There’s a reason Hedda Gabler is known as Hamlet for women. Henrik Ibsen’s beautiful 19th century aristocrat is an antiheroine for the ages, so murky in her actions and contradictory in her desires she gives you whiplash. It’s a character not just to sink your teeth into, but one to tear apart sinew by sinew, tendon by tendon. And you well may want to: Hedda is as repulsive as she is captivating.
It was all this and more that struck director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels; Candyman), when she first came across Ibsen’s perilous protagonist as a drama school student in London a decade ago. The play, written in 1890, concerns Hedda, a high-society woman who marries a dull academic named George. Bored out of her mind in domesticity, she toys with her acquaintances, chief among them her ex-lover Eilert Løvberg, who happens to be her husband’s academic rival. Emerging from a period of debauchery and disrepute, with a new and brilliant book in tow, Eilert is doing well for once. Enter Hedda.
“Oh!” DaCosta recalls thinking when reading the play. “Ibsen is really invested in complicated women. He’s really pushing the bounds of what people will endure and allow women to do and to be and to express.” She did have one note of feedback for the late playwright, though. A niggling complaint she couldn’t quite shake: is it really believable Eilert’s undeniable intellect would be so overlooked? “He’s quite annoying in the way he’s like, ‘I’m a genius but no one understands me!’ It’s like, bro… come on. Maybe if he was a woman, I’d buy into that a bit more.”
And so in DaCosta’s soon-to-be released adaptation, Eilert becomes Eileen, with DaCosta casting Tár actor Nina Hoss opposite Tessa Thompson’s Hedda. She also transplanted the action from 1890 Oslo to a country manor in 1950s England, and while she was at it, even made stuffy old husband George hot. “Not your grandma’s Hedda Gabler,” is how Hoss puts it. The film is rich and luscious, the majority of action unfolding over a single night at a cataclysmic party, Hedda’s machinations set to a soundtrack of clinking glasses and popping Champagne corks.
All three women – DaCosta, Thompson, and Hoss – are on Zoom this evening, speaking about their buzzy new film a week before it debuts at the London Film Festival. They greet one another like childhood friends, DaCosta calling in from a coffee shop in Pasadena.
Adapting any Ibsen text is a tricky thing to do, and adapting Hedda Gabler is the trickiest of them all, like wrangling a stallion in the middle of a tornado. Thompson’s first reaction to being cast was to dive into the text headfirst. “I was studying the play, studying its critical response through decades and its different productions,” she says. “I was asking a lot of questions and fretting about the scaffolding and how the changes were going to impact the overall story – bless Nia, she was so patient with me!”
It was only after the dual actor and writers’ strikes between 2023 and 2024 forced her to take a break that Thompson returned to the project with a new outlook: “I realised that we’re doing something else entirely. Of course we’re borrowing from the source material, but really what we’re creating is its own animal. And that realisation really set us free.” It was the case too for Hoss. She knew the text inside out, having previously played Hedda on stage in Germany for the better part of six years. “To me Nia’s script was a new text,” says Hoss. “I thought let’s forget there even was a theatre play because this speaks for itself now.”
It’s a storied lineage of actors who have taken on this most bewitching of roles: Ingrid Bergman, Diana Rigg, Glenda Jackson, Claire Bloom, Anne Meacham, Annette Bening, Maggie Smith, Cate Blanchett, Fiona Shaw, Isabelle Huppert. Add to that list Thompson, who is best known for playing the warrior Valkyrie in numerous Marvel superhero films and who never once imagined she’d be stepping into Hedda’s shoes. “I had always wanted to play Nora [from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House] because with Hedda I think also there was a sense of, well, I don’t want to be part of any club that wouldn’t have me,” she laughs.
In Thompson’s hands, Hedda is a stealthy, stylish socialite, a master of manipulation whose frothy gowns belie something more immaterial and maybe even tender. She does not walk, but swans around her country estate – the key to her father’s gun cabinet ominously knocking against her exposed décolletage. As Eileen, Hoss is a woman in a man’s world, trying to stake her claim in their intellectual enclave. She’s also newly sober and hanging on by a thread. Hedda has the scissors.
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“If you adapt these works, you have to have skin in the game,” says Thompson. “And that’s how I felt reading this script. There was something so urgent and modern about it. Making Eilert Eileen really opens up the aperture and suddenly it’s about pathways to female agency and personhood.”
Much will be made of the fact Thompson’s Hedda is biracial and bisexual. “I feel hesitant sometimes to politicise any of these things but then I realise things end up being politicised sometimes just by virtue of what you look like or who you are,” she says. “But I will say that there are not many Heddas that look like me.” She is wary not to make a “thing” out of it, though. “I feel really grateful to be working at a time where there are people like Nia for whom it isn’t just an act. It’s just the way that she saw it.” DaCosta wanted to cast Thompson as Hedda, making Hedda mixed race as a result; she wanted to make Eilert a woman, making it a queer story as a result. Simple as that. “That’s the way we live and that’s the way I think we should be creating – as opposed to identity first,” says Thompson.
Hedda is one of those characters who morphs each time you return to her. Depending on what stage of life you’re at, you’ll see her differently. “I was a teenager when I first engaged with the work, and I didn’t understand this pressure, either external or internal, towards motherhood, for example,” says Thompson, who is 41 and has no children. Still, the fact she is playing a character originally written as 29 is telling. “I feel really lucky to have played Hedda at a point in my life when I feel I know enough and have enough to say, but I do think you can play it any time,” says Thompson. “We’re told so much as women about who we ought to be at different times in our lives, and what we ought to look like, that anyone at any age can relate to feeling hemmed. I think these things deepen and change as you age as a woman, but fundamentally you understand them really young.”
There is a “particular rage” that the film seeks to address, and it’s one you feel more potently as life goes on. “You feel it the longer you spend in a body – any body, it doesn’t have to be a gendered thing, but there’s a particular thing about being inside a female body, inside of these systems,” she says. “I mean, even over the course of the time that we were making the film in America, for example, what you can and cannot do with your body as a woman has changed, right? So that particular kind of unease and discomfort or rage is something that has changed for me over the years.”
Thompson speaks sympathetically of her character, like a close friend grossly misunderstood by those around her. “I’ve always felt tenderness about her. I feel protective even when Nia talks about how terrible she is!” she laughs.
“But that’s how dynamic she is!” says DaCosta. “We’re not all fully aligned on who this woman is. She’s a real person. She’s so dimensional, but it’s not because she’s a diamond. It’s because she’s like a shattered mirror.”
Hoss is in agreement. “All these years later,” she says, “we’re still talking about why she does this and who she is and what she means to us.”
It’s not the first time Hedda Gabler has been adapted, and it certainly won’t be the last. A century on, and Ibsen’s character still fixates us – perhaps now more than ever. “There’s something just currently in the zeitgeist and we’re reassessing what kind of stories we’re telling and there’s focus on female-focused stories and wanting to speak to those audiences, and realising that it’s a robust audience and also an underserved one,” says Thompson.
Suddenly, DaCosta interrupts with apologies. “Sorry! I have to run, I’ve got to see my therapist.”
Lucky for us, Hedda had no such healthcare; we’d have been robbed of one of the stage’s most intoxicating characters that just keeps giving.
‘Hedda’ is screening at the BFI London Film Festival this week, and streams on Prime Video from 29 October
