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The first official trailer for Nia DaCosta’s Hedda is here, with Tessa Thompson fronting a sultry, knife-edge reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic.
Prime Video dropped the trailer, spotlighting Thompson alongside Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock, and Nina Hoss. The film reframes Hedda’s power games in a 1950s setting, hinting at a charged premise, teasing a mood of desire, manipulation, and consequence.
The trailer revolves around an "incident" as we see our protagonist Hedda speak to authorities. Flashback scenes then show what happened the night before as the film teases a thrilling atmosphere. We also see a subtle romance with Eileen, while she plans something grander with hostile consequences.
Describing the film's heroine, DaCosta told Vanity Fair:
“Hedda is an inscrutable character. And since the beginning, for the past hundred years, people have been like, ‘What the f*ck is her deal?’ Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out. 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.”
One of the biggest changes DaCosta has made to the film adaptation is changing the gender of one character. In the original text, Eilert was a man with whom Hedda was romantically involved with but DaCosta is reimagining the character as a female, Eileen.
Talking about her choice, the director adds:
“My initial instinct was this character should be female because it helps themes about power and autonomy, about choice, about self-regulation. I think Hedda is someone who imprisons herself a lot as well, as much as society does.”
More details about Hedda
Tessa Thompson is leading Hedda as the cold, brilliant, and endlessly magnetic enchantress, who drags every guest at her housewarming into her orbit. This includes her husband, George, played by Tom Bateman, her haunted ex-lover, Eileen Lovborg, played by Nina Hoss, and the dangerously watchful Judge Roland Brack, played by Nicholas Pinnock.
The supporting cast, Mirren Mack, Jamael Westman, Saffron Hocking, and Kathryn Hunter, round out a tense chamber piece shot against the gothic grandeur of Flintham Hall in England. The film is being shot by Sean Bobbitt, with Hildur Guðnadóttir’s work on the film's music, and costumes modeled after Dior’s silhouettes of the 1950s.
The inspiration for the play's adaptation came to DaCosta as she went through several stage versions of the play. She said:
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“I liked it, but I thought, This is not as funny or dark or s*xy as what I read or what I felt when I was reading it. So I was like, Wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie where I make all the subtext text?”
Hedda will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7 before opening in select US theaters on October 22 and streaming globally on Amazon Prime Video on October 29.
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