Ms. Thompson, have you taken the elevator today?
Are you asking because I got stuck the other day?
Exactly! That was at the season four premiere of your series Westworld, wasn’t it?
That’s right, in a hotel in New York. We were stuck for almost 40 minutes, but it felt much longer. Especially since the elevator was rather small and quite full.
Did you panic?
Not so much that I will only take the stairs in the future. But the longer it went on, the more nervous I got. I have to admit that. My Thor director, Taika Waititi, was also in the elevator because he was in town for a talk show. And of course a few “Westworld” contributors: the creator Lisa Joy for example and my colleague Aaron Paul. All people with a lot of imagination anyway, and so at some point they began to imagine how we could get out of the elevator in the worst case. And I was chosen to climb through the hatch in the ceiling. At first I laughed, but then I got a little queasy.
Speaking of Waititi, you’ve described working on his film set as “organized chaos.” How can we imagine that?
Working with him is actually more spontaneous and chaotic than I know from other directors. Which makes sense, since he does comedic films, even in the Marvel universe. And they say that comedy is the introduction of chaos into an orderly system. In any case, with Taika you have to surrender to your way of working to a certain extent and you can’t insist on wanting to have everything under control at all times. If you’re not used to it, I don’t think it’s that easy. For me, who rarely plays comedic roles, improvisation is a real challenge. But now, with the second film with Taika, I knew how things worked. There is also something very liberating about his working style and it can be a lot of fun.
In “Thor: Love & Thunder” gigantic screaming goats appear, you yourself have a fight scene in your pajamas. What was the weirdest moment for you during the shooting?
Oh, there really were countless. And some of the craziest ones don’t end up in the film, so I can’t tell you who they are. But what really sticks in my mind is an exchange between Mighty Thor and Valkyrie that we shot so many times in such different ways that I ended up having no idea what was going to end up in the film. Otherwise, the group scenes in particular were particularly crazy, because sometimes a whole handful of people would start improvising, surrounded by hundreds of extras, and nobody knew what was going to happen.
Tessa Thompson in a scene from Thor: Love and Thunder, out in theaters this week.
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Image: AP
You lived in Australia for around six months to work on the film, but of course you weren’t in front of the camera every day. Did you just focus on the job or did you also explore the country?