Hari Nef has shared part of the letter she sent to Barbie director Greta Gerwig after landing a role in the upcoming film.

In a Tuesday Twitter post, the Transparent actress revealed she sent Gerwig and Barbie’s leading actress Margot Robbie a letter to explain why a role in the film meant so much to her.

“When I heard I was cast as a Barbie in the Barbie movie, it looked like I was maybe not going to be able to do the film because of a scheduling conflict, so I wrote Greta and Margot a letter essentially begging them to fudge the schedule a little bit,” she wrote.

In her letter, the actress acknowledged that the cast and crew she’d met so far “played no small role in cultivating my love of sitting in the dark in front of big screens for an hour or two”, though that was only part of her need to be in the film despite her other commitment.

“Identity politics and cinema aren’t my favourite combination, but the name BARBIE looms large over every American woman,” she continued. “Barbie’s the standard; she’s The Girl; she’s certainly THE doll.”

Explaining that she and her “other transgender girlfriends” started calling themselves “the dolls” a few years ago, Nef explained the term was used as “a bid to ratify our femininity, to smile and sneer at the standards we’re held to as women” while also an allusion to “the shape of a woman who is not quite a woman – recognizable as such, but still a fake”.

She concluded, “‘Doll’ is fraught, glamorous; she is, and she isn’t. We call ourselves ‘the dolls’ in the face of everything we know we are, never will be, hope to be. We yell the word because the word matters. And no doll matters more than Barbie.”

Nef ultimately kept her role in the film, which will be released on 21 July.

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