Nia DaCosta

Oh, man.

I mean, so much.

I think, you know, she does some pretty terrible things in the play, and she does some extreme acts that are

are emotionally violent and she asks people to do some terrible things.

But she's so vulnerable.

She's as vulnerable as she is vicious and she's so complicated and she's funny and she's all these things.

And I just thought it was a really interesting portrait of a woman who was trying to express herself while living under oppression, essentially.

At the time, when I came to writing a script, I always just thought a Black woman would be the center because I wanted more visions of us and more diverse kinds of visions of us Black women in media.

And also, I was lucky enough to have Tessa Thompson as a collaborator on my first film and as a very good friend, and I just thought, oh, well, Tessa's going to play Hedda.

You know, that was just an assumption I made, and I told her about it.

And so from that point on, I'm like, yeah, so now Hedda is...

You know, now she's this dimension that I have to feed into the script.

And then turning Eilert Loveborg from the play into Eileen Loveborg was really about me wanting to dig into what I found interesting.

so compelling about the piece, which was really this idea of a woman trying to navigate a repressed society who's trying to put her into a box.

And I thought, she needs more women around her.

And this character, Eilert, he's always complaining about being so brilliant and no one understands him and no one listens to him.

And I thought, well, if that's a woman, if that's a female character, then I want to empathize a bit more and then I understand even more fully why she's so depressed and why that leads her to

to drink and to kind of keep self-sabotaging in a way.

I thought she was much more compelling as Eileen than Eilert.

Yeah, you know, I think in the sort of correcting the sins of our past, the dearth of visibility for people of color in cinema, I think sometimes the easy answer was, oh, colorblind casting.