Charmed Season 3 will return in January 2021 and the news just hit that the show will break some ground in the new season.
Transgender actor J.J. Hawkins will join Charmed for the third season.
Transgender actor joining Charmed
Deadline reports that J.J. Hawkins will join Charmed Season 3 as the first trans actor on the rebooted series on The CW.
Hawkins will play Kevin, a transgender male college student who inspires one of the Charmed Ones to take on a very formidable opponent.
This is also a big moment because it is a sign of authentic representation, with a transgender actor playing a transgender role. It also came at an opportune time, as it is Trans Awareness Week.
Hawkins (he/him, they/them) also played another gender-non-conforming trans-masculine role on the CBS limited series The Red Line. Hawkins was Riley, best friends with the show’s main character, Jira Calder-Brennan (Aliyah Royale), whose father was an unarmed Black man shot in Chicago.
Hawkins on trans characters on TV
“I’ve gotten quite a few auditions for trans characters and you can tell when the writers don’t know what they’re talking about,” Hawkins said about The Red Line. “You see like, ‘This character is trans and she finds out she’s a boy!’ You can read how much they don’t know what they’re talking about.
“Even in this small breakdown, it was like, ‘Riley goes by they/them’ and, ‘This is the kind of person Riley is, aside from their queerness.’ It was using correct pronouns and not using their transness as their defining character trait. I knew they saw Riley as a human and that they saw Riley as a person, as a human, who was trans.”
Now, Hawkins gets another chance with the Charmed series on The CW.
Hawkins also made appearances on episodes of All Rise, Criminal Minds, and NCIS.
Hawkins is from a Mormon family that goes back six generations but says they were not equipped with his gender non-conformity. He attended BYU and took part in activism while studying Acting and Linguistics.
“It’s sufficient to say it was not easy whatsoever. I was there for a large part of that change,” Hawkins said. “Only in 2008 were you allowed to come out as queer and not be immediately expelled, which is shockingly recent. And I started going there in 2011, so I only went there right after you were allowed to be out.”
Charmed Season 3 is set to premiere on January 24, 2021, on The CW.