Fresh Air - Best Of: Jodie Foster / Tessa Thompson

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

Jodie Foster has been acting since she was 3. At 12 she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver.’ This year marks the 50th anniversary of that film. Foster spoke with Terry Gross about her early acting career, including getting mauled by a lion on set. Her new film is ‘A Private Life.’  Tessa Thompson stars in the new Netflix murder mystery limited series ‘His & Hers’ and in Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Ibsen’s ‘Hedda.’ She spoke with Tonya Mosley about navigating her biracial identity and why she has both “yes” and “no” tattooed.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Data Bricks, the data and AI company. Are your AI agents working? Most aren't reliable for business. You need AI that's accurate. Agent Bricks, AI agents grounded in your data and built for your goals. From W.HYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Jody Foster.

She's been acting since she was three. And when she was nine, she was working on a Disney film with a trained lion. who went off script and picked her up in his mouth. He held me horizontally and then flipped me around and shook me. So I watched the entire film crew run in the opposite direction, sideways. Foster was 12 when she played a child prostitute in taxi driver, a role that would define her early career and make her one of the most celebrated actors of her generation.

Also, we hear from Tessa Thompson. She stars in the new Netflix murder mystery, Limited series His and Hers. She's built a career on characters and independent films and blockbusters, from Valkyrie in the Marvel Universe to Bianca and the Creed films to the calculating Charlotte in Westworld.

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Data Bricks, the data and AI company. AI agents work best when they have the right context, your unique data, your rules, your workflows. Agent Bricks helps companies build Agents that are accurate, continuously learning, and automate everyday tasks. It's AI built for how your business actually runs.

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Terry has today's first interview. Here she is. My guest is Jody Foster, and we're going to look back on her life and career, starting with her early days as a child actor and her Oscar-nominated performance in taxi driver when she was 12. next month marks the film's 50th anniversary. She recently received an Oscar nomination for the film Nyad, an Emmy win for the latest season of the HBO series True Detective, and is now starring in a new French-language film, A Private Life.

Along the way, Foster won many awards, including Oscars for the films The Accused and the Silence of the Lambs. In a private life, she plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris, and with the exception of a few lines, she speaks French throughout the film. When the film begins, everyone is angry with her, including her patients. One of them accuses her of having wasted his time. He's been in therapy with her for years, hoping it would help him quit smoking. It hasn't helped.

So we tried a hypnotist, and after only one session, he quits cigarettes. Foster's character is very skeptical of hypnosis, but when one of her patients, a beautiful woman, dies under mysterious circumstances, Foster's character wants to get to the bottom of what happened, hoping she wasn't in any way responsible. Despite her skepticism, she sees a hypnotist, goes under, and that sets her on a path to uncover what happened to her patient. Jody Foster, welcome back to fresh air. It's been years, and my impression is your life has changed a lot since then. I don't know. It's moved on, but, you know, it's the same old me, so. And I'm always so happy to be honest. And I'm always so happy to be

NPR because I'm such an NPR fan and such an NPR head. That is so great to hear. So your new film is in French, and you went to French language school, right? Yeah. My mom, when I was about nine years old, she had never traveled anywhere in her life. And she, right before then, she took a trip to France and fell in love with it and said, okay, you're going to learn French. You're going to go to an immersion school. And someday, maybe you'll be a French actor. And so they dropped me in where it was a school of the Lisein-Francé de Los Angeles that does everything in French. So it was science and math and history, everything in French.

And I cried for about six months. And then I spoke fluently and got over it. So hypnosis plays a key role in the new movie. Did you ever go under, even for research? Well, actually, I have. I'd quit smoking when I quit smoking. I went to a hypnotist and I was a really, really big smoker. So I'd tried everything and I'd tried to quit a million times.

And, you know, like everybody, I'd get edgy or I'd gain weight. or I couldn't sleep. So I went to this guy and, you know, wrote the check for $90 and, I don't know, he said a few things. I felt a little sleepy, but other than that, I didn't, you know, didn't go into any kind of trance. And I left thinking, well, this is dumb. I can't believe I gave that guy $90 and I could smoke tomorrow. And then I just never smoked again. Wow.

That's great. That's kind of what happens in the movie. Yeah, exactly. Well, not really. No, and the movie sets her off on this, like, mystery. Yeah. Would you be game to do a career retrospective? Sure, sure.

Okay, I'm going to go back to the very beginning. Okay. You did a Capitone commercial. A lot of people know that when you were three. And it wasn't like the billboard or picture version. This was like a TV commercial. Right. Yeah.

And we didn't see your bear behind unlike the picture version. Right. Yeah, there were a lot of things that were different. It was, you know, it was the 60s and the dog would not perform. So the dog was, you know, they tried to get the dog to kind of pull at my bikini bottom, but the dog was like not having it. Okay. I'm moving on. This is from the Paul Lynn show, which was, I think, from the early 70s.

And so the main character, played by Paul Lynn, rings of the doorbell, looking for his daughter and son-in-law who he either knows or thinks is living there. And when he walks in, he realizes, oh, it's like a hippie Buddhist. commune. Okay. Okay, here we go. Howie and Barbara Dickerson here. Are you the Fuzz? No, I'm not the Fuzz.

I'm not supposed to let the Fuzz in. I'm Barbara's father. I'm not supposed to let them in either. Let me talk to your mother. Which one? Huh? Well, all the girls hear are my mother. Just what a father wants to hear.

Pardon me, young man, but I'm looking for Howley and Barbara Dickerson. He's meditating. Well, can you hear me? Only if you're Buddha. Look, I'm not going to stand here and play straight man to you. I really, I do remember Paul Lynn because I really liked him. He's funny in this. He was funny.

He was funny. He was really nice to me. And, of course, he's very memorable. So I do remember being on that show. Okay. I actually got one more. Okay. This is a Crest TV commercial.

Oh, yeah. So four guys are playing golf. One of them sinks a putt. The other guys react. And at the same time, you run up on the green, excited to tell your father about the visit to the dentist that you and your brother just had. Okay. God! Jody?

Oh, checkup. Jimmy only had two cavities. And I didn't have any. Hey, we really did it. How'd you do it? We brushed with crest now. Must be the crest. It has fluoride.

The others we tried didn't. Hey, great. A toothpaste should fight cavities. Crest can't promise everybody results like this, but we can promise most people good checkups. Fighting cavities is the whole idea behind Crest. Hey, George, maybe your game is really tennis. Oh, boy.

The acting is so terrible. Oh, yeah. Well, but that was what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to be terrible. We didn't know. I mean, just was a different style. You know, it was a different style. But by which I think you mean,

it sounds like somebody reading their lines for the first time. Yes. Yes. And, yeah, I mean, I remember thinking, oh, well, this is not a job I'm going to do when I'm a grownup because this seems like a very silly job. I just learn lines and then I say them. And somebody usually says to me, the first direction somebody tells me is usually act natural. Or, you know, maybe they'll say something like be excited on that line. And that part of it had held no sway for me. I had no interest in that. The part that was interesting to me was being on set with these families of, you know, mostly guys. They really, you know, were all these brothers and fathers who would teach me things and they'd talk about how the camera worked. And, you know, we would all be freezing together or complaining about the food together. And there was this community of people that I belonged to.

And because I love movies and love television and love that was such a big part of my life, I was a part of something. So that's the part that I remember. I don't remember the work particularly as being intriguing. You were mauled by a lion at age nine. I read that, but what happened? Was this on a shoot? Yeah, it was an accident. I was working with a lion who I loved and but worked with every day.

It was an old lion, had no teeth, very old on a Disney movie. And they kept them in zoo structures at night, but they hadn't put enough security on them. So at kids at night in the middle of the night would come and shoot BB guns at the lions. There were two other lions. One was a stand-in lion and one was like a stunt lion. So they let the... Were they in the union? Exactly.

Yeah, oh, yeah. There's a whole, you know, animal training thing that we do in the film business. And so the trainer couldn't get the old lion to work, so he just wouldn't move. And you can't make a 500-pound lion do anything. So they got the stand-in lion, and the stand-in line, worked all day and we were ending the day going up a hillside. I think they might have been tugging him with a guiding him with a piano wire, which is a thin filament. And I guess he snapped. I mean, he came around. He picked me up by the hip and shook me. Wow, he picked you up like in his mouth?

Yeah, yeah. He held me horizontally and then flipped me around and shook me. So I watched the entire film crew run in the opposite direction, sideways. Oh, my God. To get you help or to run away from the lion? Run away from the lion. And then I remember... Showing great courage. Yes.

And then I remember thinking, oh, this must be an earthquake. I knew about earthquakes. I grew up in L.A., so I knew about earthquakes. And then I guess... Wait, wait. Are you saying you didn't know you were in the lion's mouth? No, I guess I was, you know, it's a shocking thing that happened. I had no idea what was happening.

