TO BE DETERMINED

TESSA THOMPSON IS A TRULY MODERN STAR, WITH ENERGY – AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS – IN SPADES

Actress Tessa Thompson refuses to follow the easy path to success.

With the word “Yes” tattooed on her wrist, arms as ripped as Sarah Connor’s and glitter sparkling above her eyes, it’s clear that the kind of focused charisma Tessa Thompson radiates would prompt double takes no matter her profession.

“Tessa’s engaged,” says Alex Garland, who directed her in Netflix’s Annihilation, about five women (including Thompson’s astrophysicist) who go on a scientific expedition in the wilderness. Even at her audition, after giving what Garland says was “an exceptional reading”, Thompson quizzed him about decisions he’d made in his previous film, the Oscar-winning Ex Machina. “Most people would be wary to do that,” he says. “But Tessa has no guile about that kind of thing.” Her co-star Natalie Portman adds that there’s much more to the 34-year-old than star quality. “She’s someone you can dance or laugh with, or talk about politics [with],” she says. “And she’s beautiful, of course, which you have to say, even though it’s not important.”

While Thompson insists acting wasn’t always her endgame, her fascination with the performance of identity and the complexities of race has been a constant since her childhood in LA. “I think our ideas about what a young black person or a young Mexican person or a young white person should be like weren’t as expansive then as they are now,” says the actress, whose mum is of Mexican and European descent and dad is Afro-panamanian. “It made me think I had to fit into a box.” It wasn’t until she was enrolled at a community college that she began to immerse herself in the LA theatre scene and realised acting was “a compulsion I had a hard time shaking”. While considering drama school, she met with an agent, hoping to supplement her income — she’d been working at a Chinese restaurant and as a “motivational dancer” (aka hype woman) at bar and bat mitzvahs — and promptly booked a job as a lesbian bootlegger on an episode of Cold Case, then landed a season-long arc on Veronica Mars.

For the next eight years, she worked steadily, but there were always roles she refused to play. “The one-dimensional girlfriend or the sassy black friend — those weren’t going to work for me,” she says. As she was thinking of stepping back from the industry, she read writer-director Justin Simien’s script for 2014’s Dear White People, a satirical drama that explored racial identity through the experiences of black students at college. “I had a burning to be involved,” she says.

“Sam could have been grating, in the wrong hands,” Simien says of Thompson’s character, a biracial activist. “But Tessa has this uncanny ability to let you peer into Sam’s eyes and see layers of emotion underneath her hard shell.” Ultimately, that gig led to Thompson being offered dynamic new roles. “She never struck me as the kind of person who was going to take a job because it was what she was supposed to do,” Simien continues. “It’s passion only, you know? And that can be a really scary place for any actor, but especially an actor of colour who’s a woman.”

Two months later, she appeared in director Ava Duvernay’s Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma as Diane Nash, a radical revolutionary “wrapped in the package of a mild-mannered, pretty, pretty lady,” Duvernay says. “I was looking for someone who could embody that, and I think of Tessa so much in that way.” Then, in the 2015 Rocky reboot Creed (which grossed more than $220 million worldwide), she played a musician who struck up a relationship with a boxer played by Michael B Jordan, a role for which Thompson, a singer-songwriter in her own right, wrote three songs that appeared in the film. “She’s really talented at everything she puts her mind to. It’s scary!” Jordan says.

Thompson’s career has been in overdrive ever since, and she’s now gearing up for a string of sci-fi projects, including the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War. As for the critically acclaimed robotwestern Westworld, returning for season two this month, Thompson will reprise her role as an executive who operates fearlessly in the sexual and professional realms. During season one, some fans deemed her too young for such an elevated position. “But once I was cast, there was an excitement on my part and on [co-showrunner] Lisa Joy’s that, in the future, what does power look like?” Thompson says. “It looks like a young black woman.”

“Tessa is controlling her career; she’s not letting her career control her,” Duvernay says. “She could be following a traditional career path, skating by on her beauty. Instead, through her work, you hear her voice.”

TUNE IN: Westworld season two is on Foxtel from April 23