The most epic trans love story is streaming right now and it's a literal godsend

Like I said, it’s complicated. But it’s also genius. And so very, very unapologetically queer. The writing is brilliant, witty, surprising, and clever. The cast is, well, worthy of a tale of the gods, and visually it is visionary. My gods, if you aren’t watching it, you’re missing out on some truly stellar storytelling — and one of the most compelling and steamy trans love stories this year.

One of the players in this complex web is Caeneus (Misia Butler), a trans man adrift in purgatory, with the weight of a painful betrayal on his back. His job in the afterlife is to guide the dead through a frame to their final reward, regenerating and coming back to life again, reincarnated. It’s a profoundly lonely existence; that is until he meets Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), a recently deceased woman who also has an important role to play in the prophecy. She's found herself trapped in purgatory after her husband steals the coin from her lips meant to pay Charon (Ramon Tikaram) to help her cross the River Styx. Riddy and Caeneus share an instant connection and one that blossoms into romance. However, because this is a Greek tragedy, things are complicated by the fact that her husband, Orpheus (Killian Scott), is tearing apart the fabric of existence to make his way to her in the underworld.

If elements of that story and the character’s name are ringing bells, it’s because the show’s creator, Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World), lifted and reinterpreted them from classic Greek myth. Take the story of Caneaus who in the classical literature, was born female but was later transformed by Poseidon into a male. Making him our earliest trans hero. The effect of his inclusion in Kaos is subtle and poignantly radical because it underscores that trans people have not only existed since the dawn of time and storytelling, but that they are heroic, essential beings who are woven into the very fabric of humanity and fate. They are not a fad, not a modern anomaly, Kaos says, transness is core, it is essential, it is humanity.

None of this is lost on Butler, who admits this is why he’s always seen himself in and been drawn to the Greek classics and their innate queerness. “It’s always been something that I have been obsessed with for as long as I can remember,” he tells PRIDE. “Even in the very simple translations and iterations that you get as a child, you get a sense of this very queer perspective of the world that they have created through the myths. I think Charlie called the show Kaos because of reading in Ovid’s Metamorphoses a line about the world being ‘begat out of chaos.’ The metamorphoses in themselves are all about change and the different ways in which we change and flow between different states. That at its core is a very queer concept.”

That comes through all throughout the series, where not only do queer characters — and actors — abound in this world, but Kaos infuses implicitly queer culture into its world-building, whether it’s making the Valkyries a gang of dykes on bikes, or populating the world with gay and pansexual romances — we’re here and were queer.

“It’s not just Caeneus’ story that’s so woven into the fabric, but also all of The Fates (Suzy Eddie Izzard, Ché, and Sam Buttery). They are even more arcane and more woven into the very fabric of reality and being. They’re all trans as well,” Butler points out.

Not only does this make for a more rich, compelling world, but it also means the show is able to do something all too rare: It doesn’t hang all its trans representation on one character, dooming them to fail at giving audiences a broader view of the community. It also lifts some of the oppressive weight of that responsibility off the back of one actor. “I was only part of a wider whole, and I didn’t have that impetus or pressure to represent anything too holistically, because I could only ever represent a part of it,” says Butler.

Instead, Butler was free to play a far more rich and complex character for whom transness is only one part of his being. It’s a role that the actor says is reflective of his own story. “I’m not someone who tends to go stealth a lot, I can’t really anymore. I’m pretty much open to the world,” says Butler. “I’m very proud of being trans, and I think that there’s a lot of power that I have found in it. It’s been really tough at times, but it’s also been incredibly empowering, and I think that that’s what we see with Caeneus is that his transness isn’t ignored. It’s not just dangled and tokenized. It’s really integrated into who he is as a person. But it also doesn’t take center stage. It’s his love story with Riddy, his navigation of his mum and her betrayal and his death and just being in Purgatory and his dog, we have all these threads that we get to explore. As an actor, it was such a privilege to see it done with a trans role.”

He’s so very right: It’s thrilling and moving to see a character like Caeneus being brought to life by an actor like Butler, because along with the simple pleasures of watching a good yarn unwind you can see the future of trans storytelling being written with every scene, every plot point, every trope-and-trap-defying moment.

Falling in love with the character of Caeneus is not just possible, it’s inevitable, because Butler succeeds in infusing him with an aching pathos and a dreamy sad boy allure. He’s sweet, pure, and his attractiveness is gravitational. All of which is to say it’s not a stretch to believe that Riddy would not only be drawn to him but feel an instant cosmic connection, even in purgatory.

Butler credits that crackling chemistry to a surprising demand from the director — that he and Perrineau avoid one another until it was time to film their scene. “When we shot that first scene on my first day on the bench where we’re kind of properly getting to know each other. That is very early days, [for] Misia and Aurora getting to know each other, too,” Butler reveals. “I hope that that translates as kind of that bubbly first chemistry because it really felt so exciting and special to be acting alongside someone as talented and beautiful and lovely as her.”

The ploy worked, and what comes across on screen are exactly those early moments of attraction, insecurity, magnetism, and eventually connection. It’s sweet — and it’s sexy — and it feels excitingly like a paradigm shift in the way we see trans masc men presented on screen. “It’s really very revolutionary to see a transmasculine person be seen in this way and to have a sexual relationship with someone as well,” agrees Butler.

“Sometimes trans masculine characters can be kind of desexualized, and I have felt really empowered by it. I really would love to do a rom-com. I’m so obsessed with rom-coms and with romance movies, I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. So to have the opportunity to play someone who is, yeah, deeply in love with someone in a way that I really resonated with, with Caeneus and the way that he falls in love, it felt really familiar.”

That probably also helps with the verisimilitude. After all, a major element of the series requires that you believe that two men would be willing to destroy the fabric of the universe for the love of one woman — which makes Perrineau so perfect for the role. “For Aurora Perrineau, we would!” laughs Butler.

That said, the question we’re left with is: Where do we go from here? The first season ends with a question of what happens next. While Butler can’t reveal where Caeneus’ story will go next, one thing we both agree on is that we’re hopeful and praying to all the gods we get to find out.

If you haven’t started streaming Kaos, there’s no better time than right now. This show is doing the thing we crave: offering complex, exciting, boundary-breaking queer and trans characters, being heroic, villainous, knowing, and clueless. It’s utterly, thrillingly, human — even when they just so happen to be gods.