The only thing I remember is I remember his mane coming around my... When I looked down, I could see his mane coming around, and then the next thing I knew it was an earthquake. And then he dropped me, and the trainer said, drop it, and the lion was so well trained that he dropped me. And then as I was rolling down the hill, he came running after me. And then he put his paw on me, like, I got this. What do we do next? So, yeah, it was a scary moment. The good news is, I'm fine. I have, you know, some scars that are very delicate and dainty and have moved.

all over my body because apparently that's what happens when you get older. Your scars move around your body. And I'm not afraid of a lion. In fact, whenever I see a lion, I went to Africa not too long ago, and everybody else was terrified. They were petrified because the lions were so close and they were eating prey and all of this. And I was like, oh, makes me want to go out there and ride on top of them. Didn't it make you think that acting was unsafe? No, no. Accidents happened. And I think my mom was really smart. I think she, you know, she talked to me and she said, you know, it wasn't the lion's fault. And I understood that. I went back and worked with the lion. I was in a hospital for, you know, three or four days or something. I, I determined I was okay. So I went back and I worked with the lion. And I think that was the right thing to do, which is, you know, I was very lucky. And they're animals and we love them. And, you know, you go through the procedures to make sure that you're safe. And I worked with lots of other, you know, I worked with camels. I worked with pigs. I worked with lots of other animals.

I think she did the right thing, which is just to make sure that I got through it. I think your mother sometimes exercised such good judgment in terms of choosing roles for you, though some people might find that judgment very questionable when it comes to taxi driver, but that's one of my very favorite films. It's such a deep psychological study of the characters in it.

Yeah, I couldn't be more great. to have, I mean, what luck to have been part of that our golden age of cinema in the 70s, some of the greatest movies that America ever made, the greatest filmmakers, Oter Films, that were really talking about our times in ways that challenging it in ways that had never happened before. So I couldn't be happier that she chose these roles for me. And a lot of it was, yes, it was a vicarious effort on her part that, you know, she wanted something for me that she couldn't achieve in her life. And what that was was respect, meaning, and to be a part of an art movement, to resist being objectified, and to make films that matter and that would matter to women of the next generation.

And, you know, my mom who grew up in a pre-feminist time just didn't, she didn't have those opportunities to be able to play a part in the next role that women were going to play. Did she approve of feminism once it started really blossoming? Oh, yes, yes. And filled with mixed messages, like everybody of that era, you know. It was always very confusing, which, you know, anybody who's my age probably has the same stories of their mom saying, you can do anything. You can be a doctor. You can be a lawyer. You know, but, you know, make sure you don't ever make a man mad.

Okay, because, you know, try to manipulate him and say, you know, nice things about, you know, flatter him rather than make him mad because making a man mad is dangerous. You know, there was just a lot of mixed messages of, you know, you can do anything, but you won't be able to take care of yourself. So who are you going to marry that's going to take care of you? And, you know, that's what we do as, as kids, is you rebel against your parents for the things that you feel are not true to your life and that you feel are all fear. They're just throwing fear at you and you reject that to become your own person. So did you do, do you ever take her advice of always flattering men?

No, but I certainly knew when there was a drunken guy in a bar who, you know, I knew to say something nice and try to change the subject and, you know, leave as quickly as I could. I think like any woman who wants to save their life, we know that historically we are in danger. We're listening to Terry Gross's conversation with Jody Foster. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Jody Foster. So I want to focus a little on taxi driver since next month marks the 50th anniversary of its release. So let's start with a clue. Amazing.

Yeah. And this is an example of your mother being brilliant in accepting the part for you and of being controversial because she accepted the part for you. Because you play a 12-year-old, and you were 12 when you shot this, and you are what would then be called a prostitute, and today a sex worker who has a pimp played by Harvey Keitel. And Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, the taxi driver, and De Niro sees this. And so he wants to buy some time with you to save you. He kind of has a savior complex. So here's a scene where, you know, he has tried to talk with you and rescue you, take him away from the pimp, but you don't want to be rescued. So he ends up taking you to a diner.

He's trying to convince you to go back home, be with your parents, and just live a better life. And you speak first. Why do you want me to go back to my parents? I mean, they hate me. Why do you think I split in the first place? There ain't nothing there. Yeah, but you can't live like this. It's a hell.

A girl should live at home. Didn't you ever hear of women's lib? What do you mean women's lib? You sure a young girl. You should be at home now. You should be dressed up. You should be going out with boys. You should be going to school. You know, that kind of stuff. God, are you square?

