Power, status, fear, and desire uncork a night of deadly mind games as a glamorous socialite’s over-the-top dinner party goes wildly off the rails in Hedda. The alluring newlywed Hedda Gabler is about to throw an all-out bash hoping to expand her social influence. But as champagne flows and fireworks spark, so too do passion, manipulation, and fury, building to a series of wrenching shocks.
With Hedda, writer-director Nia DaCosta reimagines one of the great Bad Girl tales of all time as a provocative modern thriller. As portrayed by Tessa Thompson, this Hedda is a devilishly smart, if dangerously frustrated, woman of ambition. She’d rule the world if only she wasn’t trapped by a man she doesn’t love, a lavish house she can’t afford, and a world that blocks her path. But she also has an extreme allergy to boredom. And at the glam affair she’s throwing on her husband’s behalf it all comes to a head, sparked by a threatening visitor from her past. Driven to lash out against all that holds her back, but also quench her thirst for more, Hedda turns her party haywire. Long an icon of mad yearning, Hedda is a dreamer, a schemer, and a woman terrifyingly determined to be who she wants at any cost.
One of the great problems of our time, and maybe just of being human, is how easily we replace the need for love with the need for achieving power. In their own ways every character in this story, but especially Hedda, falls into that trap. With ambition and lust driving their emotions, in the end, all this chasing after power is their downfall. Hedda is a fascinating character because she can’t quite achieve the courage to follow her heart, and she pays the price. That is an eternal story.
To learn more about the enigma that is Hedda, The Koalition spoke to actress Tessa Thompson to learn more about Hedda’s motives, her insecurities, her strengths, the power of Eileen, and the lack of freedom.
“Hedda is a chameleon who desires control but lacks a sense of self.” It’s a character that has captivated audiences for so long. She’s really mercurial; I feel like a chameleon. For example, even the costume design wanted to be kind of chameleon-like. It’s why I’m wearing that green dress, so I can blend in with the background. There are also all these different layers. You can’t really make out exactly what it is. ‘Is it lace? Is it this? Is it that?’ I think her mercurial nature is expressed in the costume design.”
“It’s a hard thing to articulate, but I promise you in terms of my internal logic, she’s somebody who feels a tremendous lack of power and agency and personhood and thereby tries to exert a lot of power over other people. I felt a tremendous amount of empathy for her, and she made a lot of sense to me. Not that everything that she does makes sense, but I think she’s also someone that acts on all of her intrusive thoughts and acts very spontaneously without a sense of consequence. While I don’t think that is entirely admirable, I do think the desire to feel like you’re living a life that is your own is a fundamental desire we all feel and is really human.”
With its unnerving sense of spectacle and excavation of the wages of ambition, influence, and money, Hedda feels very much of this cultural moment. And yet the story is not new. It is a bold retelling of the classic Henrik Ibsen play first performed in 1891 and originally set in 19th Century Norway. Since then, Hedda Gabler has become a kind of universal fable, reinterpreted in dozens of different ways across the globe, much like Shakespeare. A ripping yarn filled with scandals, love trysts, jealousy, inequality, and their consequences, the core story remains as relevant as ever: that of a woman who feels she is drowning and tries to take everyone in her way down with her.
In time, Hedda Gabler became a prototype of cinematic anti-heroines, those femme fatales who cracked the feminine mold by being brazen, warped, and insuppressible. DaCosta first fell in love with the iconic character over a decade ago, while watching a British stage production. She couldn’t shake her. And even as her attention turned to horror and superheroes, DaCosta kept imagining taking the character to places she’d never gone before.
In an initial screenplay twist that would change everything, DaCosta re-envisioned Hedda as a mixed-race woman, the illegitimate daughter of a highly respected general born into high society—and close enough to power to taste it—but frustratingly confined to its margins. Then, DaCosta made an even more audacious revision, flipping the catalytic character of Lövborg, Hedda’s ex-lover and the ingenious if intoxicated rival of Hedda’s husband, from male to female. Eljert became Eileen, instantly casting a revealing new light over the story.
