EXCLUSIVE: Tessa Thompson as Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s sublime Hedda is a woman in charge of her own destiny.
Studying literature would’ve been a whole lot more fun if this voluptuous, 1950s-set re-imagining had been included on my school’s curriculum.
In fact, every drama student who wants to fully understand the randy old Norwegian man of letters should check out the Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios film now streaming on Prime Video.
The Gotham Awards have already bestowed Thompson with a Tribute Award honor, and she’s a nominee for Outstanding Lead Performance.
Ibsen paints Hedda, a general’s daughter — a daddy’s girl, handy with a pistol — as someone who wants to have power “over a human destiny,” essentially a man’s. The character’s just as manipulative as ever in this version, but, as Thompson suggests, “It’s a portrait of a woman that wants to be in control of her own destiny. It’s less about access to a male world, although she does want access to society and money and wealth, but she really wants to be in control of her own destiny,” the L.A.-born star, now based in London, reveals.
Hers is a scorching account of a woman that is more hemmed in by her own self-limiting points of view than the men in the picture or even society at large. “I think we’re trying to paint a picture of a woman that sure, there are societal and cultural things at play that hammer in, but mostly it’s herself. And I think that exists in the original source material. There’s this idea … that the sort of bravest thing that you can do and be in control of is … to decide you just don’t want to live anymore. I think that’s still embedded in this piece,” Thompson explains.
Thompson argues that Hedda is a woman “who is really dying to live and to live on her own terms. And the tragedy is that she’s not ultimately brave enough to do that. And probably the further tragedy, which I have more sympathy for because I inhabited her, is that if she’s not brave enough to do it, she doesn’t want anyone else to do it. She is willing to take everyone down with her, which I guess the thing that I feel kind of empathy for in that is that I think that there’s something about that fundamentally that actually is quite human.”
The film has entered my bloodstream to such an extent that when Thompson and I meet, distracted, I refer to her as Hedda Thompson.
The woman got under Thompson’s skin, too. “The way that I really understood it is it feels almost childlike in a way. And you watch children play before they’ve been socialized and they’ll put down a toy and then their friend will come and take the toy and suddenly they want the toy and they grab at it, and sometimes they could even get violent. I think that those instincts are in us, and if they remain unchecked, it can pervert us and it can be really dangerous. But I think those fundamental instincts also help us understand how we want to live. Even jealousy, the idea of being jealous of the way that someone else is living can point us to what we want,” she suggests.
DaCosta’s impetus for making the film grew out of this clash between the play that she read — and loved — and the productions on stage that she endured. She felt that the playwright was serious about wanting to depict “complicated, interesting women.” She knew his A Doll’s House but felt there was a complete reasoning for Nora leaving her family. “There’s empathy for her,” DaCosta notes.
Whereas with Hedda Gabler, “people still hate her,” and she liked that people love the play but either loathe or can’t understand the woman at the heart of it all. DaCosta was also drawn to “the muckiness, the humor in it. I think she’s so funny in it. It’s sexy as well. It’s really dark.”
Added to that, there’s “a thriller energy to it” and she wanted to “capture all that stuff,” which she has achieved exceedingly well.
DaCosta saw another what she describes as a “very staid and very kind of dusty” stage production of Hedda Gabler. “And I thought, ‘Great gowns, beautiful gowns. But … all that stuff wasn’t there,” she sighs.
“And so I thought, ‘What if I just notched it up to 11 a bit?’ ” she declares with a glint in her eye.
As DaCosta read and re-read the play she kept thinking about Ejlert Lövborg, the visionary historian who thinks he can control the future. The character’s an academic rival to Tesman, Hedda’s husband. They’re both after a prestigious professorship.
As the director watched yet another version of the play her reaction to Lövborg was concerning. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, man. I don’t know about you!’ ”
She loved the relationships he had, but felt if Lövborg were a woman “you’d really understand the whole suffering of being brilliant and being ignored, being so much more than everyone else around you and being told, ‘Shush, no thank you,’ because you’re a woman. And then she’s a queer woman as well because of the gender switch. So I just felt like, ‘Oh, that’d be really interesting.’”
It’s a brilliant switch and allows you to delve deeper into the psychology of it all.
DaCosta doesn’t usually write with anyone in mind, except in this instance Thompson had been her favorite to play the eponymous role. Indeed, the film marks Thompson’s first film under her Viva Maude banner.
Nina Hoss was cast later to play the renamed Eileen Lövborg, and Tom Bateman was cast as Tesman, with Imogen Poots as nervy Thea, an old friend of both Tesman and his wife. Nicholas Pinnock is having a good time as shady Judge Brack.
DaCosta says that while she wanted Thompson, if the in-demand star hadn’t been available she’d have figured out someone else.
“But I really wanted it to be her,” DaCosta insists.
“And so I wrote it essentially with her in mind, which is why Hedda is mixed race. I didn’t go into it thinking, Hedda needs to be Black, but since I’m Black, I tend to put Black women into the roles that I found really interesting. And Tessa is Black and she’s mixed race. So I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great. We can have this element with her father, General Gabler, her white parent.’ She never talks about her mother. And I was like, ‘It’s even more interesting that she never talks about her Black mother,’” Da Costa says.
But allowing Hedda and Eileen a past makes up for it. ”I think in our piece more than the original source material, I think the love between Hedda and Eileen is a legitimate love,” DaCosta believes. “Whereas in the play, I think Ejlert represents an idea of freedom. He represents access to a male world, a sense of adventure that in that time of course, women didn’t have any access to, and Ejlert would come in and give her little missives from the other world. But I think he’s more emblematic, I think in our piece. It’s a legitimate love.”
Illustrating her point, DaCosta describes a confrontation Hedda has with Eileen when she arrives at the lavish party Hedda’s hosting — a scintillating scene with Thompson and Hoss that leaves Hedda spitting: “Then I will destroy you.”
It’s all the more heightened because Thompson’s Hedda has a flash of Bette Davis, perhaps a sense of her Margo Channing in All About Eve. Laughing, Thompson says, “Then buckle your seatbelts!”
Thompson tells me that I’m not the first to have observed some hint of Bette Davis and that “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” vibe.
She’s always been inspired by the likes of Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward and, while Thomson didn’t specify her, I sense Marlene Dietrich’s in there too because her father was a big cinephile. Growing up, she didn’t have a television at her mother’s house so her dad would show her films at his place when she stayed with him. “Anything he would be watching, I would watch with him,” she says. “And then when I would go to my grandparents’ house, they would have television on constantly, and my grandfather would watch Westerns … and Lucille Ball.”
Soon Thompson was hooked on movie classics where she watched early Hollywood starlets and found them “all so dazzling.”
Then as she got older she was able to seek films out on her own, she explains.
“I really loved Mae West and Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, all of them. All of these like, broads. I just found them so profoundly powerful and scary sometimes, but funny. They had a sense of wit and charm, and even when they were doing sort of dangerous, nasty things, you like to watch them.
“So I’m sure that all of that is somewhere in there because I just so have loved watching those women basically my whole life,” she says admiringly.
Later, when I meet with DaCosta, she acknowledges she and production designer Cara Brower and costume designer Lindsay Pugh discussed the influences of those silver screen broads. “But I also knew, I didn’t want you to feel like you’re watching a movie from another time, but I did want you to feel like that they were watching those movies,” she observes, making that subtle distinction.
Thompson’s curious to know, “not to make this squarely about race,” about how often have I seen a non-white Hedda.
I hadn’t, although the playwright Tanika Gupta explores the topic in a version of Ibsen’s drama, also called Hedda, seen through the eyes of Merle Oberon (Wuthering Heights) that’s on now at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, southwest of London, which I haven’t caught up with yet.
Thomson herself has found scant evidence of a non-white Hedda which surprised her because “theater of all places is the place where there’s more flexibility.”
There’s been the “flexibility” Thompson mentions in more contemporary classics such as, for instance, Arthur Miller’s plays, where we’ve seen Sharon D. Clarke play Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman both in London and on Broadway, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in London now preparing to play Kate Keller alongside Bryan Cranston in All My Sons, directed by Ivo van Hove, running at Wyndham’s Theatre from November 14. But it’s rare to see a non-Caucasian female actor playing key roles in an Ibsen or a Chekhov.
Thompson remarks that a friend of hers, a graduate of Juilliard, saw a screening of Hedda and noted afterwards that there’ll be a generation of people studying theater who will see the movie, “and I found that so moving because … these plays belong to everybody. So it’s a gift to get to engage with them and see interpretations. And I feel really, I hadn’t considered that’s also what we were doing in this, is to contribute something to the canon that people can see and engage with.”
Thompson also observes that there’s a certain kind of person might see some reflection of themself.
Once DaCosta had taken Ibsen’s play apart and dreamt about what it could be, she sent it to Thompson. “So suddenly Hedda Gabler became a mixed-race woman, and that became embedded inside of the piece … and by setting it in the world that we set it in where Hedda herself can sort of exist inside of the halls with those folks, but is with them, but not of them. And I do think that there’s a way in which we have been excluded from these pieces … And I feel really lucky and honored that I’ve gotten to get to play in this space. I’m not sure that that would happen if we’re not for a filmmaker like Nia DaCosta.”
Thompson imagines in a fanciful way that Hedda kind of has a plan worked out in her disrupted mind “that if she can have Eileen back in the picture, as many people did during that time, by the way, and have a life together, a romantic life together, but then keep up the appearance of marriage with her husband. And it was very common during the time. So I think it’s a very practical thing that Hedda considers when Eileen comes back into the picture that she could have both.”
The thespian is curious about how Ibsen purists might react to this cinematic interpretation. She cites an occasion where she was at a performance of Hamlet and a man whined. “This isn’t the Hamlet I know,” because the Danish prince was wearing a leather jacket. “If you are someone that really loves the classics and has a deep relationship with it, I understand how this could be unsettling because it is very different,” Thompson says.
In a sense, Thompson can relate to such a view because of her own reverence to the play, a factor that was a challenge early on during rehearsals when they were wrestling with the adaptation, she tells us. “I would often go back to the source material and I would say, ‘Don’t you think we need this? Don’t you think we need that?’ Because I worried about the scaffolding, about the architecture. For example, if you take out that Hedda Gabler is a woman that’s definitely afraid of scandal, what are you left with? Does something fundamentally change? Do we need to replace it with something? Or if you take out the beginning, there’s all this expository stuff with the aunt about the expectation of children, for example — if you take out that expectation, does it need to be replaced by something? And we had loads of conversations about this, and Nina Hoss performed Hedda Gabler for years. So she knows the source material super well. So both she and I would really take Nia to task on lots of things. And then I think eventually what happened for us is we really realized that we were making something that is hugely influenced by the source material and also is its own thing. It gets to be its own animal.”
DaCosta believes the classics are “meant to be torn apart and put back together.”
The oddest influence on Hedda is perhaps that of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Phantom of the Opera. There’s an enormous chandelier, and it suggests that the glass object may have come subliminally from having seen Phantom a long time ago. “One hundred percent,” Thompson agrees, because there is not mention of a chandelier in the play’s stage notes.
Oddly enough, Maria Björnson, who created the crashing chandelier for Phantom of the Opera, also designed a late 1970s London production of Hedda Gabler starring Janet Suzman, and it looked as luscious as DaCosta’s Hedda.
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