Hey, I'm not square. You're the one that's square. You're full of s' shit, man. What are you talking about? You walk out with those creeps and low-lifes and degenerates out on the street and you sell your little phty for nothing, man, for some low-life pimp, stands in a hall. I'm square. You're the one that's square, man.

I think Paul Schrader doesn't ever get quite enough credit for writing this. I mean, people who really know movies, like, think he's made terrific movies, But Scorsese did a brilliant job directing it, but Paul Schrader did a brilliant job writing it. You know, God's Lonely Man and all of Travis's monologues. Did you get to talk to Schrader about the screenplay? Well, you know, at 12 years old, my mom, if you saw Paul Schrader at that time, he really was Travis Bickle. He wore that army jacket and he mumbled a lot. And he stayed up all night and stayed up for hours and hours at a time.

My mom didn't want me anywhere near Paul Schroeder. She was like, don't talk to him, whatever you do. But that's funny because it's like, you can play a prostitute who's 12 years old in the movie, but don't talk to the person who wrote this. Well, yeah, look, I was an actor. I finally understood through working with Robert De Niro because he really took the time to show me what acting was. That it wasn't just saying lines that somebody else wrote, that it actually was creating a character. I didn't know that before I was 12. How did your mother feel about playing, you know, a 12-year-old sex worker and how?

How did you feel about it? How much did you understand what that meant? And also the film has some pretty explicit violence. Yeah. I mean, I think that my mom knew he was a great artist. We loved Mean Streets. We saw it three or four times. My mom saw that I was interested in art and cinema and took me to every foreign film she could find, mostly because she wanted me to hear other languages. But, you know, we went to very dark, interesting. German films that lasted eight hours long. And, you know, we saw all the French New Wave movies, and we had long conversations about movies and what they meant. And I think that she was before you were 12. Yeah. And some of them were inappropriate. You know, some of there were moments I remember where she'd be like, why don't you go get, let's go get popcorn. Because there were moments in the film that were not appropriate for a kid. Too sexual? Yeah. Yeah. I remember seeing Last Hangman in Paris. And my mom going like, well, maybe this is a good time for you to go get a

Coke. Did adults in the ladies' room ever look at you and say, what are you doing here? Yeah, but I also think they admired her. I think they knew that I was, I think, precocious is a weird word. I think I did have a skill that was beyond my years and I had a strong sense of self. So, you know, I'm not very good at math. I'm not terribly good at science, but I did have a, almost like an idiot, want ability to understand emotions and character that was beyond my years. But you've also said that it was hard for you to express emotion unless you were acting. Yes, and thank God I was acting. So it gave me an outlet that I would not have had. I had to develop. It was a sink or swim.

I had to develop an emotional side. I had to cut off my brain sometimes to play characters in order to be good. And I wanted to be good. you know, if I was going to do something, I wanted to be excellent. So in order to do that, I had to learn emotions. And I had to learn not only how to access them, but also how to control them so that I could give them intention. You've said De Niro stayed in character during the whole shoot and before it too. So what he would do is take you to a diner. and not necessarily say anything. Yeah. Yeah. He had a very Travis Bickle personality during that shoot, so he was pretty boring. He was very awkward and very boring, and it was difficult from, you know, I was a 12-year-old kid.

I was like, oh, God, here comes this guy again. He's taking me to a diner, and he's going to not talk for 20 minutes. And I would talk to the waiters. And we also would run lines. So we ran the lines, sort of a normal rehearsal process or we ran the lines. And I think by the third time, he started going off. and improvising around the lines and encouraging me to do the same and trying to show me how to dip in. So, you know, he would go off on a tangent, some long improvised tangent,

and then I had to find the opportunity for me to place my next line to when was the right time. And really talking about reactions, you know, how does that make you feel? And he really, he was the first person that ever took the time to treat me like an actor.

Was that fun for you doing those improv? Oh, it was amazing. It was just this huge eureka moment. I'll never forget it. And I remember being excited and being kind of sweaty in my heart racing when I came home to the hotel room and came up in the elevator. And I said to my mom like, wow, I finally get it. Like, I really get it. And I want to be a part of this. And I remember that summer specifically because we were in New York City. So, of course, we saw a million plays. You know, I saw Pippin and a little night music and Chicago and, you know, just all these amazing. equis, all these amazing plays. And we also went to see movies. You know, we saw Panic and Needle Park, and we saw Straw Dogs and all those films of that era. And I suddenly was like, oh, I want to be a part of this amazing thing that I feel passionate about. And it was just, it all happened in a moment. Judy Foster, I've enjoyed this so much. Thank you so much for coming back to the show. Thank you. And good luck with the new movie. and I hope we talk again.

