Tessa Thompson

Tessa Lynne Thompson (born October 3, 1983) is an American actress and musician. She played Jackie Cook on the television series Veronica Mars, Sara Freeman in the period crime drama Copper, Nyla Adrose in the film For Colored Girls, civil rights activist Diane Nash in Selma, and Bianca in Creed. She stars as Charlotte Hale on the HBO series Westworld. 2Early life Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised there and in Brooklyn, New York City. Her father, singer/songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson of the musical collective Chocolate Genius, Inc., is of Afro-Panamanian descent and her mother is of Mexican and European descent. She attended Santa Monica High School and then Santa Monica College, where she studied cultural anthropology. 2Career 3Theatre In 2002, Thompson made her professional stage debut in Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company's production of The Tempest. In 2003, Thompson appeared as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet: Antebellum New Orleans, 1836 with The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, California, which earned her an NAACP Theatre Award nomination. In 2016 she appeared in the off-Broadway run of the Lydia R. Diamond play Smart People at Second Stage Theatre, alongside Mahershala Ali, Joshua Jackson and Anne Son. 3Television Thompson made her first TV appearance in a 2005 episode of the CBS series Cold Case in the role of a bootlegging lesbian from the 1930