Four years ago, after nearly a decade of film acting and not a single breakout role, Tessa Thompson was on the verge of calling it quits. Sick of the same tired roles being assigned to black women time and time again, she vowed she would stick to theatre. “You can play all sorts of things on stage,” says the 35-year-old. “The film industry, at least at that point, had not been so generous to women of colour.” Then Dear White People came along. “It changed the game for me,” says Thompson of the 2014 comedy drama, in which she plays a politically provocative student at a fictitious, predominantly white Ivy League college. “The film itself is sort of an indictment of Hollywood. With black people, why is everything that we do wrapped in Christian dogma? Why do we only have to be the sassy black friend? It was incredible to be able to talk about the frustration that I’d had in this industry, in a film. And then it did so well. So that became my North Star.” Since then, that star has ascended. The American actor, raised between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, played civil rights activist Diane Nash in Ava DuVernay’s Selma; the badass, bisexual Valkyrie in Marvel superhero film Thor: Ragnarok; a scientist investigating an iridescent phenomenon alongside Natalie Portman in Annihilation, and a ruthless park director in HBO’s high-budget android drama Westworld. This year, as well as being instrumental in the formation of the Time’s Up movement against sexual harassment, which has raised millions in legal defence funds, she starred in musician Janelle Monae’s “emotional picture” Dirty Computer. Too many female characters, she continues, “don’t have their own rights, they don’t have agency – we don’t even know what they care about, what they’re after”. It was important to her Bianca should not only “occupy her own narrative”, but also push back against the hyper-macho world in which much of the Rockyfranchise takes place. tessa-thompson-thor-ragnarok.jpgThompsoin ‘Thor: RBecause it’s set in the world of boxing, and about men, there’s a real danger of it just existing in a real toxic masculinity space,” she says. “And while I don’t think it should be the role of the women in the film to soften that entirely – like, men should have the responsibility to deal with their toxicity,” she laughs, “I do think that there’s a nice opportunity for the women in the film to come in and be like, ‘Hey…’ you know?” The first Creed was filmed before the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements emerged. On Creed II, and indeed “on every set that I’ve been on since this watershed moment”, Thompson felt a “palpable difference”. “The thing that’s been really great about Time’s Up,” she says, “in terms of looking at the industry, and not just addressing gross abuse of power, is acknowledging that there’s just an imbalance of power. We look at workplaces and we go, ‘How do we make them more safe? For all people, but specifically for women?’ We just have more women in the workplace, and women in positions of power. So I do feel like there’s been a seismic shift, which I’m proud of.” Published in Daily Times, December 2nd 2018.