Me too. Jody Foster's latest film is called A Private Life. She spoke with Terry Gross. You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper. With people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker.

So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. My next guest is actor and producer Tessa Thompson. Many of the characters she's played share something in common. They're public-facing but privately conflicted, grappling with visibility, identity, and control over their own lives. She starred as the warrior Valkyrie in the Marvel Universe, the musician Bianca and the Creed franchise, civil rights strategist Diane Nash, Selma, and a woman navigating the fraught boundaries of racial identity in the film passing, and a biracial college student wrestling with racial dynamics in dear white people. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe in her portrayal of Heta, Nia Dacosta's reimagining,

of Henrik Ipsen's classic play. Tessa is also starring in a new murder mystery, the Netflix limited series, his and hers. She plays a once prominent news anchor who returns to the small Georgia-Texamination, where she grew up after a murder pulls her back into the spotlight. And the detective leading the case is her estranged husband. It doesn't take long to realize they're both hiding something. There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine.

Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying. The series is adapted from Alice Favis. Fienie's best-selling novel and is structured around competing versions of the truth. Tessa Thompson, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Am I right that this is your first lead in a murder mystery?

This is my first lead in a murder mystery. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that until just now. You're very intentional in the roles that you choose. I think that most actors are, but there's something that is very specific. I talked about it a little bit in the intro. There's a through line of many of your characters. Many of them, are, of course, they're highly intelligent, but they're also deeply self-reflective and aware. They use control as a way to survive. Anna, this particular character and his and hers is no exception. And I actually want to play a scene where she's having lunch at a diner with a cameraman. His name is Richard Jones, and he's played by Pablo Schreiber. And he's married to Your Nemesis, another news anchor, which I should just say is

really real. Like this steps, there's so many photographers who are married to news anchors. It's so true. And there are also so many anchors that have some, you know, testy relationships, which I learned when I did my time shadowing some of them. Oh, you did. So you shadowed. Yeah, I shadowed, which was, it's just such a delay. I did a ton of it in Atlanta. And I'm so grateful to all the folks there that were so generous with me. But, you know, it's gotten better now, but it has been, you know, for a very long time, a very competitive industry. And for women in particular, there is a scarcity of opportunity, which creates its own sort of drama. Did you go out on stories with them or what was your shadow of?

Yeah, what got to go out on stories, they got to help me with my copy. So I would send my copy in the show. They would help me rewrite. I got to go in studio and watch them work. It's one of the great extraordinary pleasures of what I get to do is to really, in the process of preparation and research, to meet so extraordinary, so many extraordinary people that do incredible work and to really get a window into worlds that I think I might know something about, but truly like anything, you know nothing about it, the closer that you look.

Oh, I'm so curious. What's something you learned that was a surprise to you about the job? Something that was really surprising to me is I'd always sort of assumed that anchors in particular were people that were just reading the news as opposed to writing it, that they actively are really, you know, writing those stories and have so much to do with that. And then also just being in the room where they're deciding what stories are important or when something's breaking. But, you know, I had a similar thing just sitting across from you because when I played Sam and Dear White People and got to play someone that worked in a radio station, I still, every time I do a podcast or I'm in a radio station, I have like a rush of that feeling again because I just loved doing it. I just so enjoyed doing it.

Sometimes when I play parts, this isn't always the case, but sometimes it feels like I get a sense of a window of like another trajectory I might have taken were I not an actor. You know, sometimes I find things that I go, God, I probably would have really loved to do this thing and doing what you do is one of those things. I thought when I was working on it. Goodness, I really like this. I have this clip that I want to play where, as I mentioned, she's sitting with this cameraman. and he's married to her nemesis. And she's talking to him about the perils of being married to a news anchor. And so she's talking about her nemesis, but she's also talking about herself in that same way.

Let's listen. Richard Jones, married to rising star Lexi Jones. What's that like? Exciting. Lonely. Right. Friends tell you it must be exciting to have a celebrity wife or what passes for a celebrity in Atlanta, but it's not, is it? People recognize her in the grocery store, asking to take their photo.

