Here’s a challenge: adapt a lauded, Olivier- and Tony-winning play that has played the West End and Broadway, toured around the world, and been adapted into over a dozen languages into a feature film. Wait, stop, add in this: The original play is a one-woman show, essentially just one heart-stopping monologue, that has to be blown out to include multiple characters, locations, and a handful of truly demanding sequences. Oh, and it’s also about the limits of the legal system and the way it too often lets down victims of horrific sexual crimes.
Easy? Yeah, right. But filmmaker Susanna White took on just such a challenge with her latest film, “Prima Facie,” which playwright Suzie Miller adapted from her own deeply admired and oft-mounted play of the same name. Miller’s play is best known for the Tony-winning work of Jodie Comer, who played the lead (and, again, only) role on both the West End and Broadway.
For White’s film, another respected actress steps into the role of high-powered barrister Tessa Ensler: Cynthia Erivo. The film will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, further expanding the story’s dizzying reach while also showing the flexibility and universality of a tale we all know a bit too well. When we first meet Tessa, things are very much going her way, including accolades at work (she represents all sorts of defendants, many well-off, and many on trial for sexual assault), a budding romance with coworker Julian (Daniel Engs), and all the trappings of an incredibly fancy life in London.
All that changes when she’s the victim of a horrific sexual assault, which completely and irrevocably alters her perspective on nearly every aspect of her life, especially her career. “It’s a film that audiences so far have really responded to,” White told IndieWire. “We often get very, very emotional reactions from people. The ambition [is] that it’s a cinematic experience, but also what I hope is that it’ll provoke conversations and will stay with people afterwards and lead to them leaving the cinema having those conversations.”
Ahead, White tells IndieWire about the hefty task of turning Miller’s play into a feature film, how casting Erivo adds yet another layer to a story thick with them, and the complex sequences that required smart choices. Oh, and if Comer herself has seen it.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: What was your relationship with Suzie’s play before getting involved in this project?
Susanna White: I was sent it very early on, when it was still a play in Australia. There was an early screenplay, and I fell in love with it at that stage before it had opened in London. I fell in love with the passion of Suzie’s writing, her intelligence, her sense of mission, and her lightness of touch. There’s a humor about her writing, and although it deals with a very heavy subject matter at times, it isn’t depressing. It takes you on a massive journey, but a journey, I think the movie ends with hope.
You’re not someone who is unfamiliar with adaptations. What is your general approach to that process, and how did it take shape here?
It was a very exciting challenge, because it wasn’t just a play, it was a monologue, so it was entirely words. I actually love the challenge of that, how you take something where the form is entirely words and you translate that to cinema. It was the first screenplay Suzie had written, so it was a very, very close collaboration of translating it into something that was not only visual in terms of inventing a visual language for the movie, but also just saying, “Suzie, sometimes the most powerful things in cinema are when somebody is thinking, and you need to have confidence that the camera can see somebody’s thoughts, they can see behind their eyes.”
But also I came up with a system of imagery, and one of my big references was “Black Swan,” and I wanted to keep the intensity of the experience of the play, but stay very, very rooted in Tessa’s point of view. So I came up with a series of images of what’s going on inside her mind, imagery, sound effects, and performance were at the heart of that translation.
When you got that first version of the screenplay, how different was that from what we see in your film?
It was very dialogue-heavy, because that was the medium Suzie was used to and has done so brilliantly. So, we had a lot of to-and-fro meetings, we met in person, we met over Zoom, we corresponded by email. I did a big mood board, and we talked about how to open it out. That was very exciting, to open it out into the other characters, to have the family to dramatize things. There are scenes that have no dialogue 1789318553. We had a lot of to-and-fro of how to stay true to the spirit of the play, but translate it into a movie.
What we see on the screen feels very intuitive, it feels very natural. It doesn’t feel like, “Oh, this was just a one-woman show, and now it’s been blown out.”
That authenticity was really important to me, that I felt we had to be very grounded in reality, in Tessa’s experience, to the point that sometimes I cast non-actors in roles. There’s an intense scene at the police station after the assault, and I had two real policemen in that scene. When she goes to the sexual assault clinic, there’s a doctor and a nurse who are used to being in that situation. I was trying to ground it both for Cynthia and for people around her.
