Actress Tessa Thompson starts new production company highlighting POC
Tessa Thompson has branched out from acting and started her own production company.
Thompson has starred in “Men in Black: International,” “Thor Ragnarok” and my favorite, “Dear White People,” just to name a few, and she is now striving to create jobs for more actors like her. Her production company is called Viva Maude and it works with HBO and HBO Max. Thompson’s plan is to bring new and refreshing stories to the screen. As of 2021, there is only news of two books being adapted to screen by Thompson’s company.
The first of these two books is called “Who Fears Death” by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, which has been in production since 2017 with “Game of Thrones” author George R. R. Martin as executive producer. The second book is called “Secret Lives Of Church Ladies” by Deesha Philyaw. Both authors are Black, something Thompson wants to highlight. Deadline reported Thompson saying, “Together we are committed to developing interesting and inclusive stories with inventive creators and to discover new voices and visionaries.”
New voices are the reason why Viva Maude caught my attention. Production companies come and go, but their stories aren’t always diverse. White leads are more common than people of color. White stories have become the norm when they’re not the norm in reality. Movies and TV shows should reflect Americans as they are diverse with many backgrounds.
Deadline reported in 2018 that Black characters were up 16.9 percent, Asian at 8.2 percent and others at 5.9 percent. This was due to “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” both came out in 2018. Both films did very well at the box office, proving that people do show up for POC stories.
Even so, last year USA Today reported that two out of three Black Americans didn’t think they or their culture were represented on the screen. Hopefully, Tessa Thompson can help bridge the gap for POC voices known and unknown onto the screen.