Next to her, you're invisible. She leaves a two for the four and the six, and she stays for the 11. And there's meetings after, so she doesn't get home until after one. You're already asleep, so goodbye, sex. she makes five times more money than you do. Oh, and you're happy that she does. But it creates an imbalance so happy or not. It hurts you both.

Okay. I love this scene because it also is so accurate. Sorry, I just was in this world for so long. Yeah, right. And, you know, there are often these shows that try to portray this world. And they never quite get it right. But this particular piece seemed to do that. But what strikes me the most is that she's talking about her nemesis, but she's also talking about herself.

She's talking about herself. Take me to that scene. Take me to that particular piece of dialogue. So as I said, I would lean on some of my, you know, new friends who worked in the space to go through my copy. But also with that scene as we were developing it, I also asked them, like what feels right? You know, Anna is someone who is newly back or trying to regain her footing in her professional world and meanwhile is having to contend with a lot of choices that she made in her personal life. And so I think you get to see her in this moment. She's someone that deflects a lot and is probably projecting onto Richard. But really, she is really talking about herself.

If you're just joining us, my guest is. actor Tessa Thompson. She stars in the new Netflix murder mystery series, His and Hers. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with Tessa Thompson. She's starring in the new limited series, His and Hers, a true crime thriller on Netflix. Over the last decade, Tessa Thompson has built a career spanning blockbuster films, television, and independent cinema. She's known for her roles in Dear White People, Creed, Thor Ragnarok, and other Marvel movies. Sorry to Bother You and passing. She began her career in theater before moving into television and film.

She started Nia Dacosta's feature debut Little Woods and has continued to collaborate with her on subsequent projects, including DeCosta's Heda, an interpretation of Henrik Ipsen's classic play, Hedah Gabbler. Your first TV role before Veronica Mars, because people talk about Veronica Mars as your breakthrough role. But before any of that, you were a lesbian bootleger from the 1930s on the show Cold Case. This is beginning to feel like a theme, just like a period lesbian, just a lesbian of the past, a lesbian of a bygone error.

Well, gosh, you were so young. I was so young. And I thought what a hell of a way to start. Yeah. You know, but you talked about being drawn to characters that don't fit neatly who, you know, they cross lines. They resist categories. Where does that actually come from, though? You know, you go out and you audition or whoever represents you says, oh, here's a role for you to go to audition for.

But like this is a pretty specific role to say, like, I want to go for this, you know? Yes. I mean, the truth is, early in you. your career as an actor. If you're someone like me that doesn't have any folks in Hollywood and my family, I was like cold calling agents, you know, I was like sending my little resume. I put together like a little collage and a handwritten note and I would send it out to agents around town. I mean, it was like very scrappy in those early days. But I remember that cold case audition came after I'd had like a lot of commercial auditions, which I never had any luck at, you know.

You never got one. Oh, I'd be holding a pizza box and I just found the whole process. really challenging. I was not very good at it. It convinced me that I was probably not a very good actor because I couldn't do any of the things that they wanted me to do at these commercial castings. And also typically you'd be like one of like 85 people that look vaguely like you just in like slightly different outfits. And I was like, I don't know if I'm going to make it this way. But I remember when Cold Case came through, I thought, oh my goodness, this is so fascinating. Because it aligned with so many of the things I already loved. And one, of which was research. I was like, oh, I get to do so much research into the time. And then I remember when I got the part, I went to, I think it was on the universal lot, got to go to their costume archives and, you know, the suit that I'm wearing in it is an actual boys suit from that time, from the period. And I remember just thinking like, wow, if this is what it's like to work in TV and film, because that was my very first time doing it, I was like, I never want to stop. This is extraordinary. This collage that you made with these little handwritten notes, that's something that

is a throughline that I see in a lot of the roles that you ultimately got. I mean, there's this story about you writing Tyler Perry. First off, you sent a tape to Tyler Perry for colored girls. After you heard that the film was already cast. Yes, I heard it was cast, but I knew that Sadly, because I think she would have been extraordinary, Journey Smollett had to fall out of it. And so I got a call. I was in the supermarket at the time. I'll never forget.

And I got a call from my then agent who said, Journey has to leave this. I know you love this play. Because for colored girls who considered suicide when Rainbow's Enough is one of the first plays I fell in love with, I still have my hard copy that I stole, sorry, from the Brooklyn Library. I still own it.

I'm so sorry to them. I will pay you whatever I owe you. But I just devoured that play and read it so many times and loved it. And so my age at the time knew that and said, they're making a movie version of it. And there's a part in it for you. How soon could you send a tape? And I went home immediately from the market and recorded a tape and send it to Tyler and sent him a note just about – I don't even remember what I said, maybe just how much I love the play.

