Beyond The Gates star Karla Mosley recently revealed her true feelings about playing Maya on The Bold and the Beautiful.
The Good and The Bad
Mosley has found a new home on CBS daytime as Dani on BTG. But from 2013 to 2020, the actress played B&B’s Maya. This character was groundbreaking for the soap as Maya was daytime’s first regular transgender character.
As of 2013, daytime had seen several LGBTQIA+ characters and relationships, most memorably All My Children’s Bianca (ex-Eden Riegel) and Reese (ex-Tamara Braun) and Days of our Lives‘ Will (Chandler Massey, who is returning to DAYS this summer) and Sonny (ex-Freddie Smith). But B&B brought a new story to daytime with Maya coming out as a transgender woman in 2015.
Mosley recently discussed the role with People, revealing mixed feelings about the storyline as someone who identifies as queer, but not transgender. “When my boss asked me if I would do this story, I first was going to say no because it felt inappropriate for me to play that role as a cis woman.”
READ THIS: Here’s what’s coming up on BTG.
The story was ultimately told thanks to Mosley playing the part, who noted that if she hadn’t accepted the storyline, the story wouldn’t have been told. “I had so much feedback around healing that was able to happen within families and communities because of that storyline,” she shared.
However, as time passed, Mosley began to have different feelings toward playing the character. “At a certain point, it really became truly inappropriate for me to play that role. That’s why I stepped away from it.”
Daytime isn’t entirely without transgender representation today. In 2018, General Hospital welcomed transgender actress Cassandra James as Dr. Terry Randolph, a GH oncologist who is also a transgender woman.
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