feature image photo by Dave Benett / Contributor via Getty Images
When I first saw the trailer for Nia DaCosta’s adaptation Hedda, I was instantly intrigued by the adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play. I love Tessa Thompson, and I love her in a period piece. And as a Black woman, I was drawn to the way a Black Hedda Gabler would change the story. But it was the decision to change Hedda’s former flame from a man to a woman that had me most hooked. What could have precipitated such a decision, I wondered.
Drew Burnett Gregory reviewed the film for TIFF, and she captured everything I felt about Hedda so perfectly. When the opportunity to talk to both Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson about the inspiration for the film’s queer storyline arose, I couldn’t pass it up.
Sa’iyda: Tell me Nia, what inspired you to change Eilert Lövborg to Eileen Lovborg?
Nia DaCosta: I really wanted to give Hedda another foil alongside Thea, another woman who was contending with the same things that Hedda was contending with. And I thought, Eilert’s struggles with being brilliant, being troubled, being damaged, and self-medicating with alcohol was a struggle that in the body and the life of a woman would really emphasize the themes that resonated with me when reading the play and when watching it on stage.
And then I was like, oh, everyone’s gay! Now it’s a queer love triangle, which is really exciting as well. Because it added so much depth to the story.
Sa’iyda: Can we get that on a T-shirt? Everyone’s gay.
Nia DaCosta: It’s kind of like, ‘and I oop!’ But as when I’m running anything, I’m like, oh, this decision then unfolds into this bigger thing. And I think the story and the struggle resonated so much more deeply when it’s queer in the ’50s and trying to figure out what freedom is.
Sa’iyda: I really appreciated the fact that there was no trauma surrounding their queerness.
Nia DaCosta: A lot of this is about the body you’re born into, who you are, and how society oppresses you and what that makes you do. But I wasn’t interested in doing an educational piece about the perils of queerness. I really wanted their queerness to be a part of their humanity.
Tessa Thompson: Interestingly, in 1950s UK right around the time that we set our Hedda, there were a lot of arrests that were happening for homosexuality, but they were all men because they didn’t even consider female sexuality. And so in a weird way, there is a kind of freedom — particularly in some of these parts of society where you could do things behind closed doors or you could have these big raucous parties — there was a kind of freedom. Whether or not you would be able to actually live your life that way and really be inside of a relationship and have access to jobs and economic opportunities, that’s a separate thing that I think is very much embedded in their struggle inside of the movie.
For Hedda in particular, she’s like, well, this is never gonna be, I could never be with this woman because I got bills that I don’t wanna pay. Someone needs to pay them for me, and she ain’t gonna pay them. And I need to have my goods and my things.
Sa’iyda: Yes! Tessa, how did you dig into that part of Hedda? Because you’re not so much wrestling with her queerness, but you are wrestling with her vanity.
Tessa Thompson: I think her vanity is a much bigger thing in her, and her appetite for having a certain kind of access is a bigger preoccupation with her. One of the other things that I thought was so interesting — where you see Eileen really battling to be taken seriously — it was really interesting to play a character who assumes she will never, ever be taken seriously, so she doesn’t even have to try. This sort of complete acceptance of not being somebody that people are gonna ultimately decide is formidable, and the kind of frivolity that totally opens up for you because you in and of yourself are frivolous. And that was really fascinating.
And that thing was also really painful, because they’re women in particular that have felt that way over time. And I don’t think that her queerness is necessarily at the root of that, but I think that’s certainly a thing. Female queerness wasn’t even really taken seriously. So I think, for her, she’s kind of like, well then what’s the point? Why even try?
I think Hedda is a woman who would’ve been very happy if she could figure out the puzzle pieces to have existed in her queer relationship and then have the marriage that legitimizes her and to figure out a structure around that.
And the truth is, people have existed, and people still exist in that way, in relation to their queerness. Not that that doesn’t have pathos, but I think for us not to hang the hat of the narrative on that and for it to just be a textural thing and be something that is a part of their humanity, but doesn’t define it. I really like that approach to it, in the context of this story.
Sa’iyda: Hedda is definitely a woman who is being pulled between two very strong poles, and it was very delicious to have one of those poles be a woman. Now, it would have been very easy to fully contemporize the story, but you chose not to. How did you decide on when and where you were going to set the story?
Nia Da Costa: I knew I didn’t want it to be modern; I didn’t want it to be in the original time period or place. But I wanted it to be period; I didn’t want it to feel too distant. I didn’t want us to say ‘they’re so far away from me.’ And the ’50s are very recognizable to us because it’s culturally not that long ago. Pop culturally, it’s a decade we have a similar sort of thought about; it’s very repressed. It was a time of conformity coming out of the war and trying to figure out how to heal and what society should look like after the war.
Women were being told, ‘Go back home. Thank you so much for all of the elbow grease, but the men are back, you’re good.’ And then the men were coming back from war traumatized. No one is really doing what feels right. That was a huge reason why the ’50s made sense to me because I thought that world really amplified the themes of the piece that resonated with me.
And then England. If we’re talking about repression, where else do you go?
Sa’iyda: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, for the last question, Tessa, what drew you to the role of Hedda Gabler?
Tessa Thompson: I think in a lot of ways, Hedda is about how troubling it can be to be hemmed in by society’s expectations and to be hemmed in by self.
What I feel excited about mostly is that I think this film is a piece of work that defies easy categorization, and that’s how I feel as a person. So I feel really lucky to get to make work that also does that. I want to move through space with the freedom to not be hemmed in by what anyone else tells me that I am. And I feel grateful to have made a film that also wants to challenge people to think in those ways too.
Hedda is now streaming on Prime.
Very excited to watch this, but the line about England absolutely sent me.