Tessa Thompson's Real Name: Tessa Lynn Thompson

Quick answer: Tessa Thompson's full name is Tessa Lynn Thompson. She was born on October 3, 1983, in Los Angeles. She is known for Creed, Selma, Dear White People, HBO's Westworld, and the Marvel films in which she plays Valkyrie. One Library of Congress citation also records the birth name Tessa Dunnington (Library of Congress; Britannica).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress name authority files her as "Thompson, Tessa, 1983-." One citation reads "b. Tessa Lynn Thompson, October 3, 1983 in Los Angeles, California." A second reads "b. Tessa Dunnington; Oct. 3, 1983 in Los Angeles," and the record carries "Dunnington, Tessa" as a variant. Because the two citations differ, this page uses Tessa Lynn Thompson, the form tied to her professional name, and notes Dunnington as a recorded variant.

Britannica says she is the daughter of Panamanian-American songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson, of the collective Chocolate Genius, and visual artist Maciallah Thompson. She is also the granddaughter of Mexican-American actor-musician Bobby Ramos. She attended Santa Monica High School, where she acted in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and later studied cultural anthropology at Santa Monica College. At 18 she played Ariel in the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company's The Tempest. In 2003 her Juliet in Romeo and Juliet: Antebellum New Orleans, 1836 earned an NAACP Theatre Award nomination.

Career highlights

Her first screen role was a 2005 episode of Cold Case. Later that year she joined season two of Veronica Mars as Jackie Cook. She appeared in When a Stranger Calls (2006) and drew notice as Nyla in Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls (2010). She starred in the period series Copper (2012–13).

In 2014 she led Dear White People as Samantha White and played civil rights activist Diane Nash in Ava DuVernay's Selma. As Bianca in Ryan Coogler's Creed (2015) she began a role she repeated in Creed II and Creed III. She played Charlotte Hale on Westworld (2016–22) and Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). Other films include Annihilation, Sorry to Bother You, Little Woods, Men in Black: International, and Rebecca Hall's Passing (2021).

She is also a musician. Britannica notes she wrote songs for Dear White People and Creed and sang with the electronic soul band Caught a Ghost from 2014 to 2016.

Name notes for searchers

Thompson is her father's surname and her professional name. Lynn is her middle name in the LOC citation. "Dunnington" appears in a separate LOC source, and searchers may come across it.