Tessa Thompson PUTTING ON A SHOW!

Los Angeles-born actress Tessa Thompson has built a career out of transformation. One moment, she's an Asgardian warrior in Marvel's Thor franchise; the next, she's a hearing-impaired singer-songwriter in the Creed films or a razor-sharp radio host in Dear White People. Soon, she'll step onto Broadway as a prison volunteer opposite Adrien Brody in The Fear of 13.

- By Olivia Harrowell

It is clear she has range. Her characters are often messy, layered and gloriously resistant to tidy categorisation. And, fittingly, some of the same could be said of Thompson herself.

And it rings true in one of her latest films, Hedda, a re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen's famous play, and the same role that just earned her a nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama at the recent Golden Globes.

Her titular character is still as manipulative and sensual as the versions that came before her but, in filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s version, she's also thrown the complexities of being a mixed-race, bisexual woman in the 1950s caught in a deliciously dramatic love triangle with her husband and her former lover.

The experiences of her character aren't far from those she’s had being a biracial queer woman herself. While not burning her past lover's manuscripts or wielding pistols, she has had to move through life with great awareness of her race and sexuality. “I have a tremendous amount of empathy, not just because I’ve played her, but also because I’ve had to interrogate these things that I think exist in all of us,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “As a Black woman, there’s a lot of leftover rage that we don’t always allow ourselves the access to feel and express, because if we do, we get categorised as all sorts of things.”

But Thompson, 42, isn’t one for categories or being hemmed in by labels – and her sexuality is no exception. It was in 2018 when she subtly came out to her interviewer during a chat for Porter magazine, noting her family is “so free”, and saying, “You can be anything that you want to be. I’m attracted to men and also to women. If I bring a woman home, [or] a man, we don’t even have to have the discussion.”