‘Will & Harper’: Inside the Steakhouse Scene Will Ferrell Now Regrets

“I love this country so much. I just don’t know if it loves me back right now,” says Harper Steele, the former Saturday Night Live writer who goes on a cross-country road trip with her longtime friend Will Ferrell in their new documentary, Will & Harper, now streaming on Netflix.

After Steele transitioned into being a woman, she and Ferrell decided to navigate their new dynamic by traveling from New York to California—stopping in parts of the country that may have been a bit less welcoming to trans people along the way. Their experience in the film is largely joyful—a feel-good karaoke scene in Illinois, a heartfelt trip to Steele’s childhood home in Iowa, and even a positive outcome upon entry to an Oklahoma dive bar where a “Fuck Biden” poster hangs on the wall.

But things turn prickly in Texas when Ferrell and Steele visit Big Texan Steak Ranch—an Amarillo restaurant where a 72-ounce cut of steak is free if patrons can scarf it down in under an hour. Ferrell decides that this will be the perfect place to dust off a prop he’s brought along on the trip: the Sherlock Holmes costume from his 2018 flop Holmes & Watson. “Ladies and gentleman, the world’s greatest private investigator, Sherlock Holmes,” he declares in full regalia, taking a seat in the restaurant opposite Steele as one customer shouts “Ricky Bobby!” in their direction.

What begins as a comedic stunt soon begins to feel claustrophobic. When an employee publicly announces Ferrell and Steele’s presence, he stumbles over calling her “Ms.” Dozens of cellphones and curious stares fixate on the pair from all angles. “I’m eating out of nervousness,” Steele admits, the music turning as ominous as the room itself. “As much as I’ve been in a fishbowl in various times in my life,” Ferrell replies, “this trumps all of it.”

While footage of this doesn’t appear in the documentary, Steele also took an opportunity to raise a glass—and an important issue—that night. An outtake on social media shows Steele toasting “to your great state of Texas” before telling the crowd, “I wish you guys would do more for trans rights in this state,” as the room fell silent. “It went dead, completely dead,” she added. “That’s not how we treat you up in Iowa.” One woman shouts, “We still love you,” a remark that didn’t sit well with Steele.

“I hate the phrase,” she later told The New York Times. “I could be misinterpreting this woman completely, but this is the feeling I had in the room: The ‘still’ is conditional. You still love me when I finally give up being trans and give my life over to Christ. They still love me even though I’m some kind of sinner or something. I felt that.”

The film’s director, Josh Greenbaum, told The Guardian how the moment affected his stars: “That was a learning point, certainly for Will, that not all attention is good attention, particularly for those in the trans community. It was an unforeseen error, but I didn’t want to then sweep that under the rug and not include it. A huge part of the trans experience is that there is just a massive amount of hatred, a lot of it online.”

Ferrell and Steele leave the establishment without incident. The following day, though, they’re greeted by transphobic social media attacks that are included in the film. One outlet notes the “awkward reaction” Ferrell and Steele received at the restaurant, which posted about the visit on its various social media accounts but did not identify or highlight Steele. (Vanity Fair has reached out to the Big Texan Steak Ranch for comment.)

“The room started to feel very wrong to me,” Steele says in the film, the day after their experience. “I was feeling a little like my transness was on display, I guess, and suddenly that sort of made me feel not great.” Ferrell grows emotional, tearing up as he tells his friend, “I feel like I let you down in that moment, you know? I was like, Oh shit, we gotta worry about Harper’s safety.”