<\/cite><\/p>\n It stars newcomer Thea Raveneau, a 27-year-old Gunggari, Lardil, and Kullilli trans woman, as Davina, who comes home for Christmas for the first time in three years.<\/p>\n There she finds that her family are more messed up than she ever knew: her sister is addicted to pills and in the midst of a messy separation; her brother owes a local gangster $20,000; and her parents are hiding messy secrets of their own. Not to mention Davina, who harbours feelings of resentment and superiority towards her family, which come out in ugly ways.<\/p>\n \u201cI love that Davina isn\u2019t perfect,\u201d says Raveneau. \u201cShe\u2019s not a tokenistic trans person that comes in to represent the entire trans community. She\u2019s just human.\u201d<\/p>\n The release of A Savage Christmas<\/em>, starring an Aboriginal transgender woman, comes at a difficult time for both Indigenous and trans rights, with the recent failure of the referendum and ongoing debate about trans people in sport.<\/p>\n \u201cAs someone who\u2019s First Nation as well as transgender, being able to represent those two communities in a leading role in a feature film is so important to me,\u201d says Raveneau.<\/p>\n \u201cI get to show my communities that we can do anything that we put our minds to and that we are just as important as any other person who thinks less of us based on the colour of our skin or our gender identity or our sexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n A Savage Christmas<\/em> is the first feature from director Madeleine Dyer (who co-directed an episode of her sister Harriet\u2019s series Colin from Accounts <\/em>last year), and stars comedy mainstays Darren Gilshenan (A Moody Christmas<\/em>), Helen Thomson (Colin from Accounts<\/em>), Gary Sweet (House Husbands<\/em>) and David Roberts (Please Like Me<\/em>).<\/p>\n The more experienced actors were quick to offer guidance and support to Raveneau. \u201cThey were a bit of a safety net,\u201d she says. \u201cThey would give unsolicited reassurance that I am doing a good job, and that helped me to push away any self-doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n Raveneau says she identified with Davina\u2019s strained but ultimately loving relationship with her family and was given space to explore her own feelings and relationships while making the film.<\/p>\n \u201cLike Davina, I unfortunately have dealt with a lot of dead-naming and misgendering from my family. I know exactly how that feels. I\u2019ve had to cut people off like Davina has, and I\u2019ve had to figure out if I want to rebuild a relationship with someone who I\u2019ve cut off.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t talk to my father, so to have moments with David Roberts\u2019 character, as Davina and James, it was just so sweet. I could feel my heart being warmed in moments like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Being a transgender woman starring in a Christmas movie as a transgender character is something Raveneau could not have foreseen when she was growing up in regional Queensland watching Home and Away<\/em> and secretly aspiring to be an actor.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing a very flamboyant and feminine person who identified as male at the time, living in rural, regional places, it was not probably best to run around telling everyone that I wanted to do drama or acting,\u201d she explains. \u201cThat probably wasn\u2019t the safest, in terms of bullying.\u201d<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t even know what \u201ctransgender\u201d meant until she was 20 years old. She says she wasn\u2019t exposed to the full breadth of queer communities and identities. When Caitlyn Jenner came out in 2016, Raveneau recognised something about herself. \u201cI did my research and was like, \u2018Holy smoke, this sounds like me!\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n That same year, Raveneau decided she was ready to finally give acting a try: she began taking youth drama classes at the Empire Theatre in Toowoomba and even booked an audition to get into an acting degree at Queensland University of Technology, but got scared and didn\u2019t go.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n