Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson are reminiscing about the first time they met, at Sundance film labs where DaCosta was workshopping her debut feature, Little Woods. “Honestly, Tessa had a great vibe,” says DaCosta. “She was super open, super generous and very intelligent.” A smile creeps on to her face. “Like – that was a fucking relief.”
Thompson gives a look of mock offence. “I really just like working with smart actors,” adds DaCosta, filling the silence. “Why did you assume that we’re dumdums?” asks Thompson, turning to look directly at her director, as they sit in a Soho hotel in London. “I didn’t,” she is told. “I was just like, ‘What a pleasant surprise.’ Who would have thought it? Not me.”
This is a typical exchange from a director and actor partnership that’s now on its third film, and seemingly built on a healthy amount of negging and mickey-taking. The first outing was 2018’s Little Woods, which starred Thompson as a bar-brawling drug mule who contemplates “just one more job” – crossing the border from North Dakota into Canada to acquire opioids. Shot on a shoestring budget, it was a stylish and bracing calling card that set the director, now 35, on a meteoric rise.
Since then, DaCosta has become an in-demand director who can turn her hand to just about anything. She brought horror classic Candyman back to life in a celebrated reboot, then teamed up with Thompson again on The Marvels, the $374m budget-blowing sequel to Captain Marvel, and her next outing will be the forthcoming zombie chomp-fest 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
The pair’s latest project, perhaps understandably, raised a few eyebrows – as they chose to film a play by the notoriously dour Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen. DaCosta’s first exposure to the Norwegian was via A Doll’s House, in which a seemingly devoted wife and mother called Nora Helmer suddenly bolts. The play, which was written in the 1870s, stunned the director. “How daring, to write about a woman who leaves her children because she feels as if she hasn’t fully realised her own life,” says DaCosta. “It would be controversial now. Then I read Hedda and thought, ‘Wow – this woman!’”
Hedda is Hedda Gabler, the titular character in Ibsen’s later play. Hedda is a rare thing: a complicated, multi-faceted female lead in a classic drama. It’s a role that has tempted many, even if pulling it off is notoriously difficult. In the UK, over the last decade or so, we’ve had Sheridan Smith’s admirable turn; a shocking denouement in Patrick Marber’s version starring Ruth Wilson; and, most recently, Lily Allen, who received mixed reviews.
To construct her Hedda, who is the daughter of a general trapped in a stifling marriage to an academic, Thompson delved into theatre archives in New York and London, studying hours of performances with two rules: watch each one just once and don’t take notes. “It got to the pointthat I knew the play so well, I could watch productions in Norwegian without subtitles and know what was happening,” says the 42-year-old from Los Angeles.
Another influence was Mae West, the movie star who once found herself in court after writing a play with a gay lead character. She so inspired Thompson that the actor uses Mae as her middle name on some social media platforms. From that heady mix, Thompson created a Hedda as extreme as any seen on stage or screen. To describe her character as quite a piece of work is putting it mildly. She’s a sexy, sultry, machiavellian, vulnerable mess of a protagonist who, as DaCosta says, does “terrible, unforgivable things”. These include thrusting drinks into the hands of a recovering alcoholic and giving a loaded pistol to an emotionally unstable former lover. The fact that Thompson’s Hedda is a mixed-race, bisexual woman adds even more complexity.
In the film, rather than being overt, the question of race subtly lingers: we see Hedda having to deal with whispered comments about her skin tone from party guests. “Her father is white and her mother is black,” says DaCosta. “And you never hear her talk about her mother. That means a lot. But there’s no big speech about being a strong black woman in a crazy time, because that’s not really what we’re focusing on. But it colours everything – no pun intended.”
Hedda was shot in Flintham Hall, a Grade I-listed Italianate manor house near Newark in Nottinghamshire, with DaCosta setting proceedings in the 1950s, just as the postwar dust was settling in Britain. “After the second world war,” says DaCosta, whose father is British, “people were trying to figure out what the hell to do with themselves, asking who we are, how you heal. I think people were trying to pretend everything was OK, trying to get back to what was supposed to be the way society runs. These characters are trying to figure out what freedom looks like. I thought that decade would be a really great pressure-cooker to make everything more potent.”
For a big, starry film that’s going to be on Amazon soon, the whole enterprise is exceptionally dark. It’s broody and low-lit, with tempers flaring and things falling apart. That’s a recurring theme in DaCosta’s work. “Growing up, I was like, ‘Why did that person just lie? Why did that person do something cruel?’ I think the darkness in my work is really my curiosity about the darkness in other people – and myself.”
All the female characters – including Nina Hoss’s incredible turn as the volatile genius Dr Lovborg, a male lover of Hedda’s in Ibsen’s original – are hemmed in, trying to find breathing space in a patriarchal world. I wonder if DaCosta and Thompson see parallels in modern Hollywood, where one study found that the number of female leads in Hollywood movies had hit a 10-year low.
“There are limitations,” says DaCosta, who was born in New York but lives in London. “We need to change that. We’re all chipping away at that stuff.” She mentions the support she has had from Alana Mayo, president of Orion Pictures, which produced the film. Thompson jokes that DaCosta is a “refreshing, honest and candid” voice in Hollywood. After her breakout film Candyman, DaCosta discussed the “shocking way people have talked to me in my position as a director”. When she left The Marvels in post-production to work on Hedda after repeated delays, she responded to anonymous briefings against her by saying: “They knew the entire time that I had an obligation – a greenlit movie with people who were waiting for me.”
Today, DaCosta is keen to downplay any idea of her being combative, saying: “There’s no ire in any of my energy. I was on the Avengers set a couple weeks ago because I still have relationships with these people.” She mentions Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios. “He wrote me a letter for my UK visa.”
But, despite the smooth personal relationships with major players, DaCosta knows she and other black women in Hollywood face invisible barriers, just like Hedda and Dr Lovborg. “The math is different for me,” she says. “If I want to lead a film with a white actor who’s won two Academy Awards, I know that budget. And if I want to do that same movie with a black actor who’s won two Academy Awards, I get less money.”
But for now, the actor she is most keen to work with is Thompson – and, despite the negging, there’s a clear affection between the two. Is it true DaCosta has a portrait of Thompson in her dining room? “What a very targeted and bizarre question,” says DaCosta, laughing. “Yes, I have a portrait from the movie that’s really beautiful of the character of Hedda portrayed by Tessa Thompson.”
“It doesn’t look like me,” says Thompson. “It’s like an expressionist version of Hedda Gabler.”
How does Thompson feel about all this? “She got the painting to give to me and then she took it home and said, ‘I will give it to you if you move to London.”
DaCosta, suddenly sounding like Hedda the master manipulator, responds: “She knows what she has to do to get the painting. Until then, it’s in my dining room.”
