Exclusive: Cynthia Erivo on ‘Prima Facie,’ First Film Since Wicked

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There is no easy way to prepare for a project like Prima Facie. Cynthia Erivo, a three-time Oscar nominee and Tony winner, was coming off of the years-long experience of shooting and promoting back-to-back Wicked movies. She’d agreed to step into a role that would take a great deal more out of her, mentally and physically, with material that could be difficult to shake. Going into production, she relied on the tools honed over her decorated career so that she could show up ready to “go as far as I could and I needed to, to tell the story as fully as I possibly could.” 

She adds, “I flanked myself with a really good intimacy coordinator and a really good therapist — and made sure that I tapped them whenever I needed to.”

Prima Facie, premiering Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is adapted by Suzie Miller from her lauded play of the same name. The story centers on Tessa (Erivo), a barrister in London who’s made a name for herself as a steely, crafty defender of men accused of sexual assault. Her notions of justice and the law — indeed, of her very sense of self — are then upended when she herself is assaulted by Julian (Daniel Ings), her colleague and boyfriend who comes from a relatively privileged background.

The original stage production starred Jodie Comer, and only Jodie Comer, in a Tony- and Olivier-winning solo show on Broadway and the West End. The film, directed by Susanna White (Woman Walks Ahead) in her first feature in a decade, opens up Tessa’s world, bringing audiences into her working class hometown, and specifically her complex relationships with her mother (Noma Dumezweni) and younger brother (Toheeb Jimoh), as well as her stuffy professional milieu. White’s approach also brings us deeper into Tessa’s interior life as only filmmaking can.

“The play is a monologue, and Suzie and I had to go on a big journey together where we turned it into something truly cinematic — it both frightened me and it really excited me,” White says. “I was looking at references like Black Swan, dealing with point of view and intensity of experience. I was thinking: How can I replace the monologue with imagery and lensing and a way of shooting?” 

Indeed, while Prima Face showcases its ensemble, this remains Erivo’s vehicle. “I wanted to play a person who doesn’t expect it, has everything together, and then things just fall apart,” the star says of what drew her to the part. “We rarely see these stories of women who work, high-flying in their business or in their world, doing everything right — and then it happens right in front of them. They don’t realize it’s right there.” 

“Tessa starts off with a certain arrogance and a certain level of ‘I’m good at this and watch me perform and watch how good I can be,’” Miller adds. “I wanted you to see that she really was that — and then when the incident happens, it changes everything.”

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Prima Facie will be Erivo’s first movie to be released since the Wicked films — which is to say, her first non-Wicked movie out in the world since 2023. (She’d shot some other, unreleased projects in between.) Tessa posed a vastly different challenge from Elphaba for the actor, in the realism of the drama and the trauma of the emotional arc. “They’re polar opposites, but I think that’s kind of how I like it — I like being able to move from thing to thing, and I don’t want them to be similar. I want to be able to go, ‘Okay, this is something that I learned from. Now it’s time to go and learn something else,’” Erivo says. “For want of a better analogy, it was nice to come back to the ground.”

Prima Facie depicts Tessa’s assault as well as the immediate aftermath in meticulous detail. Erivo, also an executive producer on the film, worked closely with the intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot in order to approach the material “uninhibited,” while still feeling the safety of a support system. “It really was about where my limit was, how far it goes — and if we get lost, how to get back into the room,” Erivo says. “When I’m lying on the floor, how much skin is showing? What point of view are we using and when are we using it? How gradual does it begin? When does it become really obvious that something’s happening? Lizzy would be really sensitive about how we would take those moments subtly and turn up the volume as we needed to.

“There were moments where we would slip, where it would go too far for me,” Erivo continues. “I would go too far and it would be hard to come back — there were moments of having little panic attacks, where I’d get way too emotional. But Lizzy was right there.” 

The film goes to great lengths to present an authentically complex trauma response. White draws from Miller’s play for Tessa’s inner-voice, her thoughts playing like in-the-moment narration; following the assault, the device changes shape, at times fading and at times surging to the story’s fore, as Tessa continues to process what happened. 

Miller worked with the director on refining the inner-monologue until the final days of post-production. “My thesis is that women are operating on so many different levels at once that they walk into a room and they’re considering, ‘Oh, what’s that person doing and why is that man looking at me sexually and is he being friendly and am I too much or am I too little?’” the writer says. “Often women and any other minority have to smile and nod, but really in their head they’re thinking, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe you’re talking to me like this.’”

White builds the action toward its primary, final-act setpiece in the courtroom, after Tessa decides to press charges against Julian, giving Prima Facie the sheen of a legal thriller. The director spent hundreds of hours going to court for prep, following barristers she’d watched while sitting in; she cast real-life people from the world of sexual-assault cases, like a doctor in a rape-crisis center or a policeman taking evidence, to enhance the film’s sense of reality. Finally, they both shot in the actual Old Bailey and built a replica Old Bailey courtroom to immerse viewers into the City of London’s imposing central criminal court. In that imagery, we see “the difference between the law and justice,” as White puts it, at its starkest.

“Its overwhelming majesty shows you what the law really is — this paradigm that requires people to feel intimidated when you access those spaces. You don’t think of the law as belonging to the people; you think of it as this rule that almost was there before time,” Miller adds. “But everywhere you go throughout the Old Bailey are these huge paintings of these white men in these horse-hair wigs looking incredibly intimidating. You’re surrounded by that. Susanna really leaned into that and you see visually that throughout the film.”

Those were the days that tended to weigh on Erivo the most. Each take would run a half-hour or more, covering the entirety of Tessa’s agonizing cross-examination, as every inch of her memory is ruthlessly picked apart in the same manner that she’d employed when on the other side of the courtroom. “There were times when I’d feel sick and angry or I’d feel betrayed,” Erivo says. “I’d look into the box and [Julian] would be there and it was hard, really, really hard…. And it was hard to come away from that sometimes.” 

“Cynthia is very brave, and we needed a brave actor who was going to go on that journey,” says White. “Tessa has to be that person to survive in an unequal world. She comes from a working class background. She’s an outsider in so many ways in terms of her being a woman of color, in a system where there are far more men than women — and I knew that Cynthia had the range to do that.” Miller adds that Erivo’s casting “really changed the nature of the film,” as they worked out Tessa’s personality in rehearsal workshops as a group. This included finding stretches of joy amid the pain, and coming to understand her flaws without judgment or fear; in all that, the movie reveals how Tessa could’ve fallen for a charming guy like Julian before his violent betrayal.

Prima Facie heads to TIFF without a U.S. distributor, though Sony Pictures already has international rights for release in the UK and elsewhere. The movie was the most intense shoot of White’s career, the most disturbing scenes tending to affect the entire crew, and she wonders how the project will land in North America. Miller remembers bringing the play to New York, for instance, in a way that resonated especially strongly. “The devastation of women’s rights in the US has been such a marker for this time,” Miller says. “So I hope we find a distributor that really understands the paradigm we’re interrogating — so that we can go deeply into all of America.”