Anything's Possible star Eva Reign wants to be part of a revolution

As a child in Missouri, Eva Reign caught the acting bug from the Disney Channel. "I wanted to do what they were doing," she tells EW. At age 10, a theater workshop spurred her interest, but midway through high school, her own journey of self-discovery took hold, one that eventually brought her to New York, journalism and finally acting again.

"When I was younger, I would have loved to have seen someone like Kelsa," Reign, 26, says of her character in Billy Porter's directorial debut Anything's Possible, which follows an animal-loving trans high school senior (Reign) who catches the eye of Khal (Abubakr Ali), a classmate. "That would have made me feel so much more seen. It would have helped me."

Anything's Possible, a coming-of-age rom-com about a Black trans girl and a nerdy-but-cute Iranian teen boy, breaks new ground simply by existing. But this landmark film is just the beginning for its charismatic lead. "A lot of trans people are going to be happy to see this, because we haven't seen it before," Reign says. "It's also a story that is going to resonate with people who aren't trans. This is a time to really think about how they treat the trans people in their lives, whether you see a trans person every day or meet us randomly on the street."

Ali calls Porter an "actor's director," a description that Reign agrees with. "Billy would talk to every last one of us about what the character arcs look like, and not just the top five on the call sheet, but everyone," she shares. "What I learned from working with Billy is to really trust myself and to own my power. Every day he was trying to instill that in me and everyone around him."

Ultimately, Anything's Possible is a movie about love: love of family, in whatever form that takes, as well as romantic love. Audiences will be able to relate to how Kelsa's mother (played by Hamilton's Renée Elise Goldsberry) worries about her child, or how Khal's parents are laser-focused on his future. Kelsa's friends are fiercely protective, and of course, there's the budding romance between the two central characters. "We all could use a bit more of that," Reign says. "We could be more loving toward ourselves as well as those around us."

Reign sees art as inherently political: "Artists often times make [art] either in response to the culture or in opposition to it," she says. With its powerful Gen Z love story of two non-white teens, one of them trans, Anything's Possible is a step forward, and Reign hopes it's just the beginning. "A movie like this could have easily existed when I was young," she says. "It could have existed 20 years ago — it could have existed 50 years ago. It's just now we're in a place where people are ready to receive something like this and celebrate something like it."

What she wants to see next? Dozens more stories like it.

Anything's Possible launches today on Amazon Prime Video.

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