Tessa Thompson on 'Selma,' 'Dear White People,' and Her Breakthrough Year

Tessa Thompson rushed into the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan on a warmish winter afternoon that was filled with anticipation. The 31-year-old actress — who’d arrived with her mother — had just put the finishing touches put on her dress for that night’s red-carpet premiere of Selma, the Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic in which Thompson plays civil rights leader Diane Nash.

The premiere would be the latest big event in a whirlwind 2014 for Thompson, who only a week earlier had won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Actor on the strength of her complex, powerful and honest lead performance in Justin Simien’s searing campus racial relations satire Dear White People. 

But the Selma event also proved to be a symbolic one for Thompson and the Selma team. Just a few miles away from the the event, protesters marched in response to the non-indictments of the police officers involved in the deaths of unarmed black men Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Selma and Dear White People may differ in tone — one a sobering historical drama, the other a whip-smart comedy — but they both tackle racism, American culture, and institutionalized segregation. So the actress felt a bit awkward about walking in front of paparazzi while protesters took to the streets nearby.

 n response, Thompson helped organize a red-carpet protest with her cast-mates, in which she and costars (including David Oyelowo, Common, Carmen Ejogo, and Wendell Pierce) wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts, in solidarity with the marchers. It’s just one of the many socially conscious efforts the actress has undertaken, having also used Twitter and Instagram to participate in causes like Blackout Black Friday, which sought to turn the national post-Thanksgiving shopping holiday into one of reflection and protest.

“We’re in this space — [an] ‘I Instagram and Therefore I Am’ kind of thing that sometimes can be really repulsive,” she said. “When so much is going on, when New York City is filled with people in the streets marching, it seems odd when someone then posts a photograph of their kimchi deviled eggs. It gives me pause about the individual, which is unfair, because it’s ever this way, [and] life goes on.”