Lux Pascal, Chilean-American Hollywood actor Pedro Pascal’s youngest sibling, will play the lead role in the drama Miss Carbón (“Queen of Coal”), a Spanish-Argentine production based on the story of Carla Antonella Rodríguez, Argentina’s first transgender coal miner worker.
The film, released in Spanish theaters on June 12, will arrive domestically on Netflix this year and was directed by Agustina Macri, daughter of center-right former Argentine President Mauricio Macri.
The movie tells the story of Carla “Carlita” Antonella Rodríguez, a 33-year-old from Argentina. He was born as Carlos Enrique Rodríguez in Río Turbio — a small town of 11,000 people in the Argentine Patagonia, home to many of the country’s coal mines, the town’s main source of income. Rodríguez reportedly became “Argentina’s first woman coal mine worker” in 2011 and “defeated” an over 80-year-old superstition barring women from entering the Río Turbio coal mines.
“I consider myself a cautious person at first. I tend to read the situation before inserting myself into it,” Pascal, who is also transgender, told Vogue Spain this month. “I feel like I’m someone who takes one step at a time, and if I then feel I can run, I run.”
“The feature film also shows the moment when Argentina’s Gender Identity Law was signed into effect in 2012. An explosion of joy for the trans community and a milestone in Latin American history that was cut short in 2025, when Javier Milei, the country’s current president, amended the law to prevent people under the age of 18 from accessing gender affirmation care and restricted the accommodation of prisoners according to their identity,” Vogue Spain’s report read.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter this week, Pascal said to be initially afraid of taking the role but had a change of mind after meeting Rodríguez and reframing the story as one about “women in the workplace.”
“When I met her [Rodríguez], I was mesmerized by this air of disappointment of how the world has treated her,” Pascal said. “I didn’t want to shy away from showing how sometimes that sadness is just impossible to hide.”
Agustina Macri told the outlet Infobae this month that Pascal was always the first choice for the lead role and stressed that, “to me, she has a very powerful intuition and is very intelligent. As a trans woman, she has a background and a look at life and the character that I perhaps don’t have.”
According to Infobae, women were barred from working at the Río Turbio coal mines due to an over 80-year-old urban myth that stated that a woman had once gone into the mines to look for her husband after a collapse. The myth claims that her “spirit” was locked up there and, for that reason, some miners “disappeared after being seduced by that female presence that they called the ‘black widow.’”
“For that reason, women were never allowed to enter the mines, much less work in them. They could only enter on St. Barbara’s Day, December 4, when the title of ‘Queen of Coal’ was celebrated,” Infobae said.
Macri told Forbes Spain this month that she became aware of Rodríguez’s real-life story through the movie’s screenwriter Erika Halvorsen, who she met through a common acquaintance filmmaker that was working with her at the time.
“Things of life, instead of coming to me through him, it came through a producer who told me that this project was going around in Argentina and that she thought I would be interested in it. He sent me the script, but as soon as he summarized it to me with a couple of sentences, it already seemed like an incredible story,” Macri said.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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