From starring in USA and SyFy’s brainchild Chucky TV series to gracing the covers of Elle and BLANC Magazine with their electrifying style, actor and model Lachlan Watson is creating more space in Hollywood for queer actors and looking effortlessly cool while doing it.  

For Watson, acting and theater weren’t things to be discovered, but an environment they were born into: their mother worked at the Burning Coal Theatre in their hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. Acting in the city’s theater scene and landing their first TV roles on shows like Nashville and Drop Dead Diva, Watson began to build a career that would later land them a spot on Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. 

To play the role of Theo Putnam, a young transgender teen who works alongside protagonist Sabrina to stop the forces of evil, Watson drew on their own experience as a nonbinary, transgender person. 

“I got cast in Sabrina and they put in the end of the email, ‘If you want to share your story, your journey, we’d love to hear it,’” Watson recalled in a Netflix roundtable in 2018. “I said yeah! F*ck yeah, here you go! Here’s all the trauma in my life that has prepared me for this moment in particular. Here’s all the sh*t I can talk about. We’re telling a queer storyline, but we’re telling it right, because they’re listening to me.”

“What I wish people knew about nonbinary identity is, I think that we’re equal people,” Watson continued. “That we don’t have to be different if you don’t see us that way. That we are human and that our ideas and our concepts and our feelings are human and that we just want to be accepted and loved just like everyone else.”

Watson has continued to work and advocate for the community not just through their acting (last year they appeared in the movies Only the Good Survive, The Unheard, and The Kiss List, and this year they’re starring in the upcoming apocalyptic comedy Y2K), but through modeling and the beauty industry. 

Working with brands like Schmidt’s Naturals, The Phuild Project, Calvin Klein and more, Watson is pushing for a more diverse, accepting and educated society for those outside of the queer community, along with those within it. Through it all, Watson says they hope for a day where society understands that nonbinary people are equal and better more reflective futures for nonbinary and transgender people through media. 

“I just want to reach out to the little nonbinary kids, just like me growing up, who’re always up in those predicaments where it’s hard to take care of yourself and to listen to yourself without a label or a perfect identity,” they told PAPER Magazine about working with the Trans Justice Funding Project for Pride in 2019. “It’s also so important to raise up grassroots trans-led organizations, especially in today’s world. It was a perfect storm and I am honored to be a part of it.”

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