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Before Cruella de Vil, Alex Forrest and Villanelle, there was Hedda Garbler. As the greatest master manipulator of the 19th century, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda has been the blueprint for every twisted, scheming femme fatale to boil a bunny or steal a puppy since. It’s been 135 years since Ibsen wrote Hedda Garbler and yet, unlike many other anti-heroines who have followed in her wake, playwrights, directors, and cultural commentators still haven’t had their fill. The number of adaptations is in the thousands; everyone from Maggie Smith to Lily Allen has played her. She’s often dubbed the female Hamlet, and the comparison stands alone in how enduring she is. The reason why she’s become a foundational pillar of popular culture is as up for debate as her motives. In the play, she is a high-class woman in a loveless marriage with academic George, a man who – to borrow from today’s parlance – is a wet lettuce. In search of some fun and perhaps some anti-patriarchy rebellion, she toys with every lover and loved one in her orbit, particularly Eilert Løvberg, her former flame and her husband’s work nemesis. The men in her life are flies, and she’s picking their wings off. Some analysts think she’s despicable and rotten; others argue she’s complex, afflicted by domesticity and suppression. She is also, it must be said, a little camp. “When you read the play, she’s so wild,” grins Candyman director Nia DaCosta in agreement. We’re in a London hotel room, DaCosta perched next to actress Tessa Thompson, here to talk about their Hedda. It’s another adaptation of Ibsen’s play, but unlike any that has come before it. As Thompson puts it: “At a certain point, after we had done so much research into previous versions, eventually this thing that we were making was its own animal.” Thompson, who previously worked with DaCosta on 2018 drama Little Woods and then again on The Marvels, is Hedda in this somehow more upmarket, more scandalised film version, set in 1950s high-class Britain. While George exists (played by Tom Bateman), more forthright and hotter than ever, Eilert has become Eileen (Tár actress Nina Hoss). She’s a recovering alcoholic, fellow academic vying for the same job as George, and Hedda’s lesbian ex lover. All of this to say: DeCosta’s Hedda is queer. The duo have previously played down the queering of this storied vixen, with Thompson recently saying that they didn’t take an “identity first” approach. Today, DaCosta recognises that by making Hedda Garbler a sapphic siren, everything is changed: her motives; her search for self; the chess game she’s playing. “It deepens the story and it deepens the struggle, especially [as a] queer woman in the 1950s trying to figure out what freedom and living your truth looks like, before those things were really thought about,” she says. “You have to figure out: how do I express my sexuality openly? If I don’t express it openly, what’s my relationship to it even? It just really deepened this personal search that Hedda is on.” Thompson plays Hedda with delightful chutzpah, her eyebrows permanently raised and her blood-red lips curled in a constant closed smile. She tortures Eileen with the allure of alcohol, and mocks her new partner Thea (Imogen Poots), hacking chunks out of their relationships with every move. There is an exposed side to her though, and it seems as though she has genuine feelings for Eileen. For Thompson, DaCosta’s version is the first to bring such feelings to the surface. Its entire one hour 50 minute run time simmers with star-crossed desire and illicit temptation. “I think in our rendition, the love between these two characters was actual. That didn’t have to do with their queerness necessarily. In previous versions of Hedda that I’ve seen, I never thought that Hedda was actually in love with Eilert. I thought really Eilert became emblematic of an idea of access to the male world which also meant freedom for her,” Thompson says. Still, she shuts down the emphasis on Hedda’s sexuality: “I think some stories are solidly about the queerness of characters and I love seeing those stories but that’s not the film that we made.” The entire film is set in an exuberant British manor on the night of a decadent party, Hedda sashaying about in a tight gown, pinned up hair, and a neck of pearls. Thompson had “a blast” filming it, unsurprisingly so given how the evening moves from the clinking of chandelier crystals to the ringing of gunshots. The headline-making Saltburn comparisons might be lazy, but they’re understandable, too. In Ibsen’s original, Hedda might be the only player without societal power, and so she contorts herself into the only one with personal power. In DaCosta’s version, even George, originally portrayed as “whimpering and idiotic”, has a thirst for authority. “Let’s make him someone who also exercises this power of Hedda and this desire to have more power over her,” the filmmaker says. “When you have that [and] the women then as a centre, you understand what they’re going through and you understand that the walls of their world is not just their inability to love each other or connect with each other or live out their queerness, but it’s also these men standing on either side of them pressing them into a box.” Hedda, Eileen and Thea wrestle for power throughout, but the agency provided to the men highlights how all three are more suffocated by the patriarchy than by each other. “So many of these characters [are] trying to game each other and gain power over each other,” Thompson agrees. She’s full of praise for the film’s actors, but is particularly thankful that Bateman worked to understand George’s position in Hedda’s story. “It’s really nice to just work alongside actors that understand how their characters function and work and particularly when it’s men because, quite frankly, men are tasked with doing that far less for women in film than we are for them,” she says, adding that he was game to be “secondary to these strong, incredible women in the frame”. “Strong” and “incredible” aren’t the first words most associate with Hedda Garbler. But again, this is Hedda Garbler with the camp dial turned up to 100, and everyone knows that strong, incredible women are camp 101. “All of her exclamations are so big and she’s this character who is just bursting at the seams with life and vitality and…” DaCosta pauses briefly. “And cruelty, yes, but also vulnerability.” Still, in 2025, the question remains: is Hedda a wicked monster, a victim of circumstance, or a farcical, funny enfant terrible? Perhaps the thrill is in never truly knowing. Hedda screened at the 69th BFI London Film Festival and is in select cinemas and on Prime Video now. Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
