Tessa Thompson on How the ‘Tremendously Generous’ Nina Hoss Makes the Case for Future Gender-Flipped Versions of ‘Hedda’

On December 4, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Honoring Nina Hoss, IndieWire’s Spotlight Award winner and Tessa Thompson‘s co-star on “Hedda,” Thompson praises the actress’ magnetism and generosity on set. As Hoss is playing a female version of the male Ejlert character from Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in Nia DaCosta’s film version, Thompson also explains how Hoss’ performance makes the case for future gender-flipped iterations of the play.

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As told to Ryan Lattanzio.

It is my honor to honor the extraordinary Nina Hoss. I’d been a long admirer of Nina’s work. I don’t remember what I saw her in first, but I distinctly remember seeing her in “Barbara” and just being blown away by her. When you know you’re going to share the screen with someone that you just think is tremendous, that’s always such a gift. And to not be at all disappointed, to understand in real time why it is they’re so miraculous at what they do. She’s tremendously generous as an actor and really open and terribly collaborative, and also had played in “Hedda Gabler” for six years, so had this intimate knowledge of the play and this tremendous reverence for it.

She was really supportive, and we got to really wrestle with things together, and really talk through the piece, side by side with Ibsen’s original work and this adaptation. I did a lot of spiraling in terms of, “Does it work? Is there scaffolding enough?” Nina did that with me.

This character, Hedda, that I play, I really wanted to paint a portrait of someone who has a lot of pain and turmoil and a large appetite for mischief and sometimes acts out of childlike spaces. The best of us as actors is when we can play that kind of childlike spirit, and Nina has that in spades. A real source of the chemistry of the characters is a source of chemistry in Nina and I in general. We like to play like kids, and we like a little bit of mischief. Not in such a dark way as Hedda Gabler, but a certain delight in the unexpected. Nina really had that, and I think that allowed us to capture this real romantic chemistry.

Eileen is a foil to Hedda. She’s a woman in the world who’s living boldly and doing her best to live authentically and with agency. Hedda is not someone who is doing that, so in some ways, they are fundamentally in opposition. That was easy to find and play because it’s so easy to find real harmony with Nina. You can go to those spaces of real opposition together because you’re doing it really collectively, because she’s such a generous actor.

[For this scene in which Tessa Thompson is fixed on a floating dolly and physically gravitates toward Nina Hoss’s character upon Eileen’s entrance] I didn’t know that they had orchestrated this shot, either. I knew the way that it was communicated on the page. It wanted to be something really special, but I thought we would do that by and large through the performance. They built this incredible rig. Selfishly, I’d always wanted to be in a double-dolly shot. Spike Lee’s films were the earliest films I saw, which my dad showed me. My early understanding of cinematic language, in a lot of ways, was sculpted by Spike Lee. It was so cool to get to be in one of those frames.

I have all this movie magic that’s helping me float over to her and be able to inhabit this sense of time and space, mutating by this magnetism toward this other person. But Nina just comes in and stands, and she’s so incredibly powerful. The way that it felt even in the room, with all the background actors.

Even though she’s so sweet and can be very unassuming, when she’s inhabiting someone who has the power to change the room, she can do that in spades because she’s such a powerful and commanding actress. I’m on this double dolly shot, and sometimes I couldn’t even get her gaze, but I could just feel energetically her pull and her power. That was the very first scene that she shot, so there is this palpable sense that’s meta in a way. She plays a character who comes into the pieces and changes the energetics, but Nina herself is an actor who comes into a film and changes the energetics of it because she has such a strong pull and presence.

She speaks to this, but she played in “Hedda Gabler” for six years in rep while also playing Medea. Medea! Which is a testament to her incredible ability and power as an actor to be taking on two of the most canonical, beastly parts for women in literature. She’s incredibly gifted, and because she had this relationship to the material, it was always fundamentally on the other side of being opposite Ejlert; she’d always been mystified by that character and wanted more from that character. For her to get to do that [as Eileen, in Nia DaCosta’s version] is tremendous, and she brings this sense of real intelligence and pathos and longing to it.

She’s so trailblazing and fantastic, and to get to play the first iteration [of a gender-flipped Ejlert], she makes, in a way I’m not sure other actors might, a real argument for this character, that you could do this again, that this character could also be canonical.