This is a woman who moves confidently in outer space and seems more than capable of holding her own against green-screen fire demons and blimp-sized wolves.
She’d dealt with her share of special effects on the Westworld set, and pretending to go through a wormhole in front of 300 person fixing wind machines and chewing sandwiches wasn’t much different she says, than being 19-years-old and performing Juliet for a small theater full of high school kids who are “asleep or making out or eating Chex Mix.” (It’s just a lot bigger – and way more expensive.) Still, if Thompson was nervous about being in her first $180 million blockbuster, she doesn’t show it. Her first week on shooting, she’d be standing confused in the middle of nowhere and then suddenly, the camera were rolling.
On set, she realized that she’d have to teach herself how to have gravity in the pixellated Marvel universe. “She’s the Han Solo of the movie,” says Thompson. (Thor’s ex-girlfriend Jane, once played by Natalie Portman, is written out of the franchise in one line.) Valkyrie is no wimpy love interest she’s a callous, self-centered survivor who doesn’t care if the good guys win. So she said yes when director Taika Waititi asked her to join Thor: Ragnarok, even though the Marvel franchise has tended to sideline, or flatline, its major female roles.
“This is a completely fabricated universe. “We’ve got crocodile people up in the Mos Eisley cantina but no one’s black?” says Simien. She and Simien already had a wry running joke about the need to cast people of color in sci-fi and fantasy films. “I was like, ‘ This is a different kind of talent,'” Thompson recalls. As Naomi Watts’ Fay Wray ran through the jungle, got yanked into the air, turned to the CG beast and screamed, Thompson made herself a second, surprising vow. But when Creed wrapped and Thompson and two friends settled in to undo Bianca’s striking waist-length braids, they turned on the 2005 remake of King Kong.
Jordan’s face by the credits, she’d come close to stealing the movie away from both the star and the original Rocky, Sylvester Stallone. Her character is introduced slamming a door in Michael B. “She’s funny and vulnerable and fierce all at once.”ĭear White People was life-changing, and so was the role after that – the vibrant, yet emotionally grounded songwriter Bianca in Ryan Coogler’s Creed. “In her close-ups you can see how her characters want to be seen, as well as how they see themselves behind the eyes,” the writer-director says. Simien calls her judgment, “impeccably smart,” not just because she credits his film with correcting the course of her career, but in the details of her craft, especially in the tricky, and even contradictory, layers she adds to her portrayals. “Can we have a movie with, you know, characters in them instead of stereotypes,” groans Sam – no more “black women in pain, man.”
Nothing inspired her until she read the part of college radio D.J./campus activist Sam in the script for Justin Simien’s Dear White People. “I want the next thing I do to feel like something I have to do, something that will be life changing,” Thompson vowed to herself. Most of the auditions she went on were “race specific,” says Thompson, “and not a lot of it was incredibly compelling.” She left her hometown of Los Angeles for New York and took a break from acting. She worked steadily for a decade doing live Shakespeare, BBC period pieces, teen dance flicks and the occasional indie, like the role of Nyla, a dancer who survives a horrific abortion in Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls.