Love it or hate it, one of the top Oscar front-runners of 2025 is Netflix’s Emilia Pérez. This Spanish-language musical from France nabbed a whopping 13 Oscar nominations, more than any other film in the race this year. And because it’s streaming on Netflix, it’s easy for audiences to watch.
Written and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez tells the story of a Mexican named lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), who agrees to help a notorious drug cartel leader named Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) secretly transition to a new life as a woman named Emilia (also Gascón, who is a trans woman).
Four years later, the former cartel leader has embraced her new life as a woman named Emilia Pérez. But Emilia misses her children. She seeks out Rita to help her once more—this time not to disappear from her family’s life, but to re-enter it. Rita introduces Emilia to her former wife (Selena Gomez) and kids as a long-lost aunt, and, at Emilia’s insistence, gets sucked into Emilia’s chaotic orbit. This includes Emilia’s attempts to make amends for her sins by opening a non-profit to help locat the remains of bodies who were victims of drug cartel violence.
It’s a bizarre story to say the least. So where did it come from? Some of you are even wondering: Is Emilia Pérez based on a true story?
Is Emilia Pérez based on a true story?
Emilia Pérez is not based on a true story. While it’s true that there are drug cartels in Mexico, and that many people die or disappear as a result of drug cartel violence, everything else about the story, including all of the characters, are completely fictional—meaning, made-up. Writer/director Jacques Audiard was inspired to write a story about a drug dealer who transitions by a character in Boris Razon 2018 fictional novel, Écoute.
“Six years ago, I read Boris Razon’s novel Écoute,” Audiard explained in an interview for the Emilia Pérez press notes. “Halfway through the book, a transgender Mexican drug dealer comes along who wishes to have surgery. As the drug dealer wasn’t that developed over the following chapters, I decided to start my story with that character.”
Audiard went on to explain that he began to adapt the book as an opera, but changed his mind as he got deeper into the characters. “In the book, the lawyer was a man — a worn-out, disillusioned guy at the end of his tether. I turned him into a woman, who’s also a lawyer, but she’s young, ambitious, unscrupulous, and cynical and played by Zoe Saldaña,” Audiard said. “It also felt like a script that could cut across genres —film noir, melodrama, comedy of manners, musical, and telenovela.”
So there you have it. Emilia Pérez is not in any way, shape, or form based on a true story. It’s entirely made-up, based on a novel that was also made up. No true story here!
