When Hollywood star Will Ferrell received an email from his old friend Harper Steele a couple of years ago, telling him that she would be transitioning to live as a woman, he had many burning questions.

Will their friendship change? What made her keep this in for so long? And the biggie: “Does she still like rubbish beer or is she just totally into wine now?”

Will invited Harper on a road trip across the US so they could figure out “what this all means for us” and spend time hanging out at bars, diners and sports arenas – places Harper had always enjoyed going to before transitioning but wasn’t sure how welcome she would be now.

Their 16-day excursion from New York City to Santa Monica, California, is the subject of Josh Greenbaum’s new Netflix documentary Will & Harper.

Will tells the BBC he began to think more about how he could support Harper after she sent him a follow-up email announcing her name and asking him to “do your best to kind of stand up for me”.

“If I’m truly as good a friend as I think I am to her, I want to show her that [support] in what I hope will be a fun journey for us,” he explains.

“It was kind of earth-shattering news to receive. And I assumed it would feel roughly the same, in terms of our friendship. But I didn’t know for sure.

“Selfishly… I thought this could be a great opportunity for me to ask all these questions… and to give Harper the opportunity to educate me.”

The pair met when they were both hired in the same week by US TV show Saturday Night Live back in 1995.

Harper went on to become chief writer and championed Will when some others at SNL didn’t feel he quite made the grade at first.

Harper says: “If it was just payback for me supporting him earlier, he would be done now. This [supporting her as a trans woman] is far and above what I gave to him.”

She had been on countless long car trips and loved the open road, but this was her first cross-country journey since transitioning.

“Yeah, it is daunting,” Harper says.

“And I do like to point out that my experience going across the country with a famous actor and a camera crew is quite different than a trans person going across the country solo.

“Also I have money. I can travel in a safer way. So there’s a lot there that doesn’t speak to a trans experience. Was I afraid of what I might find out there? Of course I was.”

In one scene, Harper enters an Oklahoma bar that looks potentially hostile. She wants to try it out on her own. Will is outside on standby. It’s mostly locals and there are pro-Trump and anti-Biden flags on the walls.

Will joins her, and when Harper is referred to as a man by someone on introduction, she corrects them firmly but kindly, backed up by Will. And the conversation moves on.

But as Harper notes, the cameras and the famous face offer some protection during such encounters – there are similar experiences at a racetrack and a basketball game. So did it ensure the people they met were on their best behaviour?

“I don’t really know,” says Will. “Yes, it’s an artificial environment for sure.

“At the same time, once people asked that initial question of, what are you doing here, what are you filming, it melts away and you do settle into conversing with these people in a way that I think would have existed if there weren’t cameras there.”

But being in a goldfish bowl can also have the opposite effect, as demonstrated in a scene in a huge Texas steakhouse where the friends stop off for dinner.

Will dresses up randomly as Sherlock Holmes (the kind of buffoonery his fans adore) and attempts the 72oz steak challenge. But it starts to feel uncomfortable pretty quickly as crowds gather around them to watch his attempt and film it on their phones.

The film flashes up some derogatory social media comments towards Harper, and Will says he feels he has let her down.

The following day, the pair read some of the posts over a beer. “When you’re trans, you ingest a lot of that rubbish,” Harper says. “Those tweets sit in my head.”

Harper tells the BBC she’s “extremely conscious” of the toxicity around much of the transgender/gender debate.

“I think the politicians are pushing these things to try to get votes, and I think the press is leaping on it because polarisation somehow helps numbers.

“And I understand that there are people in their basements and people who are angry and they want to lash out. But on the whole, I believe people are kind, and letting a person live their truth should be everyone’s goal.”

While there are obviously some very heavy conversations in the film, there are plenty of hilarious moments as well (watch out for Dunkin’ Donuts), something its director was keen to showcase.

“I had 240 hours of footage!” Greenbaum says. “They are very funny people. Even in the deeper, more emotional conversations, they inherently, seven out of 10 times, would make a joke inside of those.

“Comedians are famous for using their comedy to mask real emotions, but obviously that fear went away very early on… I wasn’t sure to what degree they would open up… but they really go there.”

So does Harper still just drink rubbish beer?

“I don’t know if it’s the oestrogen,” she jokes, “but I do prefer wine now.”

Nicola Bulley’s partner has described the social media focus and online obsession with her disappearance as a “monster” that got out of control.

Speaking publicly for the first time since Nicola’s body was found, Paul Ansell tells the BBC the family felt the initial wave of interest in the case was a positive thing.

They hoped it would keep the pressure on Lancashire Police to keep searching for her, he says. But that was quickly overtaken by a wave of amateur social media sleuths, posting hurtful and wildly misleading claims about the case – with the family receiving online hate.

“I think anything like that is a double-edged sword,” he adds. “That’s the problem. You’re poking a monster.”

The Lancashire mother-of-two disappeared on 27 January 2023 while walking her dog in St Michael’s on Wyre, shortly after dropping her daughters off at school.

Her body was found in a river on 19 February and an inquest in June last year found she had died due to accidental drowning.

