Irene is very restrained, but there’s an energy shift when she goes to the Negro Welfare League dance with Clare, her husband, Brian (played by André Holland), and her friend Hugh (played by Bill Camp). How do you both hide from the audience, because you’re hiding from your scene partner, but how do you also communicate a depth of feeling and thought? That was such a puzzle for me and so fun. ( Laughs) Maybe I’m a sucker for punishment, but I was really interested in what that would feel like. I really was so struck by that, that the performance would require a certain amount of restraint, and that would probably give me a certain amount of turmoil. I found it an interesting challenge, this idea that someone who is repressed - it’s not as if they don’t have a depth of feeling or thought or emotion, it’s just that it doesn’t have anywhere to go. Irene presents herself as a devoted housewife, but she’s repressed so much and her facade starts to crumble. The theme of “passing” has so many layers: There’s race, first and foremost, but also sexuality, via the attraction between these two women, and then personal identity as a kind of construct. Shot in lush black and white, the film is the directorial debut of actress Hall, who wrote the screenplay from a deeply personal place: Well into her adulthood, she discovered that her grandfather was biracial and passed as white. Vivacious Clare, played by Ruth Negga, is a free-spirit socialite married to a bigoted white man (Alexander Skarskgård) who doesn’t know she’s Black. Reserved Irene, played by Thompson, is a well-to-do wife and mother, proud to be a member of the Harlem community during the Renaissance. The Netflix film (which Thompson also executive produced) is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella of the same name and explores questions of racial and sexual identity, as well as gender and class conventions, through the prism of two former childhood friends whose fraught reunion upends their lives. One of the best-reviewed movies of 2021, “Passing” has earned the actress an IFP Gotham Awards nomination and recognition from a dozen critics’ awards groups. But her experience with her latest film, Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” is new. And between “Thor: Ragnarok” and the “Creed” movies-not to mention HBO’s “Westworld”-she’s certainly familiar with passionate fan bases.
Tessa Thompson has been working in movies and TV for nearly two decades, so she’s well acquainted with bringing a project into the world and hoping that the public will treat it with care. This story about “Passing” first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.