Tessa Thompson Stuns In Visually Enthralling First Look At ‘Hedda’

Well-behaved women seldom make history

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

We’re certainly intrigued by Nia DaCosta‘s visually enthralling Hedda starring Tessa Thompson as a high society socialite who finds herself ensnared in a lusty conundrum which unfolds over the course of one particularly charged evening.

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, Hedda Gabler, the provocative reimagining smolders when Hedda—a bored newlywed with long-repressed desires—pulls herself and everyone around her into a spiral of manipulation, passion, and betrayal.

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

“Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out,” said DaCosta in an interview with Vanity Fair. “She just feels like everyone is cowardly, everyone’s lying. She has this deepening emptiness inside of her that makes her do things she doesn’t understand—and she is living in a world that she doesn’t get.”

Check out the trailer below:

Premiering at the famed Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, Hedda will surely be the talk of Hollywood as the latest Oscar contender with a Black lead and director (Sinners).

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

“She’s so brilliant at playing characters who have a roiling ocean inside of them but have to keep a façade,” said DaCosta about Thompson. “She’s just really great at that tension.”

In an intriguing twist, DaCosta swapped Hedda’s ex-flame (who also happens to be competing with her husband for a coveted teaching gig) from a man to a woman which proves to be rather interestinggg in the trailer.

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

“You do have this extra layer of another thing that these women are fighting against to just feel like they’re people who matter in the eyes of the men that tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” said DaCosta about the change.

“This made it more potent, more powerful, and also more unfortunately tragic.”

Written and directed by DaCosta (Candyman, Little Woods, and The Marvels), the buzzy film also stars Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock, and Nina Hoss.

Source: Amazon MGM Studios

Hedda opens in select theaters on Oct. 22 and premieres on Prime Video Oct. 29.