Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting awards season’s buzziest scripts continues with Hedda, writer-director Nia DaCosta‘s ambitious adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s famed play Hedda Gabler — originally written in the 1890s and set in Norway.
In DaCosta’s vision, Tessa Thompson dives in as Hedda, a woman in 1950s London trapped within the constraints of society who, in one fateful night amid a swirl of scandal, trysts and jealousy at an opulent party, decides to take it all down. Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots and Tom Bateman also star.
The pic, from Amazon MGM Studios, has resonated since its debut first for an awards-qualifying run and then hitting Prime Video at the end of October. Thompson has garnered Best Actress or Lead Actress noms from the Golden Globes, Spirit Awards and the Gotham Film Awards.
DaCosta in fact wrote the script with Thompson in mind; they were so locked in that the writer-director began calling her lead actor “Hedda Thompson” by the third week of production. “I hadn’t realized how tense Hedda made me,” DaCosta told Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye.
The other key element of Ibsen’s play that changed, in addition to the lead being mixed race and the new time period: Hedda’s secret love is a woman, Hoss’ Eileen, not a man, like Ibsen’s original Eilert. DaCosta’s thinking: “If this character were a woman, you’d really understand the soul suffering of being brilliant and being ignored … being so much more than everyone else around you and being told, ‘No thank you,’ because you’re a woman.”
DaCosta, whose work ranges from superheroes (The Marvels) to horror (Candyman) and indies (2018’s Little Woods), says she loves working with adaptations, calling herself “a big theater head.”
“I love a Shakespeare moment. I love Ibsen. I love these titans of classical theater,” DaCosta told Deadline. “Chekhov and I have a spotty relationship, but I do the ones I love. And they are meant to be torn apart and put back together. They’re meant to last forever. And that means they’re meant to speak to our time, whatever time that’s in.”
Read the screenplay below.