I was asked a question I couldn’t dodge. During a panel at the adobo SheCreative Network Pride Session, someone asked where I stood on the “Die Beautiful” casting debate — whether a trans role should only go to a trans actor, and whether what happened in 2016 is something the industry should defend or rethink in 2026. I didn’t hedge. I said it depends on where you are on the wave.
Here’s the framework I’ve been sitting with, because I think it’s more useful than the binary the debate usually gets collapsed into.
Representation doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in waves — and visibility, when sustained long enough — can become inclusion.
Think about how gay male characters moved through Philippine media. For years, they are the parloristas, the comic sidekicks, the best friends who exist to support everyone else’s story. They are constantly present in media but often stereotyped, limited and sometimes cruel.
Over time, that presence did something debates alone could not: it made the character harder to erase. A gay man on screen no longer needs to explain himself to exist there. That’s what the crest of a wave looks like.
But look at the rest of the spectrum. Trans stories sit lower on that curve — present, contested, gaining ground. Sapphic stories, lower still, are gathering their visibility right now. Non-binary narratives, are further back yet. Same arc, different pace. And the work — our work, as producers, writers, directors, festival strategists, casting directors — is to keep each wave moving.
This is where Die Beautiful enters.
The 2016 film was a phenomenon. A story about a trans woman — the kind that usually lives in festival sidebars — landed at the Metro Manila Film Festival, the most commercial cinema slot in the country, and the mass audience showed up.
Paolo Ballesteros played Trisha Echevarria as an actor doing the work the role required. He took home Best Actor at both the Metro Manila Film Festival and the Tokyo International Film Festival. The story was seen, the door was opened.
That was the logic of that phase: use the star system available to bring a trans story into the country’s most commercial cinema window, where it could no longer be ignored.
Now, a decade later, “Die Beautiful: The Musical” has just announced its leads. Viñas DeLuxe and Maxie Andreison — two of the country’s most celebrated drag artists, Drag Race Philippines icons both — will alternate as Trisha Echevarria when the production opens in June 2027 at the Proscenium Theater in Rockwell.
What makes this moment worth pausing on is the chain it completes. Viñas has said publicly that watching Paolo on television was what inspired her to become a drag queen. She copied his makeup from Die Beautiful. And now she plays Trisha.
The wave didn’t plateau. It handed something forward.
And here’s a quieter moment, from a different point on the same curve. Last year, PETA staged “Walang Aray” and cast Lance Reblando — a trans woman — not in a trans-coded role, but as Julia: the female lead, in a romance. Cisgender actresses were also in the rotation. A safe option was on the table. They chose her anyway.
Ice was in that production too, playing Lucas, a trans man. So this one isn’t abstract for our household. We watched it from the inside — the rehearsals, the care, the decision to cast for who the role needed rather than for who would be easiest. That is what inclusion looks like when it becomes practice, not policy.
Both decisions tell us something true about their moment. The mistake isn’t in either choice. The mistake is in treating the 2016 logic as permanent, or in pretending the wave could have been skipped entirely. You can’t force the later phase before you’ve built the earlier one. You can only push.
The room I was in at that Pride session was full of people who hold this tension from the inside. Janlee Dungca of Castro PR, who built a fourteen-year career in an industry that initially refused to hire her for being trans, said something I keep coming back to: excel where you are accepted, and then build the conditions for others to be accepted somewhere new. Leigh Reyes of Treyna made the argument I also bring to investor rooms: what’s good for the community is good for the business. Lawyer Elen Pasion, who leads the Special Committee on LGBTQIA+ Affairs at the DSWD, reminded us that the wave isn’t only cultural — it’s legislative. The Sogie Equality Bill has been waiting for passage for more than 25 years.
It wasn’t only a Pride celebration. It was a working session. The question on the table wasn’t “how do we feel about inclusion” — it was “how does inclusion actually get built.”
That question doesn’t stay in the room for me. It follows me out.
Diversity, representation, and inclusion aren’t values we pinned to a wall at Fire & Ice — they shape who we develop, who we cast, who we build for. And when we look around and don’t yet see the platform we want to exist, Ice and I have learned to stop waiting and start building. We’re calling our next one Spectrum — a theater festival for queer stories, new and untested, staged from inside our studio. Not because we’ve solved anything. Because waiting for someone else to build the room stopped making sense.
The casting debate around Die Beautiful has a longer answer than any panel can hold in an afternoon. But the answer begins here: we are not in the same place we were in 2016. The wave has moved.
Viñas DeLuxe grew up watching Paolo Ballesteros and taught herself drag by copying his face. Now she plays Trisha. That’s not a debate. That’s a wave breaking.