A Disparate Housewife

By Joel Stein / Los Angeles

It's a pleasant kind of humming. Happy, unself-conscious, slightly flighty and more than a little girly. It comes out whenever I halt the conversation to scribble in my notebook to catch up. And when I run out of the restaurant to feed the parking meter, she grabs the pad and writes, "Note to self: buy Felicity presents." She giggles and touches my arm and asks me lots of questions about myself. If all that weren't femme enough, she refers to herself by her nickname, Flicka; points out her favorite knitting store across the street; and admits that the night before, she ran out of gas on Mulholland Drive and cried until her husband came to pick her up. I am worried she is going to try to braid my hair and choreograph a dance routine for us.

So it's even more impressive that the woman in the thin purple dress, drinking chai and wearing makeup and nail polish in various shades of pink, plays a biological man, albeit one who is in the process of becoming a woman, in Transamerica, a low-budget indie film about a transsexual father's road trip with her newly discovered teenage prostitute son. If people thought it was brave of Nicole Kidman to endanger her glamour by wearing a big prosthetic nose or Charlize Theron to put on fake teeth, Huffman is going to get the silver star. In one scene, for longer and in larger form than you might enjoy, her penis is visible.

"The Oscar talk is starting now," says Marc Cherry, creator and executive producer of Desperate Housewives, for which Huffman won an Emmy for playing an ad exec turned frustrated stay-at-home mom. "People are starting to use the O word with Felicity--which upsets me because it would mean we'll have to pay her more." The Transamerica role is indeed the kind of thing Oscar voters love: a lady who looks like a dude who looks like a lady. But the most impressive thing is how, a few minutes into the film, you stop noticing Huffman's external transformations and start to focus on the character. Not that the external stuff isn't impressive. Her voice is man low, she walks like a guy in drag, and she gestures just like a guy who desperately wants to hide his masculinity. "I said to her, 'You don't have big hands, but they look big in every shot. How do you do that?'" says Duncan Tucker, Transamerica's first-time feature writer and director. "She said, 'I move them like they're underwater.'"

The voice took an hour of practice to slip into each morning, so she stuck with it off camera all day. It was so convincing that Huffman's husband, actor William H. Macy, who served as a producer on the project, wouldn't take her calls during the day because it creeped him out. "My 2-year-old did cry when she saw me," said Huffman. "It's probably something she'll be talking about in therapy."

After years of a highly respected career just outside the public consciousness--as a member of David Mamet's ensemble at New York City's Atlantic Theater Company (where Matthew Fox and Jessica Alba were her students) and the female lead on Aaron Sorkin's failed sitcom Sports Night--Huffman, 43, is a star. "People in show business have been waiting for her to be a star for a long time," says Cherry. "She's so down to earth and humble, you get the feeling she doesn't see herself that way."

Still, she says she hasn't had any film offers since she got Transamerica, just after Desperate Housewives got picked up. And she notes that it was gay men who cast her as a lead in each. She believes that as more gay men get positions of power in Hollywood, older women will get more opportunities. "I think for gay men, women stay sexual, sensual beings longer," she says. "Because the sex question doesn't come into it, they appreciate women sensually. I don't think they afford the same courtesy to their own community." You don't have to worry about saying things that alienate gay guys when you star in Desperate Housewives.

Huffman says she wouldn't be shocked if Housewives were her swan song, and she doesn't seem all that worried about it. She's using the rest of her free day to meet Macy on the set of his film about Bobby Kennedy's assassination and then to see her kids, including the gender-traumatized daughter who begged her to wear a dress that morning. It's the same dress she wore to a screening of Transamerica the night before and to work the day before that. "I wear things for days on end," she explains as she leaves. She might have mastered the acting-like-a-guy thing a little too well.