When Indya Moore was 21, she had the same dreams as most mi♔llennials.
“ꦐI wanted a stable job, and I wanted to feel like I was grounded with my family, and to have personal relationships in my life that were healing and honest and genu♑ine,” Moore, now 23, tells The Post. “I felt a lot like Angel.”
Angel is the transgender sex worker and ballgoer Moore plays on “Pose,” Ryan Murphy’s new FX drama series premiering Sunday . She falls for Stan (Evan Peters), a married client who works at Trump Tower and picks her up on a Red Hook street corner. Instead of asking to have sex with her like ♔other johns, Stan takes her to a hotel room to talk ab🦋out what she wants in life.
“He’s asking her, ‘What are your values?’ This𒊎 is something she’s never been aske🐎d before,” says Moore, adding that she can relate to her character’s willingness to spend “so much emotional, romantic energy” on those who may not deserve it.
“People who have trouble finding acceptance and love in theirꦚ life settle for whatever they can get,” she🍌 says.
Moore had troඣuble finding acceptance while growing up in The Bronx. She faced transphobia in her community — she’s known about her identity since she was a toddler —🥃 and had to separate from her birth parents at the age of 14 to live in a series of foster homes.
“My [birth] parents loved me dearly, but we were having issues with my identity being [recognized at home],” says Moore. “Th♔ey thought I was essentially in harm’s way becaus🌃e of the way I existed.” Today, she has a better relationship with her parents, who attended the premiere party for “Pose.”
As a teen in the foster-care system, Moore w🔜as constantly shuttled around. She lived in all five boroughs — facing discrimination from neighbors and inside group homes along the way.
“People were so cruel because of the way I existed,” she says. “They may have known I was assigned male at birth, and they didn’t🅷 understand why I didn’t exist [as male] like I was [then].”
She dropped out of school at age 15, around the time that she started modeling for a fashio🐠n-photographer friend. She went on to pose for brands such as Gucci and Dior, and eventually earned her GED.
“There isn’t a lot of represen🎃tation [in media] for girls who look like me, so I do feel exci🌳ted in representing a different type of woman who exists through the clothes I wear,” she says of her modeling career.
Beyond small roles in music videos and indie films, she didn’t have a lot of acting experience when her agent received a casting notice for “Pose,” which was seekin🔯g trans actresses, in 2017.
At first, Moore wanted to audition for the role of Blanca, a scrappy ballgoer who, after being diagnosed with HIV, decides to form her own house, a close-knit group of queer people where one “mother” serves as a caregiver for “house ch♈ildren.” These houses compete against one another in lavish, underground drag balls where participants hit the catwalk and the winning team gets a trophy and bragging rights. In the series, Blanca’s costume ideas are undermined by her former house mother Elektra (Dominique Jackson).
“I felt Blanca was more humble. She was tired of the way she was being treated in her ball house,” says Moore. “Angel felt very shallow. I didn’t know much about her. She was just this pretty girl who wanted a normal life as a trans girl.💞”
But 🧔when she auditioned for Angel in front of Murphy and Bronx-ܫbased writer Steven Canals, Murphy knew this was the character she was meant to play.
“Ryan stood up and said, ‘I have nothing,’” she says. That meant no problems, no questions. They didn’t even ask her to take a screen test — she was ♋immediately offered the role.
Eventually, Moore foun𒈔d the humanity in her character.
“She has a mind of her own, she stays true to herself and she has a really big 🔥heart,” the 🙈actress says.
She prepared by taking weekly dance classes alongside her castmates. And to c🐈aptur♔e the era’s ’80s lingo, she channeled the voice of her Puerto Rican mother.
Moore is thankful for the fact that Murphy cast such a diverse group of people for the show — there are 140 trans acto🃏rs and crew members, as well as 35 non-trans LGBTQ characters.
“It reaffirmed how important representation [is when] people with power leverage their access to uplift voices that are less heard,” she says. “People of color and children of immigrants like myself … don’t get to be teachers, or leaders and actors … I think this shows marginalized people they can be anything they want to be.”
Mꦑoore is still filming the last two episodes of theಌ eight-episode series, and she’s gotten close with the cast and crew.
Her co-star, Jackso🉐n, was even Moore’s counselor at an after-school program for trans students when she was 14.
“She was one of 𒁏the first trans women I’d everꦬ seen,” says Moore.
“‘Pose’ feels like a family,” she continues. “I love them all. It’s just really beautiful to see everyone 🐠else evolve and trying to figure themselves out the same as I am.”