1/15/2024 0 Comments Thor and thessa thompson![]() He said: ‘Let’s explore.’” Even if he had said yes, Thompson would be sworn to secrecy, as she is about her upcoming role in Avengers: Infinity War, and any possible crossover with the superhero movie of the moment, Black Panther. And Kevin Feige happened to be walking past, so we sort of marched up to him and said: ‘Hey, we should do this!”įeige’s response? “He didn’t say yes or no. “It was just a Marvel social gathering we ended up being in a semicircle, a bunch of the women, so we were just kind of talking about how fun that would be. She was also also fearless enough to buttonhole Marvel supremo Kevin Fiege at a recent get-together and demand an all-female superhero movie, launching a thousand fansite rumours in the process. It was Thompson who campaigned to shoot a scene making Valkyrie’s bisexuality explicit in Thor: Ragnarok (although it was later cut). She is learning to channel her inner Valkyrie, though. ![]() “I don’t wake up and move through space feeling like Valkyrie on the rainbow bridge!”īoxing clever: Tessa Thompson with Michael B Jordan in Creed. “Those ‘badass’ roles are exciting to me because they’re very different than how I feel,” she says. There’s a similar thread running through some of Thompson’s other roles, although don’t mirror the actor’s own personality. Her character in Dear White People was of a type we rarely saw associated with women of colour: cool, smart, confident, articulate. “I had all but decided to take a break and do some plays, and to see plays and read books and not work – literally not work – until I was going to burn for something.” Slave dramas, black best friends, single moms upset with their babydaddy. She had an early break in teen detective series Veronica Mars and things were ticking along, but after the BBC America series Copper, in which she played a former slave in 19th-century New York, “a lot of the parts that were coming my way were things that I’d seen before”. Los Angeles-born, she had taken acting classes even as she studied cultural anthropology in college, and interned with an all-female Shakespeare company. She had already been in the business nearly a decade. I don’t wake up feeling like ValkyrieĪt that point, Thompson was reassessing her career. She was so taken with the script, she wrote a “fan letter” to writer-director Justin Simien: “I felt strongly that I needed to be in that movie.” Those ‘badass’ roles are exciting because they’re very different than how I feel. “The film itself was an indictment of Hollywood in a way, of the opportunities that people of colour are presented with,” she says. Her student provocateur fought the power with a cool head and a sharp wit, articulating racial codes, hypocrisies and micro-aggressions that went beyond the college campus. Thompson’s breakthrough role came in the 2014 race satire Dear White People, itself something of a cultural turning point. “That’s an unfortunate thing, being inside of a marginalised group: you either become the ambassador or you internalise the sense of responsibility for how you represent said group, and while I feel that palpably, I also feel like I wanna be able to do whatever the fuck I wanna do!” She giggles mischievously, as she often does when she knows she’s sounding over-earnest. She is ambivalent about being a poster girl for Hollywood change, however. ![]() She later clarified that criticism as “an attempt to recentre the conversation around the work” but did not apologise.Īsgard’s parade: with Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo in Thor: Ragnarok. Thompson has been actively involved in Time’s Up, speaking up, pitching in with its recent presence at the Golden Globes, and and even calling out Girls creator Lena Dunham for her lack of participation prior to the photo-opportunity stage. Hollywood is being shaken by the successive earthquakes of #OscarSoWhite and the Time’s Up/#MeToo movement against discrimination and sexual harassment, and you know the terrain has started to shift when a woman of colour can land the part of a kick-ass bisexual Norse warrior traditionally depicted as a statuesque white blonde. There is the feeling that Thompson’s ascent encapsulates the present moment. “It was the Westworld season one wrap gift.” ![]() And there is still more to come: a Creed sequel and Alex Garland’s sci-fi Annihilation. Lately, Thompson’s star has done nothing but rise, thanks to roles in Selma, Rocky sequel Creed, sci-fi series Westworld, and, most recently, as the scene-stealing Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok. “I sort of feel like I’m cheating,” the 34-year-old actor admits. She has just been nominated for a Bafta in that category, but the accolade feels a little late in coming. Tessa Thompson laughs at the idea of herself as a “rising star”.
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