She has portrayed a rebellious android (“Westworld”), a hard-drinking Valkyrie (“Thor: Ragnarok”), a physicist trapped in an extraterrestrial prism (“Annihilation”) and a songstress with progressive hearing loss (“Creed”).
But of all the provocative and varied characters that Tessa Thompson, 41, has embodied over the last 20 years, few can match the mythology surrounding Hedda Gabler, the fatefully unhappy housewife conjured by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in his seminal 1891 stage drama of the same name.
It’s a role so faceted, so rich in Sturm und Drang — many have called Hedda “the female Hamlet” — that actresses including Ingrid Bergman, Glenda Jackson, Isabelle Huppert, Annette Bening, Cate Blanchett, Mary-Louise Parker and Rosamund Pike have flocked to play her.
This fall, Thompson will star in a big-screen adaptation by the filmmaker Nia DaCosta (“The Marvels,” “Candyman”) that puts her boldly reimagined Hedda, both queer and biracial, at the center of a hedonistic midcentury house party on a lavish English estate. Illicit romances are pursued, careers derailed and psyches unraveled; more than one gun goes off in the night.
The actress sat down with The New York Times at Amazon’s Manhattan office to discuss “Hedda” (which opens in limited release on Oct. 22 and begins streaming on Prime on Oct. 29) and some of the more radical swerves it takes with the source material. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.
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The post Tessa Thompson Puts a Sexy, Messy Spin on the ‘Female Hamlet’ appeared first on New York Times.
