‘She does terrible things’: What could a Marvel director do with Ibsen’s cruel heroine Hedda Gabler? | movie

nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson recall the first time they met, at Sundance Film Labs where DaCosta was working on her first film, Little Woods. “Honestly, Tessa had a great vibe,” DaCosta says. “She was so outgoing, so generous, so smart.” A smile creeps onto her face. “Like – that was a fucking relief.”

Thompson gives a mock offense look. “I really like working with smart actors,” DaCosta adds, filling the silence. “Why did you assume we were stupid?” Thompson asks, turning to look directly at her manager, as they sit in a Soho hotel in London. “I didn’t,” she was told. “I was like, ‘What a pleasant surprise. “Who would have thought that? Not me.”

This is a typical exchange between a director-actor partnership, now in its third film, and one that seems built on a great deal of negligence and deceit. His first outing was 2018’s Little Woods, which starred Thompson as a drug mule who has a bar fight and thinks of “just one more job” — crossing the border from North Dakota into Canada to get opioids. Shot on a shoestring budget, the film was a stylish, stimulating calling card that has put the director, now 35, on a meteoric rise.

Since then, DaCosta has become an in-demand director who can turn her hand to almost anything. She brought the horror classic Candyman back to life in a popular reboot, then teamed up with Thompson again in The Marvels, the $374 million sequel to Captain Marvel, and her next outing will be the upcoming zombie fest 28 years later: The Bone Temple.

The duo’s latest project has, understandably, raised some eyebrows – they chose to film a play by acclaimed Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen. DaCosta’s first exposure to Norwegian was via A Doll’s House, in which a devoted wife and mother named Nora Helmer suddenly divorced. The play, written in the 1870s, amazed the director. “How bold of me to write about a woman who leaves her children because she feels like she doesn’t fully realize her life,” DaCosta says. “It’s going to be controversial now. Then I read that and thought, ‘Wow – this woman!'”

This is Hedda Gabler, the titular character in Ibsen’s later play. This is a rare thing: a complex and multi-faceted female role in a classic drama. It’s a role that tempted many, even if it was very difficult to pull off. In the UK, over the past decade or so, we have witnessed the impressive role of Sheridan Smith; A shocking finale in Patrick Marber’s version starring Ruth Wilson; and most recently Lily Allen, which received mixed reviews.

To create Hedda, the daughter of a general trapped in a stifling marriage to an academic, Thompson scoured theater archives in New York and London, studying hours of performances with two rules: watch each show only once and don’t take notes. “It got to the point where I knew the play so well, I could watch the production 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 character. She inspired Thompson so much that the actor uses May as her middle name on some social media platforms. From this exciting combination, Thompson has created a Hedda as extreme as any on stage or screen. To describe her character as a piece of work is putting it mildly. It’s an interesting, sexy, Machiavellian, vulnerable mess of a protagonist who, as DaCosta says, does “horrible, unforgivable things.” This includes putting drinks in the hands of a recovering alcoholic and giving a loaded gun to an emotionally unstable ex-lover. The fact that Hedda Thompson is a mixed-race, bisexual woman adds further complexity.

In the film, rather than being overt, the issue of race remains subtly lingering: we see Hedda having to deal with whispered comments about her skin color from party guests. “Her father is white and her mother is black,” DaCosta says. “And you never hear her talk about her mother. And that means a lot. But there’s not a big discourse about her being a strong black woman in a crazy time, because that’s not really what we focus on. But it colors everything — no pun intended.”

Hedda was shot at Flintham Hall, a Grade I listed Italianate country house near Newark in Nottinghamshire, where DaCosta began his proceedings in the 1950s, just as the post-war dust was settling in Britain. “After World War II, people were trying to figure out what to do with themselves, asking who we are, and how do we heal,” says DaCosta, whose father was British. “I think people were trying to pretend everything was fine, trying to get back to what was supposed to be the way society was run. These characters were trying to figure out what freedom looked like. I thought that decade was going to be a really great pressure cooker to make everything more effectiveness”.

For a big, star-studded movie coming to Amazon soon, the whole project is exceptionally dark. It’s a nurturing, low-lit atmosphere, with tempers burning and things falling apart. This is a recurring theme in DaCosta’s work. “When I was growing up, I used to say, ‘Why did this person lie? Why did this person do something cruel?” I think the darkness in my work is really my curiosity about the darkness in others—and in myself.

All the female characters – including Nina Hoss’s stunning turn as the volatile genius Dr Lovborg, the male lover of Hedda in Ibsen’s original novel – are trapped, 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 films has reached its lowest level in 10 years.

“There are limitations,” says DaCosta, who was born in New York but lives in London. “We need to change that. We are all getting rid of this stuff.” She mentioned the support she received from Alana Mayo, president of Orion Pictures, which produced the film. Thompson joked that DaCosta is a “fresh, honest and frank” voice in Hollywood. After her hit film Candyman, DaCosta discussed “the shocking way people talked to me in my position as director.” When she left The Marvels in post-production to work on Hedda after repeated delays, she responded to the anonymous briefings against her by saying, “They knew all along that I had a commitment — a green-lit movie with people who were waiting for me.”

Today, DaCosta is careful to downplay any notion of her being combative, saying, “There’s no anger in any of my energy. I’ve only been on the Avengers set for a few weeks because I still have relationships with those people.” I mentioned Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios. “He wrote me a letter to get a UK visa.”

But despite the smooth personal relationships with key players, DaCosta knows that she and other Black women in Hollywood face invisible barriers, just like Hedda and Dr. Lovborg. “Math is different for me,” she says. “If I want to lead a movie with a white actor who’s won two Academy Awards, I know that budget. If I want to do the same movie with a black actor who’s won two Academy Awards, I’ll get less money.”

But right now, the actor she’s most keen to work with is Thompson – and despite the denials, there’s clear affection between the two. Is it true that DaCosta has a picture of Thompson in her dining room? “What a very targeted and strange question,” DaCosta says with a laugh. “Yes, I have a really beautiful picture from the movie of Tessa Thompson’s character Hedda.”

“He doesn’t look like me,” Thompson says. “She’s like an expressionist version of Hedda Gabler.”

How does Thompson feel about all this? “She gave me the painting and then took it home and said, ‘I’ll give it to you if you move to London.’

“She knows what she has to do to get the painting,” answered DaCosta, suddenly sounding like a master manipulator, Hedda. “Until then, it’s in my dining room.”