New Jersey native Micky Angelo Petrillo has a story to tell!  And, without a doubt, nobody can tell that story better than Micky himself: “At 59, I hit the ‘reset’ button on life!  Now, I’m thriving… and turning my story into a documentary.  It’s got laughter, love, and… second chances!”  Micky’s gender transition from female to male is the subject of an upcoming documentary named The Man I Was Born to Be, directed by his friend Andrew Rasmussen and featuring appearances by many of Micky’s family and friends.  A sneak preview of the movie enjoyed an exclusive premiere on Saturday, December 6th at his friend Ike Avelli’s variety show “50 Shades of Gay Takes on the Holidays” at New York City’s famous hotspot Copacabana.  

Micky took the time to speak with me about his latest project and why “It’s never too late to become yourself!”

JR: Hi, Micky!  Thank you so much for speaking with me. I have been wanting to interview you about your movie The Man I Was Born to Be for a long time. If I may ask, how old are you?

MP: I turned 62 on January 3rd!

JR: Congratulations!  So, what made this the right time to tell your story via the documentary?

MP: It happened because I got sexually assaulted in a Morocco airport in June of 2023.  When I came home, I couldn’t go out of the house.  I had double D boobs and I was afraid I’d get attacked again.  So, I was frightful to go out. I put on an ACE bandage.  I was trying to flatten myself.  Then I did research and found a binder.  Once I put the binder on, I looked in the mirror and was like, “Holy shit!  I LIKE me!  This is great!  What is this?” I could never look in the mirror before. I didn’t know what “transgender” was.  I had no idea.  This was in June.  I went through therapy, I did all the research, found the doctors I needed, and in September I saw the surgeon.  They put me in for surgery for December 27th.  I saw the hormone specialist, and he got me on hormones. In October I started by name change, and that became legalized on December 20th.  So, within six months, everything was done.  Remember, I didn’t even know any transgender people at the time.  I was so happy because I had never even thought twice about what was happening to me.  I just thought, “This is ME!  This is who I was meant to be.”  And I was on such a high, because I got so much support and love on social media.  But my therapist passed away two weeks before my  surgery.  I had her for 25 years.  We had written a statement that I would put out on social media.  I wanted to take control of the narrative.   On the day that it became legal on December 20, I wrote “I’m proud to announce that my legal name now is Micky Angelo Petrillo.  You don’t have to understand it.  I don’t have to explain it.  If you can’t respect it, please move on.”  I had hundreds and hundreds of people saying I was courageous.  That gave me the strength within me to say, “You know what?  This is the reason I was put on Earth.  I finally know my purpose.”  I have a sense of humor, so I was putting my story up there– all the silly things that were happening– for people to see.  People were loving it.  They were like, “Write a book, do a podcast, whatever…”  I figured that through humor, I could change their minds about trans people.  So I was going to write a book.  I was putting this book together– getting a ghostwriter and everything– and then this woman (We will call her “H”.) contacted me about doing a movie instead.  That’s the one who took my $20,000!

JR: Yeah… not to interrupt, but honestly, that’s what bothered me the most out your whole story: the fact that you got screwed over like that.  

MP: I was going to go with the book.  I felt it was humorous but SHE was the one who reached out to ME through other channels.  She said something like, “We can do the book.  We can do this or do that.  But personally, you won’t make anything on the book. We could do something like a reality show or a documentary!”  But I believed at the time that documentaries were dark and yucchy. No! She then said that a movie would be “the quickest and the best way to do this, and it would make the most money.”  I was like, “Wow!  Somebody wants to do a movie about ME?!” We negotiated this $20,000 that I would pay over six months, and give her 50% of the IP.  When I got on the phone with the three of us, I said, “No, you’re NOT getting 50%!  This is MY story!”

JR: Damn! 50%?  Usually agents get a standard commission of 10%!

MP: What did I know?  I was like, “Why am I paying her for MY story?”  I never understood that.  We spent hours and hours talking and video chatting and everything.  I mean, she was already talking about what I’d be wearing on the red carpet, and how Laurie Metcalf would be perfect as my mother. 

