kid cudi told trans actors looking for work to hit him up. the replies turned into an open audition.

Photo: Kid Cudi performing in 2009. Jaime Rivera from San Francisco, CA, US, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Complex, Remezcla, Deadline and Kid Cudi's own post on X

"If you are a trans actor looking for work, holla at me." That is the whole post. Kid Cudi put it on X at about 1:20 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, with a prayer-hands emoji and a heart on fire, and by lunchtime it had nearly 7,000 likes and a few hundred replies that read like a waiting room.

The timing is why people noticed. On Wednesday he had announced on Instagram that he will write, direct and star as Jean-Michel Basquiat in a film called Jean, Complex and Remezcla report. "For years people have asked me about playing Jean Michel Basquiat in a film. But no project actually came to be," he wrote. "This year, I finally said f*ck it, ima write it myself." He called it "a love letter to Jean, the 80s and NY city," and posted wardrobe-test photos in a wig that Complex called an "uncanny resemblance." Deadline says the post flagged filming for 2027.

which movie is it for

He did not say, and we are not going to say it for him. Jean is not his only film. He is also making Doe, his directing debut, and the horror thriller Wrong Number with Barbie Ferreira, per Cover Media. The post names no project, no role and no casting process. It is an open door with no address on it, which is honestly the most Kid Cudi way to run a casting department.

The replies did not need an address. One woman wrote that she was a few months into her transition and would take a small part or a spot as a background extra. He quoted her an hour later: "Ima hit u Claire!" Another, @payphoneexhibit, told him it was her 21st birthday in 40 minutes and that she is "a trans playwright and actress," which is the most efficient pitch we have ever read.

Basquiat died in 1988 at 27. Jeffrey Wright played him in 1996, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. has the role in the separate film Samo Lives. Whether trans actors end up in Jean or in a phone thriller, a working rapper-director publicly asking for them, in a year like this one, is a sentence we are happy to print.