Actor and producer Tessa Thompson has tattoos of the words "yes" and "no" on opposite arms, and they serve as guiding principles.
"I got the 'yes' first and then many years later I thought I needed to get the 'no' for good measure," Thompson says. "But I do think I'm constantly wrestling with ... my cynicism and my optimism."
Thompson's built a career saying yes to interesting roles. She's currently nominated for a Golden Globe award for her starring role in Hedda. The film is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1891 play, and reimagines the main character as a mixed-race queer woman.
"For my money, I always think if you're gonna do a classic, you ... have to have a good reason to want it, because they are so perfect," she says of the film. "Why take it apart and put it back together unless you have something to say? ... And I think [director] Nia [DaCosta] did that in spades."
Thompson's also starring in the Netflix thriller series His & Hers, based on the novel by Alice Feeney. In it, she plays a once prominent news anchor who returns to the small Georgia town where she grew up after a murder pulls her back into the spotlight. To prep for the role, Thompson shadowed TV journalists as they reported on stories in the community.
"It's one of the great, extraordinary pleasures of what I get to do ... the process of preparation and research, to meet so many extraordinary people that do incredible work," she says. "I might know something about [their work], but truly you know nothing about it the closer that you look."
Interview highlights
On why she sees envy as useful
Understanding and being able to connect to moments of jealousy or envy actually helps us understand the lives that we want to live. It's that thing of, like, when we're scrolling on Instagram and we feel petty about someone's job that they post or recent weight loss or engagement. I think what they help us understand is maybe I'm not in the job that I want to be in. Maybe I want to be someone who's taking better care of myself. Maybe I want to be in a relationship that feels like it's moving towards some new level of commitment. These are little whispers to ourselves. If we can channel it in positive ways, I think it can help us understand where we want to go and potentially how to get there.
On her mother, who is white and Mexican, raising a mixed-race daughter (Thompson's father, musician Marc Anthony Thompson, is Afro-Panamanian)
She did a really phenomenal job at raising a mixed-race daughter and like connecting me to my Black identity and making sure that I was in those spaces and taking me out of private schools that were completely white where I was the only kid of color in there on scholarship and understanding what that felt like. … I was in a school system that frankly was racist and not great and I was bullied in that school and she understood how detrimental that was to me at a very young age and we didn't have the money to get to a better school district and so she took me out of school and homeschooled me until we could.
On navigating her own racial identity
I remember very early on wanting to ... get my hair chemically straightened, and my mom was very sweet and very generous. And she's like, "We can investigate the whole process and do it." And we investigated everything. I had had a series of very terrible blowouts that the weather didn't agree with. And she was like, "Whatever makes you happy," but she outlined everything for me. And finally, it was my choice. I said, "No, I wanna keep my hair just like this." And I remember when I made that choice, she cried because she was so happy. But she had given the choice to me, you know?
And I think that was just an early indication that was so helpful for me then when I navigated Hollywood and eventually was on sets where people decided that I had to straighten my hair or that I had to look one way or another, my mom gave me an early sense of self enough that I could say, "No, actually, I want to look like myself." And I'm not sure that I would have known how to do that were it not for my mother.
On starring with Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, Janet Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, Thandiwe Newton in Tyler Perry's 2010 film adaptation of For Colored Girls
I just spend a lot of time energetically feeling connected to Black women inside of this business.Tessa Thompson
So many of these women had had such an incredible impact on me. ... Janet Jackson, I [dressed as] her for three times at Halloween. ... Being on set with them — I was pinching myself every single day. But also I'm so deeply aware all the time, how we're in relation to each other — the women that both came before me, many of them still working today. The women that are working currently that feel like they're coming after me. The women that will come after them. I just spend a lot of time energetically feeling connected to Black women inside of this business. Because I just know from watching film and television growing up that it meant so much, it shaped so much of my ideas of self, seeing Black women on screen.
On almost quitting acting — and then being cast in the 2014 film Dear White People
I read Dear White People at a time when I almost wanted to quit. … I hadn't really been working in it arguably that long, but I just thought there's not enough for me here. There's not enough that's substantive, and frankly, some of the things that I'm going up for or would be offered, were I lucky enough to get them, I think are problematic in terms of what they say about us and I just I don't know if I want to do it anymore. Then I got this script and it felt like for the first time I could play a character that was not just the object of the narrative, but the subject of the narrative, which was massive.
On Hollywood pulling back on stories about race
I think that there was run of really extraordinary projects — American films that wanted to talk about race in really inventive ways. I don't know. I hope, I think, that these things are sort of like a pendulum and things come around and this time will probably give birth to a whole welcomed rash of projects. … I am optimistic. In the same way that I love stories that are audacious. I love storytellers that are audacious. I love people — full stop — that are audacious. I think one of the most audacious things, currently, is to be optimistic, and so I try to be.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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