JR: Well, I LOVE Laurie Metcalf, but I don’t think we should be talking about casting befire we even have a script! (Laughs)

MP: Agreed. So she was doing all this stuff, and putting all this shit in my head– but I never even saw a page or even a paragraph.  I wanted to see what her writing was like, and she was always like, “Oh, I’m working on it, I’m working on it… I’ll have it this week, I’ll have it that week.” But I wasn’t getting anything.  I started to get a little frustrated.  She had me putting everything in this Super Excel thing online.  I put all this stuff in there, and then I was like, “Why am I doing all this stuff? YOU do it!  You’re the one getting paid!”

JR: Wow.  That raises so many red flags already.  I know from my own experience that you need to have a finished script and secure funding before you can think about things like casting.  And before you shoot one single frame of footage, you have to know where you’re going with the project first.  Fuck “casting”!

MP: And fuck what I’m wearing on the red carpet!  She was putting all of this in my head to “keep me going”– and God forbid I was a day late in my payment!  I had to put it in her personal checking account.  She knew I didn’t have that kind of money.  I was selling my grandmother’s jewelry and selling my father’s stuff.  Once she got the final payment, she just turned into someone else.  She said she’d have the script, but then it wasn’t ready.  Then we did a sit-down for the script.  It starts out with “me” in Aruba, in the ocean, with women’s feet.  All you see are a woman’s feet dangling in the ocean.  And in the end, it’s a man’s feet dangling. (Sarcastically) Oh, that is SO compelling.  I REALLY need to see that! (Laughs)  She never even finished the script.  But for 80 pages, she never even mentioned ME.  I was like, “Uhm… excuse me?!”  She was so excited, but I was like, “No! That’s not it at all!”  I wanted it to start out with me in the courthouse with some close friends of mine.  The opening scene would be me standing in front of the judge.  And the judge says, “Michele Angela Petrillo is now Micky Angelo Petrillo!”… and he stamps the paperwork with a gold seal.  You see my friends behind me clapping.  The judge says, “Order in the court! Order in the court!”  I go over and get my paperwork, and then go outside with my friends.  You see a moment of them remembering me as a kid in the playground.  They come over to me, as if to say, “Good bye Michele, hello Micky!” They each come up to me with a memory and then embrace me as Micky.  She hated it. She said that I had never been to a courtroom.  But this was always the way it was done.  Because my experience was during COVID, that’s why it wasn’t done that way for my case.

JR: But it’s YOUR story.  I don’t know how this would work legally, but I would think that you should have a lot of say in what was going on with your own story.  What you say goes!  Put it this way: Let’s say you had NO budget to make this project.  You wouldn’t be paying anybody.  You’d be doing all of this yourself.  Then you’d have NO choice but to make all the decisions yourself.  In that case, it would be the most authentic of all.  I mean, I know it COULD work.  Lets say she wrote a story which was a generalized story about transitioning, or even just an allegory for being trans: It would be less individualized and less “your story”– but it could be “relatable”, as much as I hate that word!  I mean, no one says that your story HAS to be relatable!  Why should it be?  Again, it’s YOUR story.  But that’s the only rationale I could see for hiring her to write your story for you: for so called “mass appeal” and to make it more “marketable”! (Laughs)

MP: She was very upset because I didn’t like what she wrote.  First of all, she didn’t write the story.  AI did. 

JR: Eeeew!

MP: I wanted to see everything she had. She accidentally sent me in a Dropbox folder that accidentally had the AI notes of The Man I Was Born to Be (Laughs).  We had a contract.  I have a friend who’s a lawyer and a partner in the #5 entertainment law firm in the United States. This was breach of contract.  We reached out to “H” and told her that six people in “the business” read the script and couldn’t make it past the third page.  It did NOT go by the Screenwriter’s Bible.  It was not a script, not a screenplay, NOTHING!  You couldn’t even tell it was ABOUT ME!  If we have to go to court, it will become public— and I don’t think she’d want the public to know that she wrote this garbage.  We have reached out to “H”, and she wont return calls. 

JR: (SIGH) I’m so sorry to hear all this.

