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Tessa Thompson takes us through her iconic character style from Veronica Mars, Westworld, Dear White People, Thor: Ragnarok, Passing, and many more from the cover shoot. Watch above to see Thompson share details on the character styling in each film.
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Hi, I am Tessa Thompson, and today we are going behind the looks with Who, What, Where
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Valkyrie, when we meet her, a superhero has kind of lost her way and hasn't been in battle
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hasn't been a part of a community, and is sort of this hard-drinking, leather-wearing misfit
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But this look in particular is sort of when she returns to glory and puts on her armor
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So we wanted this moment to feel very heroic. I feel like it's shot in slow motion
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If it isn't, I'm acting like I'm moving in slow motion. It's giving very cape-blowing, hair-blowing
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My inspiration was very much Beyonce, the way that she sort of walks on stage back and forth
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It always feels like she's in slow motion. Superhero costumes are not the most comfortable things
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because they're made of crazy materials, like, I don't know, plastic sometimes
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They're not the easiest thing to look cool in. Also, I didn't realize until about four months
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into shooting the film that you could request a shorter cape which is good if it's your first time having a cape
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because you trip on them. And then if you have a sword, they get caught in the sword
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And then if there's a wind machine, they flap over and they hit you in the face
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They're just really hard capes. So if you need a cape ever
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I suggest practicing with a short one. And then they fix it and they do like movie magic
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and make it long again. But in this particular shot, I am in fact wearing a long cape
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So Irene Redfield is probably one of my favorite, if not my favorite character I've ever played
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The film was shot in black and white, and so there was such an emphasis in terms of costuming on texture
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Not so much color, obviously, but also there was sort of subtleties between color that you could sense, which is so interesting
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It's the first time I've ever worked in black and white. and so it made the fittings really fascinating
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because something that we would think would be fantastic and it was, you know, in person
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we would take a photograph of it, convert the photograph into black and white
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and it just wouldn't pop in the same way. It meant that we wore a lot of textures
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like rich velvets and things that just had sort of a story and a life
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Okay, Detroit from Sorry to Bother You is my most favorite style of any character I've ever played
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I had so much fun. And our director, Boots Riley, gave me so much freedom
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So I really got to shop a lot for Detroit. I brought some things from my closet
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but I also just went shopping. We shot in Oakland So I would scour all of the vintage stores there but also would go to Michael and make stuff There were sort of arts and crafts
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All the earrings that she wore are instrumental to her character. They're all scripted
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So it was really incredible to get to see all of those things that were sort of in the DNA of it come to life
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Also, the hair and makeup, we had such freedom. I dyed my hair instead of wearing a wig
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It took 13 hours. I had to redeposit the, it really messed up my hair actually, but I had to redeposit the
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color every week because it would come out. But it was so, just so much fun to work on Detroit
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Veronica Mars. Veronica Mars is my second job ever. There are some very interesting wardrobe choices
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The whole idea with her was very sort of luxe, fashion. She loved a sparkle moment
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And she loved an acid wash denim. She loved a studded belt
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She always wore heels to school, which I appreciate. I don't think that she owned a backpack
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And she was just fabulous and fantastic. It was definitely a time in my career before I felt like I could say that I didn't like something
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So I just put on anything they put me in. Bianca in Creed is another favorite of mine
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I remember director Ryan Coogler showed me a photograph that he had taken of a girl at a train station in Philadelphia
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And he was like, I feel like this is our girl. Not just what she was wearing, which is actually something really similar to this photograph
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But there was something, there was like an energy in her eyes
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There was like a kind of quiet power. and I think the way that that communicated into Bianca's fashion
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was just like kind of not really a need for adornment and she's a singer but in her life when she's not performing
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she sort of just puts on things that feel comfortable to her
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Her time on stage is a time for her to do something that feels sort of more performative
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She had a kind of simplicity and she felt like somebody you could see you know, at a train station or at the post office
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Charlotte is a sort of badass executive this season. I think we wanted something that also had
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because there's stunt stuff that's happening in these sequences on Westworld, we wanted something that could move and have some flexibility
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but also felt like something a powerful woman would wear. And I personally love wearing suits
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What I think is so cool about this work is there's kind of a juxtaposition because it's angular and structural
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but it's also delicate because it's in this soft sort of blush
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And this bodysuit that she wore kind of is an iridescent moment which caught light really fantastically We shoot Westworld so out of sequence and we could be shooting you know parts of one episode for over six months I was wearing this a lot
