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John P. Johnson/HBONext up, actress Tessa Thompson will star in the upcoming film, Sylvie’s Love.
Set in 1957 New York, Thompson plays Sylvie, the well-to-do daughter of a record shop owner, who falls in love with sweet and gifted saxophonist, played by Nnamdi Asomugha.
Written and directed by Eugene Ashe, the film — which Tompson also co-executive-produced — reminded Thompson of another romantic love story with a similar 1950s aesthetic.
“When I first heard about Sylvie’s Love and had conversations with Nnamdi about making it, it reminded me of The Notebook,” Thompson said during a Porter magazine interview. “I remember seeing that way back in the day and thinking, ‘I’d love to be in a film like this.'”
“To make a film that centers around two Black people falling in love felt really impactful to me,” Thompson confessed. “I think even in these moments of peril and pain, it shows we’re still having dinner, we’re still celebrating, we’re still singing songs, we’re still making love and doing all the other things that we do as humans to sustain us.”
Tessa has other impactful projects in the works, including a lead role in Rebecca Hall‘s upcoming directorial debut, Passing, a film adaptation of the book by Nella Larsen. The film explores the practice of racial passing, though Thompson describes it as “as something that is not just about the performance of race, but the ways in which so many things as a human are performative.”
“The way gender can feel performative, the way sexuality can feel performative, the way happiness inside of just being a human can sometimes feel like you’re performing happiness,” Thompson says. “That idea really spoke to me.”
By Rachel George
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'Sylvie’s drama love Notebook' Reminds romantic tessa the Thompson
