Some characters slip quietly into cultural memory, while others burn their way in, leaving behind embers that refuse to cool. Hedda Gabler is one of those. Part muse, part monster, she has, for more than a century, been a cipher for desire and destruction, harboring a restlessness that transcends the parlor rooms that confine her. Now, filmmaker Nia DaCosta—known for examining power inequities and agency through a subversive genre lens, from 2020’s Candyman to 2023’s The Marvels (the highest-grossing film directed by a Black woman)—summons Hedda into a new light in her daring reimagining of Ibsen’s classic play, set in 1950s England.
In collaboration with Tessa Thompson—who starred in DaCosta’s 2018 feature debut, Little Woods, about two sisters fighting for survival and freedom in rural North Dakota—she renders one of literature’s most enigmatic heroines as something sharper: a portrait of womanhood caught between performance and authenticity, constraint and revolt. The 35-year-old writer-director opened up to Vogue from her home in London about reclaiming Hedda for our moment, what the character would wear if she were alive today, and why a 19th-century protagonist still feels unsettlingly contemporary.
Vogue: I confess I didn’t know anything about Hedda Gabler before seeing this.
Nia DaCosta: That’s such a good way to go into it. If you watch 10 Things I Hate About You, you don’t necessarily have to read Taming of the Shrew. It’s its own thing but heavily inspired by this play that I love. I wanted to pull out everything I loved about Hedda and build a world around her that emphasized those things.
What did you see in it that hadn’t been expressed as strongly in other interpretations?
Hedda’s deeply sad but also funny, quite cunning, and slightly ridiculous. She feels really deeply but also feels empty, and I thought all that dimensionality was fascinating. I also found the play quite sexy and felt there should be more of that. There’s yearning, an unrequited, unconsummated obsession, and also a predatory, gamelike situation.
Did any themes feel especially urgent in this moment?
Hedda is a woman hemmed in by society in a very specific way, which relates to the limitations we have put onto us as well as the limitations we put on ourselves—sometimes because of the world we were born into, or our trauma, or our fear. I found all that stuff really human and thought it was a nice way to talk about it by showing this woman who’s very difficult to get on the side of. Yes, she can do terrible, unforgivable things, but you can see her dying to live, yearning to love, and falling short in the end because of those limitations, external and internal.
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You always had Tessa Thompson in mind for the role. What made her perfect for it?
When I wrote this in 2018, we were in the throes of Little Woods premiering in theaters. We’ve been very good friends since we met 10 years ago. She’s an artist and a person I really admire and a great hang. What Tessa can do with characters that have a lot of internal turmoil, the way she can project that without showing so much, like her performance in Passing, for example—it really made sense for Hedda, because I didn’t want to betray the character and overexplain who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing and force empathy onto an audience. How do you justify someone asking someone to kill themselves or destroying someone’s life’s work? It’s not about forgiving this woman—it’s about presenting her as valid. Tessa’s so good at juggling all that. She also read so many translations of the play and watched every single film or theater production she could get her hands on.
She does a specific accent too, right?
The specificity of her accent is around her performing class, because part of her damage is the fact that she is the illegitimate child of a white general, who is very well respected in society, and a Black woman, whom she never talks about. She’s always striving to be part of her father’s world, and every decision she makes is toward that end. In some scenes you feel her putting the accent on a bit more, or when she’s more emotionally raw, you hear the accent soften because she’s being more her true self. When is the mask on or off?
I wanted to ask about a terrific scene where visible nipples play a prominent role.
[Chuckles.] I just wanted to see Hedda systematically destroy this person. Not necessarily be a Machiavellian mastermind but have all these opportunities to choose the worst thing. She sees Loveborg [Hedda’s former lover and now her husband’s rival, played by Nina Hoss] in this state and knows she can embarrass her. Hedda purports to love her but is so cruel to her. Then Loveborg enters this room, and it’s just mortifying. But she makes all those men fall in love with her mind. She’s been wanting to do that the entire time. You start to understand that she walks into the lion’s den every day, and this is what she puts up with.
Describing the movie’s look as stylish doesn’t do it justice. You and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (Judas and the Black Messiah, 12 Years a Slave) wanted to not make it look like a stuffy English period piece but also not overstylize it either.
I very intentionally was like, We can get some murder-mystery vibes, some English country-house weekend-party vibes. I wanted it to exist within that tradition but also didn’t want it to look like every period drama and be overly familiar. This had to represent this very idiosyncratic woman in the center, and everything we see has to be hers. Production designer Cara Brower and I filled the house with some old, stodgy furniture that would have been there in the 1950s, but the portrait in the dining room—which is now in my dining room—is this Cubist modern-art piece. There are Art Deco touches because that was making a resurgence in the ’50s—the black lacquer and leopard print. We wanted it to feel like this meeting of the period and this modern woman. You see this clash play out at every level of the film.
What inspirations shaped the film’s look?
We had this overarching principle that no 20 minutes of the movie should look the same. This is about a party that goes off the rails, so as things get darker, the lights get lower. Then you have the fire—such an important part of Hedda Gabler. And then it’s the cold light of day, and everything is stark and blue and solemn. This Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershoi, his work is so beautiful but very spare and also evocative and full of emotion.
I was so impressed by the costumes.
I love me some Balenciaga. The 1950s were the height of the French fashion houses. It’s so funny thinking about Balenciaga now and when Balenciaga was alive—those are very different things. It was a time of sexiness but also demureness. Loveborg was the most interesting person to figure out. Would she be a Katharine Hepburn or lean into the femininity? Costume designer Lindsay Pugh and I ended up on a dress that shows she’s a woman who’s doing both. She’s hemmed in but soft. She’s saying, “I’m here as a woman, I’m not hiding that, but you have to accept me because my mind is what’s most important.”
If Hedda lived today, how would she express herself through fashion?
Would she be the Sloane Square set? Would she be Made in Chelsea energy? Would she be a Real Housewife? She’d be a Dior girl, a Chanel girl, but not particularly skin-showy because it’s so easy to do that in modern times. She’d want to align herself with history and class but with an edge. What she’s doing behind the scenes is very different from what she’s presenting. That’s where that contrast would live.
Where do you see Hedda in our culture today?
This is gonna sound crazy, but I see Hedda in tradwife. She’s a woman who does terrible things, but I get why she’s living for herself. Is that for me? No. But in the world we live in, with how society is structured, the way the economy is, it’s a legitimate economic decision. Think about the women who vote against their interests, for example, to uphold the patriarchy. They’d rather be in that system and feel safe, quote-unquote, than liberate themselves and their sisters. That’s where I see Hedda, which sounds very ungenerous. I don’t agree with that at all, but I can see it being a legitimate decision given what society has made around you.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Hedda is in theaters now and streaming on Prime Video from October 29.
