So, I actually had passages of the book in the margins of my scripts. Even though it’s not written in first person, it’s entirely from Irene’s perspective, and while she doesn’t verbalize a lot of her thoughts and feelings, she has so many. Maybe for some people it feels liberating to not engage with the text that much or create a barrier between what you read on the page and what your rendering is going to be, but we were doing something that I felt like was a pretty dedicated adaptation of the book and trying to capture the same ambiguity and haunting nature of it, so I just thought, what a resource, because one of the challenges is there’s such interiority in the book. I engaged with Nella’s words almost obsessively, actually, while we were making the movie.
How did reading her work prepare you to play Irene? “Passing” is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella. “When movies like this do well, all that does is make room for more stories like this to be told.” “It was so hard to get the film made because of the subject matter and because it’s shot in black and white,” she tells Variety. Beyond her own acknowledgment, Thompson explains, those accolades represent something more. The movie, which marks Rebecca Hall’s feature directorial debut, recently earned five Gotham Award nominations, including a lead performance nod for Thompson.
In “ Passing,” Tessa Thompson stars as Irene Redfield, a Black woman living in Harlem amid the Renaissance, whose life with her doctor husband Brian (André Holland) and their two sons is turned upside down when she reconnects with Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), a childhood acquaintance who’s since begun passing for white and is married to a wealthy (and racist) businessman named John (Alexander Skarsgård).
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