Instead of focusing on Hedda’s singular struggle with lack of agency, the story became a much larger look at three very different women each trying to find meaning in a world that tells them they don’t deserve any. It became about how Hedda, Eileen, and Thea each takes her own path to trying to be who she is. It worked because Lövborg was always meant to be someone brilliant who feels unfairly ignored, someone pushing against social limits, so making her a woman was true to the character. With all these new social and sexual pressures on Hedda, DaCosta forged one of the fieriest portraits yet seen of the character, at once excessive and relatable, befitting our charged times.
It raises questions we relate to: Is anyone better than anyone else? How should power be used? What makes us monstrous towards each other? Why do we manipulate and self-destruct? From all that, Nia has made a playful film that is a thriller, a melodrama, and even a bit of horror.
Hedda operates from a place of deep pain and rejection, from this gaping trauma that she’s always trying to paste over, and that opened up another question in the story, which is not only how does society limit us but how do we limit ourselves? Because Hedda is a self-limiting person. While Hedda has real reasons for anger and righteousness, she flat-out loses her mind as she turns to cataclysmic destruction. There are so many reasons why Hedda does what she does—she’s jealous, empty inside, in a marriage she doesn’t like, her father who always protected her has passed, and she’s living in a world that says she doesn’t count. But none of that can justify the things she actually does to people.
Hedda’s party starts climbing a steep roller coaster with the arrival of another intriguing and volatile guest: the visionary writer Eileen Lövborg who, in grabbing for a rare second chance in life, ratchets up tensions, sparks jealousies, and sets off a manic hunt for a missing manuscript. Once renowned for her beautiful mind, Lövborg developed the reputation of a disgraced drunk. But now, Eileen has sobered up, started writing again, and, on the verge of a groundbreaking theory of sexual desire, is ready to go after the very same university position Hedda is determined to make sure her husband gets. Complicating matters further, Hedda and Eileen have their own past, which only further incites Hedda to lay out her vengeful trap.
“Eileen changes everything. When you first see Hedda, you see a woman who’s sort of sleepwalking, a woman who’s between life and death, who frankly is unsure she wants to continue to live. Then she hears Eileen’s name, and immediately she’s animated with life and a sense of purpose. When Eileen arrives at the party, that’s when the film really begins in a lot of ways. There’s this sort of magnetism between the two of them that is a kind of love, but I think also Eileen is such a foil to Hedda. In this one you get to see a portrait of a woman inside of what Nina Hoss is doing who, regardless of the sort of limitations of the time, is trying to live her own life and be in the world and love who she wants to love. So, she becomes this example for Hedda of a choice that she’s frankly too afraid to make, too terrified to make. And that’s the thing that is really kind of bittersweet and heartbreaking about their dynamic.”
Eileen now looms as a threat to her future. “To Hedda, Eileen is the epitome of the brave woman who thumbs her nose at the patriarchy. There’s something beautiful about their connection as two powerful women, but they’re also that pair who bring out the worst in each other. And if Hedda cannot be happy, she doesn’t want anyone else to be, least of all Eileen.” From her new husband, Tom, Hedda expects not solace or romance, only wealth and stature, which aren’t coming fast enough. “Hedda knew going in this was a marriage of convenience. And that appealed because his not being too invested in her might give her more freedom to exist as her own person. But returning from their honeymoon, she is suddenly alone in this huge house, confronted with being a traditional wife, and the walls start caving in on her.”
When Hedda does go fully unhinged in the film’s blistering final act, the movie becomes a freight train that slowly leaves the station and keeps going faster and faster until it comes completely off the rails. Here, Thompson turns on a dime from magnetism to loneliness to scheming, making Hedda at once alluring and deeply disturbing. Hedda needed to exude confidence, charm, and a dark fascination with power. Tessa brought it all, becoming so captivating you can’t look away even as she does bad things.
To learn more about Thompson’s approach to Hedda check out our full interview in the video above.
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