The greatest cinema experience of Tessa Thompson’s life: “The whole place felt abuzz”
For all its faults, the Marvel Cinematic Universe did a great job in elevating many great actors to superstar status, and one of them was Tessa Thompson.
The American star (who can do a surprisingly good British accent) first joined the series in Thor: Ragnarok, playing the fearsome Asgardian warrior Valkyrie. Since then, she’s appeared in a total of six Marvel productions, from the high highs of Avengers: Endgame to the disappointingly mediocre The Marvels—show of hands as to who remembers that one?
Thompson has been a part of some truly monumental movie moments in recent years, and I’m not just talking about that moment in Endgame where all the characters fly through the portals. As Bianca Taylor, the wife of the title character, she plays a pivotal part in the highly successful Creed franchise opposite Michael B Jordan, and has also voiced Lady in the live-action Lady and the Tramp movie (again, does anyone remember that even happened?).
When she’s not busy making movies of varying calibre, the Westworld star enjoys being on the other end of the process. Speaking to Empire, Thompson reflected on one of her favourite cinematic experiences as a viewer, centring a movie that was released in 2017, and she was right there when the doors opened.
“I was in Hollywood at the iconic Cinerama Dome; it was opening weekend of Get Out,” she recalled, “I remember being in the lobby waiting at concessions, and the energy was already kind of explosive. The whole place felt abuzz with anticipation… And it was, by far, the most electric cinematic experience I’ve ever had. You could feel the whole audience interrogating together; some vocally, the laughs were big, the gasps too, the cheers at the end powerful, and suddenly there was a charge in the room as the movie ended, this collective (albeit tenuous) connection.”
It’s safe to say that nobody expected much from Jordan Peele’s Get Out when it was first announced, although there was certainly buzz around the project as people were curious to see what a horror film directed by a comedian would look like. However, nobody expected it to have the ramifications it did, and Peele’s tight debut effort was refreshingly original and open to an array of different interpretations.
Horror still carried something of a stigma in 2017, but Get Out broke down so many barriers when discussing the genre as a legitimate art form, it didn’t take long before everyone was talking about it. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’, which almost never happens with genre movies of any sort, and we haven’t even mentioned the impact of the film from a racial standpoint.
Black characters never tend to do well in horror, mostly falling victim to the dead in the first five minutes club, but Get Out proved that there was room to discuss race while sticking to the established conventions of terrifying cinema that could even elicit a few chuckles. It made an international superstar out of Daniel Kaluuya and positioned Peele as one of the leading authorities on Black storytelling, a reputation that has only been enhanced by his signature style in the years since.
Tessa Thompson is far from the only person who was left blown away when they first saw Get Out; it was a proper ‘moment in time’ for so many reasons, and one she was clearly grateful to have witnessed.
