Laverne Cox introduced Rihanna at the Billboard Music Awards Sunday night. She also chatted with ET about her upcoming role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Fox’s reboot of the cult-classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

There’s been some trepidation about Cox in the role of a crossing-dressing cisgender man, since the project was announced last October. Due to her being a transgender woman there’s confusion in mainstream culture about the differences between the identities. And others are just plain upset that a remake is happening PERIOD.

Within 24 hours of the film’s trailer premiering on YouTube, it had gotten more than a 250,000 views, with the Likes and Dislikes being 50/50.

Cox says she has given the film “250 percent” and she’s hopeful audiences will respond positively to it,

“People can be very… challenging and critical, but I put everything I had into this. Rocky Horror is sacred to people. It’s the longest-running movie in theater history, in movie history. For 41 years, people have been going to midnight showings and dressing up, and there’s been shadow casts all over the world. It means so much to so many people.”

Cox, of course, is one of the most highly visible transgender people in Hollywood, as the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Besides Rocky Horror, she will also appear in the fourth season of the show that launched her, Orange Is The New Black and, will reportedly make history as part of the new CBS show Doubt, which will be the first broadcast series, according to Deadline, “featuring a transgender series regular character played by a transgender actor.“

The Rocky Horror Picture Show will premiere on Fox on Halloween.

(via Huffington Post)