Tessa Thompson: ‘We’re all in boxes none of us fit squarely into’

We are speaking over Zoom with an eight-hour time difference, Thompson in a rental home in Los Angeles while her real home is done up. We both agree it would be far more fun to be doing this over a three-Margarita lunch at Chateau Marmont, but times being what they are we must adapt. And so must Thompson’s lockdown puppy, Coltrane, a black Australian kelpie with ‘35 per cent chihuahua’ who keeps jumping up and trying to lick the screen. ‘I’m afraid I’m becoming one of those people that just takes their dog places,’ she laughs. Even at this remove, Thompson is a quicksilver presence: sharp, measured, casually elegant in a baggy thrift store blazer, the sort of person who makes everyone around her up their game and probe a little deeper.

While she has been Marvel-famous for a while now, it is a trio of roles in smaller films that have really elevated her to the elite of Hollywood women: in the batshit crazy anti-capitalist satire Sorry to Bother You (2018); in the swoonsome Sixties romance Sylvie’s Love (2020); and now in Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing. An adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel of 1929, it is a highly personal project for all involved — and feels like a dead cert for a few Oscar nominations when awards season hoves into view. Thompson read Hall’s script, and then Larsen’s novel, in one sitting — and wanted in right away.

Set during the Harlem Renaissance — the high days of Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Zora Neale Hurston — and filmed in bleached-out monochrome, the drama centres on two mixed-race childhood friends whose lives have taken very different paths. Irene Redfield (Thompson) is the image of black, middle-class respectability. Her husband, Brian (André Holland), is a successful doctor; their sons open presents underneath a huge Christmas tree; a maid cleans the rooms of their handsome Harlem brownstone. But Irene’s well-ordered life is upended when she runs into Clare (Ruth Negga) on a trip downtown. Clare is magnetic, reckless, ‘the sort of person who changes the vibration in a room’, as Thompson puts it. She is also ‘passing’ as white, as many dual heritage Americans did at the time. Her racist husband (Alexander Skarsgård) has no idea of her background. ‘I don’t dislike Negroes. I hate them!’ he announces to Irene when he meets her, assuming that she too is white.

Hall had long wanted to adapt the novel as she has a history of ‘passing’ in her family — her maternal grandfather was of African-American descent but presented as white, a complexity long buried in her family history. But while race is at the heart of the film, the story that follows the initial meeting between Irene and Clare opens out in subtle and unexpected ways and becomes a meditation on sexuality, gender, class and identity itself.

‘What haunted me about the book — and Irene says this in our film — is this idea that we’re all of us passing in one way or another, you know?’ Thompson says. Irene is clearly electrified and disturbed by Clare’s presence and there are hints of her bisexuality. Is she passing as being straight? Then there is Irene’s identity as a loving wife, a successful mother and a pillar of the community. Is she only passing as a happy family woman? ‘I think for Irene, the fact that Clare has the audacity to be a mother and be honest about the fact that it sucks is something that she is wowed by,’ says Thompson. ‘There are things about Clare, about her appetite, her lust for life, her energy that Irene feels really compelled by, that she wishes that she had inside herself, too.’ There is a sense that Irene is a little repulsed by her — in the way that we are, sometimes, by people in whom we recognise ourselves.

Thompson says she has always been compelled by these issues. Now 38, she grew up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s in what she describes as a very ‘free’ environment. Her parents were not together but both were independently artistic: her Afro-Panamanian father was a musician (Chocolate Genius Inc, if you want to look him up); her half Mexican mother was a ‘working mom’ who painted and sculpted. Thompson has early memories of wandering around the Hollywood Hills, making Super 8 films with her dad. When she was old enough she would write little scenes and press her reluctant sister into acting them with her. But her first loves were musicians, and particularly ones who played around with their stage personas: Prince, Grace Jones, David Bowie, Björk. ‘Those musicians really set me free when I was young. In telling your deepest truth, you can also create a construction that gives you enough separation that you feel free to express it in its fullness. It’s both you, of you and not you at all. I mean I think we’re all engaged in some sort of mask play, you know?’ she says. ‘You are right now, I am certainly to an extent…’

This is why Larsen’s novel resonated so deeply with her. She sees its treatment of identity as decades ahead of its time — and certainly, the book gives the lie to the idea that no one thought about these things until the internet came along. ‘There’s so much in the book that talks about intersections of identity long before we had language around that. I think that’s why it was really misunderstood in its time, you know? People didn’t really see what she was driving at. Now we’re in a time thankfully when we have language around this idea of race as a construct, and gender as a construct.’

