[Answered ]-DRF APITestCase force_authenticate make request.user return tuple instead of User object

The problem is not force_authenticate but get_or_create method. It returns tuple. First element of the tuple is object and second one is boolean indicating if object was created or not. To fix change your code in setUp method to this:

def setUp(self):
      # self.factory = APIRequestFactory()
      self.user, _ = models.User.objects.get_or_create(
                username='test_user_1',
                uid='test_user_1',
                defaults={'agent_type': 1}
            )