Yes. I mean, for color girls, it's a raw poetic exploration of what it means to be black. and a woman in America, and you are alongside all of these Titans. When you go back and watch it, Wopi Goldberg, Carrie Washington, Thandie Newton, Felicia Rashad. What did you absorb being among them? Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson. How could I forget Janet Jackson?

Literally all of the women, all, I cannot tell you, all of the women I watched, my whole childhood. I mean, so many of these women had had such an incredible impact on me. I remember the first time I saw Tandy Newton in that film Gridlock. My dad showed it to me and was like, you've got to see this woman. I mean, all of their work collectively. Janet Jackson, I was her for three times at Halloween. I used to know all of, I mean, very poorly, but the Rhythm Nation dance, I could do that as a child. Wait, three times.

So Rhythm Nation and what other eras of Janet? Rhythm Nation twice. It's a good one. Rhythm nation twice. You've got the hair today. That's true. I do have the hair today. I mean, I'm always trying to be Janet.

But these women meant so, so, so much to me. And so being on that set with them was just, I mean, like pinching myself every single day. But also I feel like I'm so deeply aware all the time of just how we're in relation to each other, you know. The women that both came before me, many of them still working today. Absolutely. The women that are working currently that feel like they're coming after me, the women that will come after them. I just spend a lot of time energetically feeling connected to black women inside of this business. Because I just know from watching film and television growing up that it,

meant so much. It shaped so much of my ideas of self seeing black women on screen. I want to ask you about your parents, and in particular, your father, Mark Anthony Thompson, he's a musician. I have so many questions I want to ask you about growing up with parents who were artists, but in particular, your father, he was always photographing you, always filming you. What do you remember, take me there, what do you remember about being on the other side of his camera? Yeah, he loved, he always had cameras, whether there was a super aid or a digital camera or still camera. He loved images, still does, but then it was relentless. He was always recording, and he would use me to test light.

And so he just sort of needed a subject, but then we graduated eventually and I could use him my cameraman and my cinematographer. So I would come up with these stories. And then I would tell him and sort of direct him and he would shoot them. And some of them actually were quite elaborate. I cast my older sister, very begrudgingly, who was deathly shy, just in general, but camera shy, especially. And so she's in one of those early films that we made.

I don't know. I think I remember a sense of feeling... A tremendous amount of excitement and abandon. Mm-hmm. You know, I was lit up by a camera's presence. It was actually later in life when I began working professionally that I had to build a new relationship with a camera. But then it's no self-consciousness at all,

just in excitement and being able to capture. And then my dad would also, because we drive around Hollywood, a lot. He would hand me the camera, so I would get to record a lot too. And I really loved that. I loved being able to see life through a lens. It made even the most mundane thing exciting suddenly to get to see it behind a lens. That's so powerful because I just, it makes me think about your ability to clearly see the people you want to work with and how you want to work with them. and if those foundational experiences with your father were pretty foundational and you understanding how it feels and what you need from the people that you work with.

Yeah, I hadn't even connected that, but you're so right because I think obviously it's my dad and there's such a kind of intimacy. And trust. And trust. And so there's absolute freedom. You're right. Maybe I'm always tracing that now. You're, he's a musician, he's a musician, chocolate genius.

Really, he had several different arcs in his career as a musician, but I'm always fascinated by the Neo-Soul era because that was just a special era of a time when it was a bringing back of music in such an intentional way and musicality in such an intentional way. And I know that you are, that's another form of storytelling for you. You did it in Creed where you were a musician who was writing music, but also you wrote music as part of it. Can you talk a little bit about how music kind of plays into your storytelling as well? Do you see yourself as a musician? I don't see myself as a musician, no, just because I know, if anything, like, it's requisite. It's sort of like an eat, sleep, breathe, it is your world. And music is not necessarily, but it has such a huge place in my world.

And I think in terms of formative early experiences, a lot of those films that I would make with my dad or that time of creation was also at a time when he lived in his studio. So when I would be spending because my parents weren't together, I would spend time with my father. And when I was spending time with my father, I was in Hollywood in this studio. So there were so many people coming in and out in creation. And I would be playing or watching a movie while my dad would be recording. And so there was this sense of constant music around and constant kind of creation. And I still work in a very similar way when I'm working on something. Music is a huge part of how I'm beginning process and character and understanding characters.