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And she had sort of her, like, I mean business bag, which in her case had a gun in it
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So that's not a fashion accessory I typically like, but it's a fun thing about playing Charlotte
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So Men in Black, obviously, it's, you know, the most iconic, I mean, the most iconic thing about those movies, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones
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But second to them, well, and the black glasses. Okay. And then, and then is the suit, obviously
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And so we sort of needed the perfect suit. And we were so lucky to have Paul Smith come in and make
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these suits for us. And I love wearing a suit. So this was my happy place. Chris Hemsworth is a
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very tall man. He's about 6'4", and I'm just under that. But I wear heels typically when I'm
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around him because otherwise I would not be in the movie. So I'm wearing my suit with some sensible
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footwear, sensible booty, which I ran in a lot, but it's a good thing I can do that. And I would
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make jokes with Chris that everything he could do, I could do in heels. This is from an emotion
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picture that I got to make with Janelle Monae, which was a dream. We made all of these short
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videos. And in this, I am wearing, I don't know what I'm wearing, honestly, but that's what I
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like about it. One of my favorite things in fashion in general, when I see something and I don't
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entirely know what it is, but it feels like it can be worn in some way, I typically want to own it
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So I'm wearing some sort of headpiece, some sort of something, but it's really beautiful
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This is another fave for me. So in Sylvie's Love, I love clothes. I love vintage clothes
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I got to wear just under 50 looks in the film. Our director, Eugene Ashe, really wanted this first scene to feel like the first time you see Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast and Tiffany's
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It's kind of like iconic look. And we were making this dress
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Our incredible costume designer Phoenix was working on something and it was in a Tiffany blue and we just couldn't get it right
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We had a bunch of fittings. And then very last minute we got very lucky and Chanel graciously sent us a couple of archive pieces that we could borrow for the shoot
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And so this beautiful dress is an archive Chanel piece, which becomes the first time that we see Sylvie
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And I think it really did feel like that sort of old Hollywood glamour shooting this
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We shot in downtown Los Angeles for New York, but it felt, it really felt like, yeah
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it felt like a modern day for me, the experience of getting to make something
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that just feels very glamorous and was thinking of Audrey Hepburn the whole time
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So this is from a scene in Selma and incredibly you know we in all these sort of rules and the women were wearing heels and then remembering that these marches that we were portraying people actually marched
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miles and miles and miles and miles like that, which was sort of incredible to be thinking about
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So many of the pieces that the brilliant costume designer Ruth Carter pulled were actually from
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the period. Diane Nash was such an incredible iconic and is still an iconic figure, an unsung
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hero of the movement and there's an incredible gentleness to her and so we wanted the costume to
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sort of communicate her fierceness. This was so fun getting to recreate Monica Geller on Friends
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She, Courtney Cox is just so cool in the show and always looks so fantastic and getting to sort of
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emulate her personality, her spirit, her movement, her intonation on the show was so fun, but also
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wearing those clothes. And it made me then order a bunch of tennis skirts. Sam White in Dear White
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People was another really favorite character of mine. I worked really closely with Justin Simeon
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who gave me so much freedom to really create Sam and a lot of things. When I'm playing a character
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that is a modern character, I typically like, if it makes sense to shop for them. I don't typically
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like to wear clothes of my own because I have my own sort of memory and feelings attached to them
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but I like to buy things that I then sort of like build a closet for the character and I did that
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really intensely with Sam White. It's also the pleasure of working on independent film and
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people are typically grateful when you bring some stuff because we're working on such a budget
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anyways. Inside of this part of her identity that is an activist she has this idea of how to express
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that. And so you'll see in this, there's sort of fabrics that feel culturally specific. The use of
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sort of African fabrics. She's always trying to make her hair bigger, more textured than it actually
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is. She's really dead set on expressing her blackness because I think at this point in the
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film, she has some insecurity about it. But I found it really interesting as someone who's gone to a
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lot of rallies, just seeing like how activism gets expressed in clothing. I think it's such a
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powerful way to talk about how you feel. And that's something that I think Sam is trying to
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do throughout the movie. But I loved just getting to play with different periods, too. I really
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looked at the iconography of black leaders over time, like Angela Davis. So also playing with
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70s and 60s silhouettes, even though the film was set in present day, there's this idea that we're
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still cycling through the same issues, the same problems, because race in America is, you know
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You know what it is. Thank you so much. Let me know. I'm curious what's your favorite in the comments below
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