Tessa Thompson, who is set to appear in Thor: Ragnarok, has a bone to pick with Hollywood over the terrible way male writers portray female action stars.
In case you’re playing catch up, the technicolor trailer debuted back in April, and fans just can’t get enough. In the third installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to hit theaters in November, Thompson stars as the Asgardian warrior Valkyrie.
In Ragnarok, Thor finds himself imprisoned on the planet Sakaar, where he must fight to the death in the Grandmaster’s gladiator games. “If we were taking things a little too seriously, I would say, ‘Never forget that we’re making a cosmic adventure with a space Viking,’” director Taika Waititi recently told the Los Angeles Times. “That sort of captures it all. We’ve got the Incredible Hulk, and a giant woman with antlers. We’ve got aliens and spaceships. It’s almost like a bunch of kids were asked what they wanted to put into a movie, and then we just did that.”
Meanwhile, Thompson, best known for her role in Selma, opened up about her distaste with the way strong women are portrayed in action films, touching specifically of how she and Waititi worked to make Valkyrie more relevant.
“There’s an unfair position that women are sometimes put in, in the context of superhero movies and action movies where at once they have to be very strong and fierce, but also sexy,” said Thompson. “There’s one word I hate in all scripts in Hollywood at the moment in describing women, and that is the word ‘badass.’”
She continued, “That word has just crept into every script that is pushed around this town now.”
“It’s a dumb male writer’s way of saying, ‘Ah, uh, she’s like, she, uh, she’s tough.’ Then straight after that it’s like, ‘She’s badass, but she’s got a beauty about her. And she’s sexy. Unconsciously sexy.’”
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