Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Heart, Baby’s Shawn-Caulin Young

Being a part of the film, Heart, Baby, has been a life-changing experience for actor Shawn-Caulin Young. He learned first-hand the difficulties and challenges that transgender people face on a daily basis and he says that experience taught him to embrace his true authentic self. Pop Culturalist had the pleasure of speaking with Shawn-Caulin about the role.

PC: How did you discover your passion for acting and storytelling?
Shawn-Caulin: I discovered my passion for acting and storytelling in third grade. My school did a play about bugs and I got cast as one of two dragonflies. I recall my creativity and mind exploding from my costume and knowing that I was going to look like a dragonfly. I took it so seriously. Looking back on it I’m like, “Wow, I was instantly caught by the bug”. [laughs]

Given where I grew up, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for this kind of stuff; it wasn’t really a possibility in my world. It wasn’t until I went to high school and got into an acting class that I really became consumed by it. By the time I was graduating and looking at colleges, the only thing I could think about was being a storyteller—being an actor—so that’s what I did. I went to the University of Hartford, got a BFA in acting from the Hartt School, and started my career.

PC: What would you say is the biggest lesson that you’ve learned being a part of this industry?
Shawn-Caulin: You can’t run away from yourself. As much as I thought I could escape inside the skin of other people that I portray, at the end of the day, there’s always me. For the longest time, I ran away from who I authentically was because I was ashamed and it brought me trauma and pain. Growing up as a gay kid in a small town wasn’t really a possibility. I didn’t have role models. I erased pieces of myself and literally became someone else. During the course of my career, I kept putting on these different personas and disappearing. People were like, “Wow, where’d that come from?” or, “Who is that guy?” It was just all these different versions of me that I had concocted to hide my authentic self.


After doing Heart, Baby, I was forced to deal with that because for me, Crystal represented all the femininity and the little gay boy that I had been so ashamed of. I had to come to terms with my feminine side. Living as a trans woman for four months, it’s clear that life is very challenging and difficult for trans people. After I stepped back into myself, I was like, “Why are you hiding Shawn? Crystal did this inside prison walls. What is your excuse?”

After a lot of therapy and a lot of soul-searching, now I’m finally at a place where I can say that I love myself.

PC: Tell us about Heart, Baby, Crystal, and what drew you to this project.
Shawn-Caulin: Well, the first thing that drew me to the project was the fact that it is a true story. When I read the script the first time I was like, “No way, this is not…no way.” I talked with the writer-director, Angela Shelton, and I was like, “So wait, this all happened? Literally, this all happened?” She was like, “Yeah.”

So I was like, “Okay, so there was this trans woman living fully as a woman in prison in the south…in Tennessee. And she’s an evangelical Christian and her cellmate is a black man who is this crazy boxer, and he gives up freedom and Olympic gold to stay in prison for her?” She said, “Yeah,” so I said, “Okay, I have to do this.” It’s just so remarkable, especially given the time and place. That was it, honestly.

When I first got approached to do it, it was solely as a producer. It wasn’t until we were in the middle of the casting process and we couldn’t find a trans actor to play the role that I dealt with the fact that I was going to do it. There was no way I would ever think about doing a part like this without trying to find someone who authentically lives this life. I just wanted respect and honor the community as much as I could and the only way that I knew how to do that was to step into her shoes and live the trans experience to the best of my ability.

PC: What was that preparation like?
Shawn-Caulin: The whole thing from start to finish was about six months. I started living as a trans woman before we started filming. I went through different stages of what I call my transition. It started with me growing my hair and nails. Then I started working with Larry Moss, who worked with Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby. I started working on vocalization with him. We did two hours of vocalization techniques every day.

Then I started interviewing my trans friends, watching documentaries, and all the left brain stuff. As the time went on with Larry, I started moving and talking like her on a continual basis. I would go out and I would go shopping for personal items for her. All the while, I was butting up against that thing that I mentioned earlier about the part of myself that I hated, which was this little gay boy.

It was really interesting because I was basically starting to experience some of what trans people experience, this kind of stuff that I, as a cisgender man, didn’t abide by of the gender norms, because I had long nails. I was moving and sounding differently. People were instantly treating me differently, so that in itself was its own kind of preparation.

When I got to New Orleans, I actually started really living a trans experience there. I feminized my face with some cosmetic procedures and I was in the process of losing 30 pounds. I learned how to do etiquette and pageant walking from a former Miss New York. I went whole hog into this because I knew I had to do everything I could to try to be the woman that they said Crystal was.

The day before we started filming, we had a final makeup test, and I walked out of the trailer and got catcalled by my own crew. I was like, “Whoa, wait, this is a whole world that I don’t even know.” I was experiencing discrimination already. I was experiencing degradation from just strangers. That was the first moment that I was turned into a sexual being, and it became objectifying.

That night, we went out to a restaurant in New Orleans and through the course of the evening, my mind was blown because this huge, good old boy white dude grabbed my butt and walked away. He thought I was this beautiful southern belle. He looked at me with expectation and whatever. I was internally going, “Oh crap, he’s clocking me. He’s going to know that I’m trans. He’s gonna know that I’m not who I’m presenting myself to be.”

That was when the danger and anxiety started to take hold. I’m not one that normally prescribes to method acting, but it was the only way I knew how to do it for Crystal and to honor my trans brothers and sisters.

That night, I got followed by two drunk guys who were threatening me because I wasn’t responding to their advancements. They followed me down the street and I was like, “Oh my God, they’re going find out that I’m Shawn. What am I gonna do? Scream out and be like, “Hey, I’m an actor? Please don’t get me?”

I get really emotional talking about it, because the whole time as I went further and further and further, there was no shred of me. It got to the point where I would look in the mirror and couldn’t even deal with my own genitalia. I didn’t see myself. I was like, “Oh man, this is what it’s like for a trans person to be stuck in a body that they don’t identify with.” Here I was now stuck in a body I didn’t identify with. I was trapped, and it was really traumatizing, so I spent a lot of time in therapy doing things to come to terms with how intense it is for all women in general and all trans people to just be themselves.

Then throw on top of that, Crystal was an evangelical Christian, so here’s this person who is fully identifying with God, quoting the Bible left and right. I’m going, “Okay, how do you marry these two worlds, because in the south, you’re an abomination?” Yet she knew she was a child of God, so needless to say, it was a very complex experience.

PC: With the film out now, what do you hope audiences take away?
Shawn-Caulin: My hope is that after people see Heart, Baby that they choose love and they recognize how they treat others. I hope that we can get to a place where this film starts a conversation about our gender expression, because whether you identify as a male, a woman, non-binary, whatever, this idea that masculine and feminine expression are isolated, and that a man can only act this way and a woman can only act this way is complete and utter BS. It’s fabricated because what it does is it causes us all to become inauthentic because we’re afraid of judgment. We’re afraid of being hurt.


Make sure to follow Shawn-Caulin on Twitter and Instagram, and catch Heart, Baby in select theaters now.

Photo Credit: Umberto Mantineo