“I was too visible”: the role Tessa Thompson almost lost because of Marvel
You might often hear of actors in independent movies struggling to land that big studio film so that they can break into the mainstream, but it’s rarely the other way around; however, according to Tessa Thompson, it’s not an impossibility.
Beginning her career on the stage, Thompson is no stranger to the struggle of breaking onto the big screen, but after making her breakthrough in Justin Simien’s 2014 comedy Dear White People, the actor became somewhat of an indie darling.
Shortly after, she played civil rights activist Diane Nash in Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King biopic, Selma, but it was 2016 when she fully broke out of the indie bubble when she was cast as Valkyrie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For most actors, this means that Hollywood suddenly opens its arms wide, but for Thompson, it actually jeopardised a role she’d already scored, as Detroit in Boots Riley’s indie hit Sorry to Bother You. Although Riley had offered her the role from the very beginning, which made sense given her indie credits and her track record when it came to making films that were significant for the Black community, he began to backtrack when it came time to film.
“By the time he went to make it, I had made a Marvel movie,” she told the Collider Ladies Night podcast, “and he told me that I couldn’t be in Sorry to Bother You anymore because I was too visible.”
It’s easy to understand why a nameless actor might not get cast in a big-budget studio production, but most actors probably don’t expect their big roles to jeopardise their ability to take on the indie roles that actually creatively satisfy them. As Thompson said, “You would think that it’d be easier to make interesting indie movies”, but as someone who loves an indie movie, I can honestly say that nothing can pull you out of the world being built by an indie filmmaker quite like a well-known face. Actors like Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson might have built their careers on balancing the big and the small, ensuring that they are both financially stable and creatively fulfilled, but it’s a difficult line to walk.
So it’s understandable that Riley, of all directors, was reluctant to cast someone who had tarred themselves with the Marvel brush. After all, the man’s not only an indie filmmaker but a communist to boot, yet Thompson somehow managed to talk him down: “I said, ‘No, sir. I have the email of you offering me this movie. Please’”.
In the end, she had to prove that she could still do it by auditioning with central actor LaKeith Stanfield, and, according to her, Riley said, “Fine, you can be in the movie”, and so, in 2018, Thompson played the artsy activist girlfriend of Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You, which followed him as a code-switching telemarketer caught between unionising and corporate success.
She has since featured as Valkyrie in several other Marvel movies, but has somehow managed to keep straddling both the independent and studio film scenes, most frequently collaborating with filmmaker Nia DaCosta.