There's so much that happens with sort of connecting kind of a sonic landscape with an emotional landscape. And so I think that had a huge influence on me, for sure. Your mom, you all are extremely close. And I want to read something that you said about her. It was at an essence black women in Hollywood luncheon back in 2020. So you said something pretty poignant about your mother and your grandfather. And here's the quote. I want to acknowledge someone who is not black and is not in the room because she couldn't be. But it's my mother. Her father, my grandfather was of Mexican descent. He's a woman. He was. He was a performer in a time where there was very few of them, and he was the only very often. And I think because of this, he had a real pressure to assimilate because he didn't want my mother to speak Spanish. And I was just really struck by the fact that you wanted to acknowledge her in this room. You wanted to say the sacrifices that she made allowed you to be in that room and also her understanding of identity in that way. How did your mother's experience actually help you hold on to the parts of yourself in this?

world as you navigate trying to pinpoint the storyteller you are? Yeah. Firstly, I think she really recognized, because I was doing plays in school and one of my early productions, I remember she came, and I had never seen her look at me that way. I think it was the moment that she realized that I had found something that was going to occupy really so much of my heart and life. And then separately, I think, as someone that grew up, you know, I remember, and I think her father was just trying to give her the best odds, but for example, suggesting that maybe she changed her name on a resume to sound less ethnic

because it might help her get jobs. And in fact, it did. It worked. He was not wrong, you know, in the 1980s. But I think my mom really wanting to make sure that I didn't feel like I had to make any concessions of self that I could show up exactly as I was. And she did it in really small ways. For example, I remember very early on wanting to straighten my hair, to get my hair chemically straightened. And my mom was very sweet and very generous. And she's like, we can investigate the whole process and do it. and we investigated everything.

I had had like a series of very terrible blowouts that the weather didn't agree with. And she was like, whatever makes you happy, but she outlined everything for me. And finally, it was my choice. I said, no, I want to keep my hair just like this. And I remember when I made that choice, she cried because she was so happy.

But she had given the choice to me, you know. And I think that was just an early indication that was so helpful for me then when I navigated Hollywood and eventually was on sets where people deeply decided that I had to straighten my hair, that I had to look one way or another. My mom gave me an early sense of self enough that I could say, no, actually,

I want to look like myself. And I'm not sure that I would have known how to do that, were it not for my mother. You know what I also note based on what you shared about your mother, and in particular that speech you gave at that women's luncheon, where you said, I want to acknowledge this woman who's not in the room. I mean, oftentimes when we're talking about your identity, it is really focused on your blackness. But you are biracial and your mother is white and Mexican. And so she's really not in the rooms when we talk about black discourse. But this sounds like she was such a fundamental part. and you understanding who you are. Yeah. And also I think she did a really phenomenal job at raising a mixed-race daughter and, like, connecting me to my black identity

and making sure that I was, like, in those spaces and taking me out of private schools that were completely white, where I was the only kid of color in there on scholarship and understanding what that felt like. You were even homeschooled for a while. Yeah, because I was in a school system that frankly was racist and not great. And I was bullied in that school. And she understood how detrimental that was to me at a very young age.

And we didn't have the money to get to a better school district. And so she took me out of school and homeschooled me until we could. Yay for moms. Yay for moms. Something interesting about you is you have to be. have, you may have more, but I don't know this, but you have two tattoos, one that is a yes. Yes. And then one that's a no. Yes. The yes is bigger and more visible to two audiences than the no is. But, you know, I got the yes first and then many years later I thought I needed to get the

no for good measure. But I think, and they're on separate arms, I do think I'm constantly wrestling with that. I think I wrestle with my cynicism and my optimism. I think they're always in a bit of a tussle. There's the optimism and there's the cynicism. But why did the cynicism need to happen a few years later with the no after this big declarative? Yes. It was a reminder to myself that we are as much defined by the things that we don't do than by the things that we do. And I think I needed to be reminded to say no.

I think I'm partially because of my optimism. boundless energy, I'm someone that's inclined to say yes. And also, I think in this industry, there is a perceived feeling of scarcity. And so I think you're constantly kind of like, what's next, what's, you know, and sometimes it breeds a yes that maybe should have been, that should have been a very polite no. Tessa Thompson, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. The pleasure has been all mine. Thanks so much for having me. Tessa Thompson stars in the new Netflix series, His and Hers. Fresh Year Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.

Fresh Year's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorok, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Anna Bauman, Susan Yacundi, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.