BY DANIELLE ZHU
Difficult People is adding transgender actress and activist Shakina Nayfack to the cast when season 2 returns, EW has confirmed.
Nayfack will play Lola, a new waitress at D’s Café who will clash with Billy Eichner’s character, as first reported by The Advocate.
“Shakina is an accomplished performance artist and an incredibly impressive theater producer, performer, writer and director,” Difficult People creator and star Julie Klausner told the magazine. “We connected to her raw sense of humor, her tenacity, her eagerness to use comedy to tackle social injustice, and, of course, her love of the show already!”
Lola is described as “strong and opinionated and crass,” with controversial opinions like believing 9/11 was an inside job. While she butts heads with Billy at first, she’ll soon fit in with the other resentment-filled employees.
“In the quest for transgender visibility we’ve only been introduced to sympathetic roles that rely on victimization or stereotypes in order to elicit empathy from our audiences,” Nayfack told The Advocate. “It is so refreshing to be able to play a trans woman who is funny, confrontational, and just as difficult as everyone else on the show.”
Difficult People will return to Hulu for a 10-episode season later this year.