“Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out,” said DaCosta in an interview with Vanity Fair. “She just feels like everyone is cowardly, everyone’s lying. She has this deepening emptiness inside of her that makes her do things she doesn’t understand—and she is living in a world that she doesn’t get.”

For her latest film, DaCosta found inspiration in a source a bit older than the MCU. Hedda is a “provocative, modern reimagining” of Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1891 play Hedda Gabler, per its logline. In the film,