It’s also a pleasant surprise to see a largely successful and functional black family depicted in a period drama; a true Hollywood rarity even though ‘that was the reality for many black folks throughout the time’, as Thompson points out. Surely, we are trying to get to a place where we can afford any human individual the full range of human emotions. While film-makers are now much more willing to put black American lives front and centre, so often these stories are ‘couched inside of our trauma and our hardship’, she says. ‘And I think what we then ignore is the personal and interpersonal hardships. When we talk about our stories, the assumption is always the stories have to be about our experience as a marginalised group. But for me it’s like any story that you tell becomes a story if it’s through your lens. I can tell a story about, I don’t know, earthworms — and I should be allowed to. This idea that we can’t speak to stories that are outside of what you might expect I think is lazy and prohibitive.’

Which is why she is now looking to roles that allow her to upend expectations — and is investing in her own production company to make that happen. She saw Sorry to Bother You as one of those crazy, magic, realist satires that always used to feature white actors. And if you are of a slightly soppy disposition, I urge you towards Sylvie’s Love, a big, old, giddy romance of the kind that no one really makes any more — and when they did, tended to star people like Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. Even Passing redresses a balance: it’s the sort of intimate interpersonal drama that typically centred on rich white New Yorkers. ‘I’m kind of like, where have we not gotten to play? I guess selfishly I want to play there you know? Those are the places I want to play. While people were taking to the street to fight for our rights, they were also at home making love and drinking gin cocktails and listening to records. And you don’t really get to see that often.’

Another place Thompson wants to play is London. She had a productive lockdown in LA — she bought a puppy and read a lot of books — but finds the 365 days of south Californian sunshine ‘oppressive’ and misses London — which she did, after all, save from alienkind in Men in Black: International. ‘I love London, I could live there in a heartbeat. I really, really love being there,’ she insists. As if to prove the point, she goes into raptures about Dishoom — ‘I know everyone likes Dishoom but it is really, really delicious’ — and about our pubs. ‘I love pub culture in general, but I also really love a pie and a cheese sandwich.’

Come and do a play! Once upon a time appearing in the West End was her grandest ambition in acting — maybe some producer or other can make that happen? She singles out the young London playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones, writer of Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner — ‘she’s a voice that I’m really excited about’ — as well as Michaela Coel, with whom she had a love-in at the Emmys in September. ‘She’s just like such a singular, really singular voice. I May Destroy You is just one of the best things that’s been made. I think it’s a case of television before it and after it.’

We move to talking about the online world, the pros and cons of Instagram and I swear that Thompson is the one who steers the conversation in the direction of those internet-breaking pictures. I mean the ones that purportedly show her kissing Ora and Waititi and prompted much talk about whether they were a ‘throuple’. Now I have to ask, I say. ‘I mean do you have to though?’ she says. ‘Who says you have to ask?’ (My editor.)

She deliberately did not comment at the time, she says, mindful that anything she said would spawn another million terabytes of bullshit content. However, she does stress that they were nothing like what they seemed. ‘This idea that we were caught in some private salacious moment is frankly just untrue. If you look at those images, nowhere are our lips touching. Those are just my friends. They remain my friends, they were just my friends that day and they continue to be.’

She did find a small silver lining in this ‘gross invasion of privacy’ however, in that there was no censorious misogynistic commentary around the images, no moral policing. Five years ago, she reckons, there would have been. ‘So while I didn’t love being embroiled in all that, I think the public discourse around it was at least interesting, in terms of people celebrating that people can have a fun and free time and that’s okay.’

She comes back to her great heroes — Prince, Bowie, Björk, Grace Jones — and the importance of separating public and private persona, even if to the outside perspective, they might look exactly the same. ‘The value is that I can always just shut down my laptop and not read about the public part of me.’ And she laughs. ‘I think we all spend too much time on the internet anyway.’

‘Passing’ is in cinemas now