A documentary, called the Search For Nicola Bulley, explores the media coverage and the impact of amateur internet sleuths conducting their own investigations, as well as hearing from Lancashire Police and Nicola’s family.

The Friday morning of her disappearance was “normal”, Paul tells the documentary.

He says Nicola left at about 08:30am to take their two children to school with the family’s dog, Willow.

When she didn’t return at the usual time, Paul says he wasn’t overly worried. But at about 10:30am the children’s school rang to say somebody had found their dog and Nicola’s phone by a bench.

“I mean, that’s not a normal phone call to get,” he tells the documentary. “She would never have left Willow.”

He says he knew “something isn’t right here” and recalls feeling like he was having a panic attack.

“It’s where you feel like your legs have gone. In a situation like that, your mind is going absolutely crazy. And so I rang the police as I was driving.”

“That Friday, I was just sat at my desk, and I got a phone call from Paul,” Louise Cunningham, Nicola’s sister tells the documentary. “And he was panicky and frantic, and he was like, ‘something’s happened, something strange has happened’.”

The documentary hears the turmoil the family went through as the search for Nicola intensified – and the impact it had on Nicola and Paul’s young children.

“One morning, I got up,” Nicola’s mother, Dorothy, tells the programme. “The youngest one, she says: ‘Cold, isn’t it, Nanny?’ She said: ‘I hope mummy’s not cold and hungry’.”

“The nights were the hardest,” Paul remembers of the search. ”In the morning the hope would be strong. It used to go dark at like 4pm.

“It used to get to about 3pm and then I’d start panicking that I knew it would start going dark in an hour. So we had an hour to find her.

“And then obviously I’d have the girls. The first they’d do when they came out of school was run over and say ‘have we found mummy?”

As the search for Nicola continued, so-called ‘amateur detectives’ began travelling to Lancashire to see what they could find.

As their fascination with the case spiralled, police became increasingly concerned they might interfere with the investigation.

At the same time, the amount of online hate focussed on the family began to get worse.

“I was getting direct messages from people that I’ve never met – they don’t know me, they don’t know us, they don’t know Nicky,” Paul says now.

He was told “you can’t hide” and “we know what you did”. Unable to reply, he says he felt “silenced”.

“On top of the trauma of the nightmare that we’re in, to then think that all these horrendous things are being said about me towards Nicky – everyone has a limit.”

Days before she was found, Lancashire Police told the public Nicola had “significant issues” with alcohol brought on by her ongoing struggles with the menopause.

“It’s not uncommon to go through it young,” Louise tells the documentary. “But Nicky had it tough. And then, I guess, over about a three-week period in total, she just wasn’t functioning like normal Nicky.”

Paul describes how Nicola developed trouble sleeping. “The lack of sleep, irritability, brain fog – she’d be awake for hours in the night, hot sweats every single day. Everything was becoming difficult.”

The family says Nicola stopped taking her HRT over that period and began having a drink to deal with it.

“It was literally normal, weird blip. That’s the most honest answer I can give you,” Louise says.

Police officers investigating Nicola’s disappearance felt they had to release personal information about her struggle with the menopause and drinking.

“Because of the commentary that was coming up on social media, Paul was just key to a lot of people’s theories, and we had to negate that,” says Det Supt Rebecca Smith, who played a key role in the investigation.

The family were not happy about Nicola’s alcohol and menopause struggles being revealed to the public, with Paul saying Nicola would have been “mortified” about the information being shared.

“Went mad again, didn’t it, in the media,” recalls Louise. Nicola’s family criticised parts of the press for what they described as “absolutely appalling” conduct.

The family’s worst fears came true on 19 February, three weeks after Nicola’s disappearance, when police were called to reports of a body in the River Wyre.

Visibly upset, Det Supt Smith tells the documentary about the moment Nicola was found and describes sitting in a police tent with her body “for quite a long time until she was taken to hospital.”

Reliving the moment the family was informed about Nicola’s body being found, Louise says: “I’ll never forget dad coming into the kitchen. Just, like, completely breaking down and Paul being out in the garden. Just in a complete state.”

“I’ll never forget the cries,” says Nicola’s dad Ernest, who describes hugging his son-in-law Paul as they tried to process the devastating news.

Last year, a coroner recorded Ms Bulley’s death as accidental, saying she had fallen into the river and suffered “cold water shock”, and there was “no evidence” to suggest suicide.

Police accused people on TikTok of “playing private detectives” in the area, and said they had been “inundated with false information, accusations and rumours” relating to the case.

“It doesn’t always have to be something sinister linked to something that happens,” Louise says.

“Sometimes bad things just happen. I just wish it didn’t happen to us. We’re just a normal family. We’ve had a really tough time.”

Paul says he still sees Nicola in the faces of the couple’s two daughters.

“I see her in the girls every single day. I see all these little mannerisms in them and I’m like ‘that was Mummy, you know?’ And that is worth everything, I think.”

• The Search for Nicola Bulley will be broadcast on BBC One on October 3rd at 21:00 BST and on BBC iPlayer