No Hedda Gabler slander will be tolerated as long as Tessa Thompson is around.
“I still have moments where people will say something about her and I’m like, ‘Don’t talk about my friend that way,’ ” admits the actress, who plays the calculating titular character in Hedda, Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 19th century play, streaming on Prime Video. “I have a tremendous amount of empathy, not just because I’ve played her, but also because I’ve had to interrogate these things that I think exist in all of us. As a Black woman, there’s a lot of leftover rage that we don’t always allow ourselves the access to feel and express because if we do, we get categorized as all sorts of things.”
Thompson’s Hedda is wrestling with the societal box she’s been placed in, seeking wealth and a sexual agency as a queer woman during the 1950s that rarely comes unattached to a man — one of the many frustrations that causes her to lash out, often cruelly, at the guests attending the party at her English estate around which the film is centered.
“I’ve had young women say to me, ‘I’m such a Hedda,’ and I don’t think they mean that they’re going around shooting guns or burning manuscripts,” says Thompson. “I think what they mean is that they have some part of them that also acts on impulse, that also wants to walk into a room and take up space. And those qualities are actually really admirable.” THR recently caught up with Thompson.
Nia DaCosta talked to different actresses who’d played Hedda during her writing process. Did you talk to anyone, outside of your co-star Nina Hoss, who played her as part of your prep?
I first sat down in New York City at Lincoln Center in the library, in the theater archives there. I have a long history of doing this just for fun. I love theater so much — if there’s a production that I’ve heard of from the ’60s or ’70s or any time that I didn’t get to New York to see, I always try to see if there’s an archive and I can watch it. So I first started there, and I watched anything I could get my hands on. Then I spent another two weeks in London and watched European archives of all these performances. One of my favorite performances of Hedda — there were many that I thought were incredible — was Fiona Shaw, and I told Nia, and Nia happened to be out and ran into Fiona Shaw and went right up to her and said, “I’m doing an adaptation of Hedda Gabler. Tessa Thompson is going to play Hedda, and she was just raving about your Hedda.” Miraculously, Fiona Shaw said, “Does she want to have breakfast?” So, then I got this text message: “Fiona Shaw wants to have breakfast with you.” I was like, “Oh my God!” So, we sat and had this sort of Hedda breakfast, and she told me about her experience playing her, and she was so generous and lovely. Nina said that when she did Tár with Cate [Blanchett], they spoke a lot about Hedda — of course they both played her — and Cate said there should be a conference for all the women who have played Hedda Gabler. So, I might actually throw a party and see how many Heddas we can get in the room.
Hedda’s accent is a big piece of embodying this character. What went into perfecting her voice?
I knew that I wanted to take a big swing because this is a woman who I think is caught in a kind of performance. And there is a performance of class and high society, particularly in that time in the U.K. in the 1950s, that to a modern sensibility, I think, feels really mannered but was actually quite prevalent. And, funnily, I think the higher in society you were, the less you opened your mouth at the time. (Laughs.) Like, you don’t even have to bother to express oneself when you have that kind of proximity to wealth. Hedda isn’t quite that, but I think she’s reaching at that. I love the musicality of the voice. And I really loved watching period things from that time and listening to people that were closer to the Queen’s English, which we didn’t go completely in that direction but certainly sampled from some of those sounds.
Tessa Thompson stars as the cunningly aspirational Hedda Gabler in Amazon MGM Studios’ Hedda.
Courtesy of Prime
Hedda’s story is so much more about class, sexual identity and womanhood than it is her race. What did that allow in terms of storytelling?
It allowed it to be kind of textural as opposed to incredibly apparent. And I think that is the truth of most of our human experience. Anytime I walk through the world, I walk through the world as, obviously, a Black woman, and it’s hugely a part of my experience, but it isn’t the totality of it. I really liked that it became a texture in the piece. But it also becomes really important because this is a portrait of a woman who has made life choices, and she wakes up in a life that doesn’t feel like her own or isn’t the life maybe that she wanted. There’s a line in Nia’s first film [Little Woods] that “your choices are only as good as your options.” And I think her optionality at that time as a Black woman, a queer woman, is very limited. So I think that also allows you hopefully to have some empathy for her and also for the choices that we all make. I think sometimes the older you get, you realize that your life is basically a combination of all the choices that you’ve made over a lifetime. And sometimes you’re like, “Goodness, I might’ve made a different choice then.” But hopefully you can look at where you were then and what your optionality was and have some empathy for the choices that you did make. And the only thing you can hope for is that when you realize maybe that you’re inside of a life that doesn’t feel like it’s completely the life that you would choose today, that you can make better choices moving forward. That’s the thing that sadly Hedda can’t do, but at the end of the film, unlike in Ibsen’s original play, she has the opportunity to. We can only hope that she will.
Did you film any alternate endings?
Nia, when she sat down to write, really knew what the piece was. The only thing she didn’t know for sure is whether or not Hedda would die. She always knew Eileen [Hoss] would live, but she wasn’t sure about Hedda. So in the first draft that she sent me, Hedda dies at the end, she drowns and then — spoiler — over the course of rewriting, she decided eventually that Hedda would live. That came from a series of conversations with our brilliant producers, Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner at Plan B. They asked her, “What do you want audiences to feel?” “What are we saying by her dying?” And when Nia started to investigate that, she thought, “What am I saying? I just always assumed it was a foregone conclusion that it would end in the way that the original did, but maybe there’s something else here.” When we went to shoot (laughs), I did say, for safety, “Listen, should we do one when we’re done — obviously, because it’s a reset for hair and makeup — where I dip down [like I’m drowning], and she said, “It can’t hurt. Let’s do it.” So we do it a couple times, and you know me, if there were time, I would just keep doing it over and over again. But we were losing light. And I’ll tell you what, the universe, people, they don’t want this woman to die, spiritually, because my dress kept popping up. We finally got [a take] where I was underwater, and the dress is just kind of floating and then it floats me up. And I was like, “See, she’s meant to stay alive.” But by then, we really knew she’s going to live. And the way Nia wrote this incredible ending was something like, “Hedda, stuck between dark finality and dark possibility, can do nothing but break into a wild, wicked and wanting smile.” It’s just the most beautiful piece of stage direction.
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
