Will & Harper

When comedy writer Harper Steele emailed her longtime friend and collaborator, Will Ferrell, about her decision to transition, there was an understandable fear in her typed words. How would this affect their friendship? Their work? The very dynamics they’d honed for decades? Thankfully, the SNL and Anchorman star was nothing short of supportive. So much so that he decided to embark on the kind of fool’s errand that has always tickled Steele and now, in its finished form, makes for a rollicking ride for the rest of us: a filmed cross-country trip that would allow them both to reconnect and to reintroduce Steele to the life on back roads and in seedy motels and dive bars she’d so enjoyed for much of her life. The result, Will & Harper, is equal parts buddy comedy and didactic doc about what it means to be a supportive friend in spaces and environments where even Ferrell’s celebrity isn’t enough to inure Harper from the bigotry and transphobia that had kept her from transitioning until so late in her life. For presenting a curious (and quite hilarious) portrait of trans allyship that makes room for failure and fallibility, Will & Harper wins a Peabody award.