MP: I was ready to give up. I was like, “This is it. I put too much into it. I can’t do this anymore!”  It was Andrew.  He was the first person to believe in me.  He was already a friend, but was working on something else at the time. Then he said, “Get your ass up.  We are going to Jersey City and we are going to see the documentary I’m Your Venus”, because Dominique Jackson was involved with that.  I met Dominique before.  She and everyone else involved with the documentary was telling me that my story needed to be told.  There are no trans men stories out there; Trans men feel that they can “pass”, so they don’t want to get out there and say anything or do anything, and it can be hard to get their stories.  Andrew believes in this story so much.  He knows me inside and out just from being a friend.  I got rejuvenated.  Now, I have to promote MYSELF.  I can’t rely on “H” anymore.  This story, especially now, needs to be told.  Our kids are committing suicide.  They. are afraid that their medications will be taken away. They don’t want to go backwards.  So, this needs to get out.   But this movie isn’t just about being transgender.  This is a mainstream movie.  It’s about people relating to what I’m going through: a family member disowning you, “legally extracting” you, whatever…    Anybody could have that happen to them, whether you’re gay, straight, Jewish, Catholic, whatever.  That could happen to anybody for any reason.  Also, it’s humorous.  It’s to change the way people perceive the trans community– through humor and through their connection with me.  I have a lot to say.  I think my personality can grab attention.  And I know that I’ve changed people’s lives from people coming up to me.  Maybe I think too highly of myself, but I think I do have a message and that I can get it across to some people before this trans community is totally destroyed.  I’ll answer any questions. When I came out, I said to my friends and to Genny (AKA Mom) that I had no idea what I’m doing here. I don’t know anyone that’s gone through this, so let’s go through this together. Any questions, let me know. If I don’t know the answers, I will ask the doctors. So let’s do this together!

JR: I’m so glad that I got to hear your story.  And remember, documentaries do not HAVE to be “dark and yucchy”! (Laughs) I personally love documentaries. I watch about two per week. I am VERY looking forward to seeing yours!

MP: I DON’T like documentaries! (Laughs) But Andrew is doing it in a different way. He said to me,  There is no actress or actor that can play both parts. It’s got to be YOU! You are the story. It’s your personality that makes this what it is. It’s the silly things that you go through everyday. When we were in that bar on Transgender Day of Remembrance, I was sitting there trying to fix my bra straps. I haven’t worn a bra in over 2 years! Why was I doing that? So it’s the silly things like that. Nothing is staged. I don’t want them ever to interview people. There is over 20 hours of video. All they do is follow me around. I’ve invited people who I felt are important to the project, to get their views. But we just sit there and talk and be honest with each other. We ask hard questions. But I won’t answer any “below the belt” questions. That’s one thing I won’t talk about: what’s going on down there. But ask me anything else. We taped a lot of footage and narrowed it down to the important stuff. I never get to see anything! I haven’t even seen the footage yet. I do a lot of voiceovers. So, it is not going to be dark and gloomy at all; Andrew convinced me of that. No interviews. When my cousin was talking, he kept looking into the camera. I had to keep moving his face and say, “Look at ME! Just me and you are talking in front of my grandparents home. Don’t look at the camera!” Because I don’t want that. I just want them following me around on my daily routine. You don’t know what it will ever come out of my mouth! And you don’t know what people will say back! 

JR: This all sounds fascinating. So, finally, for those who have not yet donated to the Crowdfundr campaign or volunteered in other ways, how can people help you with bringing The Man I Was Born to Be to the big screen?

MP: The best way is helping with the Crowdfundr page.  There were already like 110 people who believe in me and believe in my story. There were even some strangers who donated anonymously, because they are afraid of repercussions. I’ve raised almost $6,000 already.  So, it’s just about money right now.  Nobody involved has taken a dime. Andrew does so, so much. One of those things is to keep me in line!  He is always reminding me, “One step at a time!”

JR: So true.  And you need to remind yourself that it will  be worth it!  Nobody knows better than you that some things are worth waiting for!

Visit Micky Petrillo’s Crowdfundr page here: