Tessa Thompson

Sort of this post-war effort to button up everything.

Women get back in the house.

Men get back to work.

Everything's okay.

Never mind the trauma that is happening globally.

And the great pretending, it shows up in so many different ways in Hedda.

I mean, she herself is a great pretender.

But when I was beginning work on her, I thought about my paternal grandmother crying.

who was a black woman in the 50s, a schoolteacher, so a working woman.

But I thought about all the ways in which she and my maternal grandmother had to pretend.

You know, they took very different paths.

One became a working woman.

Another married and was a housewife, never had a job in her life, was always attached to the men that she married, first one and then the other.

And I understood with more clarity now looking back on them.

One is still alive.

And to this day, by the way, she's almost in her 80s.

She wears her red lipstick every single day.

But I just think about how much I understood that they were pretending.

And how much rage they must have had because of the things that they were expected to do or the things that they could not do because of the time.

And I think something that we were really interested in in this adaptation is to, yes, create a world in which Hedda, as a mixed-race woman...