Hedda Star Tessa Thompson Felt Challenged By 'Smart and Daring' Adaptation From Friend, Filmmaker Nia DaCosta

Henrik

Ibsen's 1891 play Hedda Gabler has been remade yet again, this time for streaming by Amazon Prime Video as the movie Hedda. Written and directed by Nia DaCosta, Hedda is played by Creed star Tessa Thompson. Recently, the longtime collaborators spoke about reuniting for this adaptation and how well they understand one another.

Tessa Thompson, Nia DaCosta on reuniting for 'daring' adaptation of Hedda

Tessa Thompson has known Nia DaCosta since 2015, after they met at the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs and the actress was cast in her directorial debut, Little Woods. They worked together again in the superhero film The Marvels (2023), but Hedda reunites the artists in their true passion project. Both are also producers on the project. In a press conference, DaCosta revealed that she subconsciously wrote the role for Thompson. She recalled, "It's so funny because we've been great friends for over 10 years now. And we made my first film together. I picture movies all the time because I always had all these ideas and these feelings. Sometimes I'd have these half-formed thoughts and just call her and be like, What do you think about this? But to me it was quite clear that I would ask her to do it eventually. Because literally when I wrote the movie, like after the title page, I described all the characters as if it's kind of a play. And I basically wrote Hedda [as]Tessa Thompson, you know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3lgD59KrTw

The filmmaker continued, "But also it just speaks to the depth of our relationship, not just as friends, but also as people who love each other's work and love each other's minds creatively. And her brain is so beautiful, and she's so smart, and it's really such a relief to be able to cast a really intelligent actress, not just emotionally, but intellectually, especially when you are tackling ideas. And then Tessa, as a producer. That's really formalising our relationship that we've already had, with her really being able to contribute in a significant way to the film getting better. So that was a fun but also new sort of dynamic for us on set." Meanwhile, Thompson called their friendship and working relationship "an extraordinary gift." The Thor: Ragnarok actress recalled, "When she first told me that she wanted to work on an adaptation of Hedda Gabler, I didn't imagine that she meant she wanted me to play Hedda. She's always brainstorming things with me. But I didn't understand what the sort of cinematic imperative was to retell it in this time. And it was only when I read her first draft of the piece that I really understood what she wanted to do with it, which is to take it apart and put it back together."

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Thompson added, "It's one of the big, you know, canonical parts for a woman. And the truth is, I care so much about Nia as a filmmaker, I would always want her to be best-suited with the people that are inside of the frames. When she told me that she really felt like me as an actor and the kind of work that I do with being able to really internalize and express things without words, which is my favorite way of working, then I really understood, Okay, I'm game. And also, I just thought that her adaptation was so smart and so daring. [It] really captured the spirit of the piece while really also allowing itself to be a whole animal and a whole new beast, which I thought was riveting. Hedda also stars Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock, and Nina Hoss. It was released on Amazon Prime Video on October 29.