THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER Star Tessa Thompson Covers Harper’s Bazaar’s August Performance Issue

Tessa Thompson covers the August 2022 issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine photographed by Collier Schorr and styled by Samira Nasr.

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On the pageantry of the red carpet: “I always see the red carpet as [creating] a character,” she says. What she wears—a starbursting trail of bubblegum tulle by Carolina Herrera at this year’s Met, a sculpted hooded jacket over bike shorts from Schiaparelli’s latest haute couture collection to the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party— depends on the nature of the event. “It’s always a costume to me.”

On Thompson’s roster of projects and the launch of Viva Maude, a production company dedicated to developing “inclusive stories with inventive creators.”: “How do we create worlds where the kind of protagonists that we don’t often get to see get to take up space?” Thompson muses. More explicitly, she names “folks of color” and those who are “queer” or otherwise “marginalized inside of Hollywood.” The company name comes from the beloved 1971 film Harold and Maude, which was underappreciated in its day. “People didn’t really get it or know what to do with it,” she explains.

On the 2021 film, Passing, being overlooked at the Oscars: “But the thing is…in terms of awards, there’s no objective truth about what’s fine and what’s good in a work. It’s all subjective. So what do you do?”

On her appreciation for the unique route she took in Hollywood: “I feel really lucky in my career to have gotten to play the kind of protagonist as a Black woman that we don’t necessarily always see,” she says. Josie Radek, from 2018’s Annihilation, comes to mind: Thompson plays the depressive physicist with an unassuming intensity that could be childlike or ancient. Charlotte Hale, Thompson’s character in Westworld, a cagey—and caged—executive, is another; it’s a show about robots called “hosts.” “You don’t always understand the mechanism completely,” she says. “I don’t mean this in an ominous way, but we”—the actors—“are kind of the hosts.”

On playing Valkyrie, the smart-mouthed former bounty hunter, opposite Chris Hemsworth’s titular Norse god: “It was kind of just one big messy experiment,” she says of Ragnarok.

When Thor: Love and Thunder opens, Valkyrie rules Asgard, but the malaise is thick. “She has this job,” Thompson says. “She’s certainly more healed and healthy than the last time we found her, and she loves her job, but she also is sort of…it’s lost its luster.”

This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR, available on newsstands July 26.

[Photo Credit: Collier Schorr/Harper’s Bazaar Magazine]

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