Every actor knows Hedda Gabler. The protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theater. Elusive and complex, Hedda is a newlywed who, already bored with her marriage and the life she’s chosen, manipulates and terrorizes those around her—leading to deadly consequences.
Maggie Smith, Isabelle Huppert, Annette Bening, Rosamund Pike, Mary-Louise Parker, and Cate Blanchett are just a few of the actors who have taken a stab at the role onstage. There have also been several screen adaptations of the play, including the BBC’s 1962 version, starring Ingrid Bergman; a 1981 movie with Diana Rigg; and a 1975 film, which earned Glenda Jackson an Oscar nomination for best actress.
But there has never been a version of the main character quite like filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s Hedda Gabler. Hedda, which will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, is a voluptuous cinematic reinvention of the text, with a towering performance by Tessa Thompson in its lead role. “Hedda is an inscrutable character,” says DaCosta. “And since the beginning, for the past hundred years, people have been like, ‘What the fuck is her deal?’”
DaCosta’s adaptation digs deep into that question. Hedda is often characterized as just a bored, moody society wife, but DaCosta builds a character who has a lot more. In the film, Hedda is hosting a party at her new home with her husband, George (Tom Bateman), and over the span of a single night, she struggles with unfulfilled yearnings for a past lover while wreaking havoc on those who come into her orbit. “Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out,” says DaCosta. “She just feels like everyone is cowardly, everyone’s lying. She has this deepening emptiness inside of her that makes her do things she doesn’t understand—and she is living in a world that she doesn’t get.”
The film, which Amazon MGM Studios will release in select theaters on October 22 and globally on Prime Video on October 29, is set around 1954, but told through DaCosta’s modern sense and singular vision, showcasing Thompson’s agile work as a troublemaking woman for whom audiences can’t help but fall. “She’s mad and bad, but she’s still a person, and you kind of love her because she’s so ridiculous,” says DaCosta.
DaCosta discovered Ibsen’s work while studying at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. “I thought that this character was terrifying, but also how brave to write a character like this, who is—to me, at least—unredeemable and does horrible things, but you’re telling it from her perspective and have huge empathy for her,” she says. She spent hours watching Hedda Gabler stage adaptations at theater libraries, but much of what she saw didn’t quite capture everything she thought the text could be. “I liked it, but I thought, This is not as funny or dark or sexy as what I read or what I felt when I was reading it,” she says. “So I was like, Wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie where I make all the subtext text?”
When DaCosta wrote the first draft of the script a few years ago (around the time she was working on her 2021 Candyman sequel), she made one major change: Eilert Lövborg, a man competing with George for a teaching position and who was also once in love with Hedda, would be a woman. “My initial instinct was this character should be female because it helps themes about power and autonomy, about choice, about self-regulation,” says DaCosta. “I think Hedda is someone who imprisons herself a lot as well, as much as society does.”
Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) is openly in a relationship with another woman, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), when she arrives at Hedda’s home, on the verge of social redemption after a drinking problem. She is a threat to Hedda’s carefully crafted life in several ways: She is up for the position that Hedda’s husband hopes to get, which would provide financial stability, and she is Hedda’s former lover. The love triangle helps to show the contrast between the choices Hedda has made and those of Eileen. “You do have this extra layer of another thing that these women are fighting against to just feel like they’re people who matter in the eyes of the men that tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” says DaCosta. “This made it more potent, more powerful, and also more unfortunately tragic.”
Thompson and DaCosta first met at the Sundance Directors Lab before working together on DaCosta’s 2018 feature directorial debut, Little Woods. The pair stayed in touch over the years, and DaCosta brought Hedda to her first. “She’s so brilliant at playing characters who have a roiling ocean inside of them but have to keep a façade,” says DaCosta. “She’s just really great at that tension.”
Thompson was aware of the character of Hedda Gabler, as every actor is. “I had always just been really fascinated by the work of Ibsen, the questions that he asks, particularly about female personhood and how hemmed in or boxed in we can be by societal expectations,” she says, adding that she studied every adaptation of the play on which she was able to get her hands. “Obviously, he was writing so, so long ago, but how resonant some of those ideas continue to be.”
The world of Hedda is built through lush production design, a provocative score by Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir, and bold cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, who worked with DaCosta on The Marvels and is best known as Steve McQueen’s longtime collaborator. When it comes to the costumes, Hedda’s looks are inspired by the Dior silhouette of the time—and its impossibly small waist. Thompson liked the connection to the “idea of being hemmed in emotionally. You’re literally really hemmed in inside of those garments because of the construction and the boning. There is a kind of suffocation that I found really helpful in character.”
As the tragedy unfolds into the late hours of the night, Hedda’s self-imprisonment and desire for acceptance become even more obvious, even as she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake. “The tragedy isn’t that like, ‘Oh no, she’s sad, her marriage sucks,’” says DaCosta. “The tragedy is that she herself will never know herself and she herself doesn’t understand why she does the things she does. And these people around her suffer because of it.”
Hedda will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before being released in US theaters on October 22. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
