Sweet Talkin’ Guy might be a short film, but it packs a punch. In it, Dylan Wardwell (aka Miss Dylan), the director and star of the short, plays Dylan. She’s a transgender who goes on three consecutive dates with straight men. And as these men grapple with their fragile masculinity and spiral into a monologue heavy sexual identity crisis, Dylan watches. It goes further than that too. She watches and says nothing.
At first glance, it seems odd that Dylan doesn’t speak. But it’s part of the social commentary where she is seen as the object of their desire instead of a fully formed person. But it’s also a showcase of portraying the trans experience on screen and not making it infinitely violent for shock value or a passing moment that is meant to check a box. Dylan isn’t a box to be checked.
Fangirlish spoke with Dylan and Spencer Wardwell, the latter being the formers brother, about their short film Sweet Talkin’ Guy. While they were both directors, Dylan was the one who took lead and came up with this idea. And like most great stories, the premise of Sweet Talkin’ Guy came from person experience for Dylan.
“It’s loosely related to a laughable experience that I’ve had of men trying to take me home and like freaking out about the implications and what it means for their identity,” Dylan explained. In the short film every single guy, no matter if they were on Dylan’s bed or out on a date, was trying to justify the idea of being with Dylan.
“I think in a way they were trying to justify why they were doing this or like there was something wrong,” Dylan added before following it up with the most satirical part of Sweet Talkin’ Guy. Because not only are they trying to justify being with Dylan. The men are trying to justify it to themselves. “They’re no trying to convince me that they see me as a woman. They’re trying to convince themselves. They’re not really talking to me.”
Just because Dylan wasn’t saying anything verbally, doesn’t mean she wasn’t saying things with her face. There was boredom, exasperation, and a feeling of “not this again” while remaining utterly poised. When we asked about that, Dylan said that all those reactions came easy to her. “It felt pretty organic to real life […] and it was nice to have Spencer behind the camera.”
For Spencer, when Dylan came to him with the idea for the short film, he was all in. “I just thought it was a great idea and it would make for an excellent short film. And I just helped her breathe life into it.” And Dylan, like any good sister, was there to hype up her brother as he took a back seat to help create her vision. She said, “I got lucky and brother has studied filmmaking for his whole life. He’s been a very talented filmmaker.”
The filming wasn’t the only thing that was spot on for Sweet Talkin’ Guy. So was the editing. Dylan said, “There was lot of it where we didn’t even have any dialogue or we were just like thinking of reactions on the fly and then our wonderful editor Mario [Fierro] was able to piecemeal all these snippets into this. There was a lot of work that went into that. The editing was really spot on.”
And with Women’s History Month just ending, Trans Visibility Day being on March 31st, and the rights of women (yes, trans women are women) being threatened everyday, there’s an added important to this short film. We have to keep creating and, in Spencer’s words, “tell the stories you want to tell, tell the stories that you want portrayed on screen.” Not just trauma ones either. Tell stories of light, humor, satire. And tell stories that center on the transgender people as they are and not what you think they are.
Sweet Talkin’ Guy premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2025.
Have you watched Sweet Talkin’ Guy? Let us know in the comments below!
Queerly Not Straight posts Saturdays (most of the time) with opinion pieces, listicals, reviews, and more focused on the LGBT community.
