IN THE ROOM WITH

translate from page to screen, but Hall and her actors tackled that head-on. “There are depths of feeling that she doesn’t express, that she tries to repress very earnestly until they don’t have release,” Thompson says of Irene. “That was a really tricky thing to prepare for, because it meant that I needed to try to track and understand all those thoughts.”

One of the methods she used was to transport herself into Irene’s music. A piano piece called “The Homeless Wanderer” plays as a musical motif throughout the film, and Thompson had multiple versions of the song playing on a loop while she was on set, some sped up and some slowed down. The song helped her trace the character’s state of mind. “I don’t typically work with music as closely as I did on this one, but Rebecca really felt like that song and these sort of sounds were almost a character in the film. I liked having them around, even when the audience wouldn’t be hearing them.”

The actor also credits Hall, who is making her directorial debut with the film, with giving the cast room to play. “I think we both left a healthy amount of space for both mystery and mischief,” she says. “What people might assume could be a very heavy, still, measured set was actually quite a free one.”

While “Passing” is set nearly 100 years ago, it echoes conversations we’re still having today around Black people and discrimination, police brutality, and safety. “There’s always the negotiation, unfortunately, if you have children that are in a Black body—how you prepare them for those eventualities or possibilities,” Thompson reflects. “It didn’t feel like we were digging up something antiquated.”

Taking oneself back in time, no matter the period, can easily unearth racial trauma for Black performers. Asked if it ever feels dangerous to situate herself in those eras, Thompson pauses, then poses the question: If a Black person had the option to travel back into the past, which time period would they go to? “My answer is none,” she says with a laugh. “For us, for folks of color, and specifically for Black Americans, [there is] no other time in American history would I volunteer to go to.”

Thompson believes Irene feels “hemmed in”—not just by her race, but by her womanhood, her fears, her politics, and the reality that’s shaped her. “When she’s presented with Clare, who has a certain amount of freedom, no matter how sort of repulsive it is, Irene has political and rational reasons why she maintains a certain amount of judgment for how Clare is living. The truth is, she has a real longing, in some ways, to also live that way. And that way is just to be without shame, without guilt. I think shame and guilt are the things that disconnect us from the fullest expressions of ourselves.”

“ ‘Passing’ is not really a film about race,” Thompson concludes. Instead, it’s “about the ways in which we pass for all things—the ways in which we pass inside of gender expressions that don’t sit right on us; the way that we pass for happy inside of domesticity, which I think is Irene’s biggest problem; the way that we pass inside of our relationships; the way that we pass in terms of our sexuality.” Thompson wonders aloud how Irene’s own queerness is also “up for interpretation,” that “there are some folks who read Larsen’s novella and see it primarily as a queer piece of literature, and there are some people who will miss that entirely.” But “if you had plucked Irene out of the ’20s, would she be a fuller expression of whatever her queer self is? Maybe, potentially; I don’t know.”

Therein lies the thrill of Thompson’s craft: Giving her art to the world ignites her imagination, plants the seeds for much-needed discourse, and hopefully, inspires cultural change—not just around colorism, but around what it means to laugh, connect, desire, cry, and be alive. If artists are the “custodians of culture,” as Thompson believes, her art can infinitely reverberate, far beyond anything we can ever hope to measure.