White's Prima Facie Film Starring Erivo Premieres at TIFF — SkimNews
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- Susanna White directed the feature film adaptation of Suzie Miller's monologue play "Prima Facie," with Cynthia Erivo stepping into the lead role of barrister Tessa Ensler that Jodie Comer played to Olivier and Tony wins on the West End and Broadway.
- Cynthia Erivo's casting makes Tessa a Black woman in a predominantly white legal world; White said the change added another layer around whether Tessa is believed, and Miller wrote input from Erivo and co-stars Noma Dumezweni and Toheeb Jimoh directly into the screenplay.
- The film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, extending a play White said has been staged in 52 countries and adapted into over a dozen languages since its debut.
- White cited "Black Swan" as a visual reference and built a system of internal imagery, sound, and performance to translate the monologue into cinema, while also casting real police officers and sexual assault clinic staff to ground the trauma scenes in veracity.
- White spent weeks shadowing real barristers and observing actual jurors in court to inform the courtroom sequences, casting some barristers from UK theater — including Elliot Levey as the defense barrister who cross-examines Tessa.
- White cast Daniel Ings as Tessa's romantic interest Julian partly for his comedy background, deliberately shaping the first act to feel like a romantic comedy so audiences invest in the relationship before the assault subverts it.
- White hired intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot after first working with intimacy coordinators on "The Deuce" with David Simon, calling them essential for making the sex and assault scenes a safe set.
Why it matters: The adaptation bets that a constrained, theater-bound moral argument about sexual assault prosecution can carry cinematic weight — White's solution (real police, real clinicians, a "Black Swan" visual scheme) aims to preserve the play's intensity while opening it to film audiences at TIFF. Erivo's casting reframes the legal system's credibility gap through a Black woman's experience, potentially deepening a conversation the original monologue already provoked across 52 countries of stage productions.
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