We had a week rehearsing, where we talked a lot about backstory. I’m somebody who works very closely with actors, so I talked a lot to the characters in the family about what their history was, what’s the backstory, so that we get to that place where people have a whole hinterland.
I spent a lot of time shadowing barristers who did a job that was similar to Tessa’s going to court. Similarly, the casting of the jury was based on very close observation of real jurors that I saw in court. The touchstone is about veracity and authenticity. That’s what I was after in the filmmaking.
Cynthia is extraordinary in this. I had not ever seen her quite like this. What was the process of casting her?
Obviously, Jodie Comer had enormous success in the theater, both in London and on Broadway. We wanted to open it out, because it’s such a universal story. The play had been really successful in 52 countries. When we were approached by Cynthia’s reps, that felt like a very exciting thought, to widen the conversation. I’ve been very struck by what Cynthia had done in the movie “Harriet.” I saw that she could go to a very deep emotional place. I love her strength and her boldness, but I wanted to make a film that was very layered emotionally, because I think our film deals in shades of gray, it’s not black and white. I knew that Cynthia could give me those layers.
With Cynthia in the role, Tessa is now a Black woman in a predominantly white world, which adds another layer to her interactions with these people and how she’s believed or not believed, and the particular way she needs to strive for her success.
Tessa’s an outsider in many ways. She’s a woman in a man’s world, in the world of the law. She’s working class in a world of people who are often quite entitled. Now we’re adding this other area of race. So, we talked a lot to Cynthia and to the other actors playing her mother, the wonderful Noma Dumezweni, and Toheeb Jimoh, who plays her brother, about the family dynamics. Cynthia fed in a lot about her experience of race, which Susie then wrote into our screenplay. We talked a lot in advance of shooting about those issues, and Cynthia definitely had a lot to contribute.
Cynthia is surrounded by wonderful actors in her working life too, including some faces we might not know. How did you go about that casting?
Some of them are great theater actors from the UK. For example, Elliot Levey, who plays the defense barrister who cross-examines Tessa in court, I’ve worked with him before, and I knew he had a certain mischief about him. One of the things I observed when I went to court was, this is just another job in some ways for these people, whereas people on the stand, their life can change from that experience. But there’s a certain nonchalance for these barristers. They like the challenge of it, but it is a job at the end of the day.
Daniel Ings, I hadn’t worked with before, but what I loved when Dan came in was he has a comedy background, and he had a lightness about him. When I did a chemistry read with him and Cynthia, it was delicious to see the chemistry, because in some ways I wanted the movie, in the first act, to feel it’s a bit like a romantic comedy, and you invest in the relationship.
And you do feel that!
And, hopefully, you don’t see it coming. Sexual assault isn’t about people in dark alleys or jumping out from behind a hedge. More often than not, it’s people you know and people you trust. And so, I wanted the audience to invest in that relationship. Daniel felt so exciting as a choice. I think he’s handsome, he’s funny, he’s witty. You want it to work out for them until it takes the turn, and that was very, very important.
Before it takes a turn, we see Tessa and Julian enjoying the early throes of romance, including a sex scene that’s fun and consensual, which then soon runs into the scene of the assault. How did you approach those scenes? Did you use an intimacy coordinator?
When I shot “The Deuce” with David Simon, I’d first discovered working with intimacy coordinators, and I’m a huge fan of them. I think they make it a safe space for everybody, if you get the right ones who are really professional. And so, I found Lizzy Talbot. I felt she was really great for the job. Both Dan and Cynthia really had a lot of trust in her.
We planned those scenes like you might plan a stunt, really. We also made a choice to build the set of the bedroom. A lot of Tessa’s apartment was shot on location in a real apartment overlooking the river, but we decided the bedroom set was going to be so charged, as it’s where the assault takes place, that we just wanted a space that would be demolished at the end of it and no one would have to return to it.
Cynthia was extraordinary. Her performance when we were doing it, and she took herself to a very deep place, which Lizzy supported her through. But also, I wanted to show the emotional absence of Julian and his intensity in that scene. I think some of the most powerful shots in that scene are actually when the camera focused entirely on Dan. Cynthia wasn’t even there for those moments; it’s just him purely focused on his own pleasure and her point of view at that point.
You mentioned the big cross-examination scene when Cynthia’s on the stand, and it’s just wrenching. What do you remember most about shooting that?
I probably planned that more than anything. I’ve looked at a lot of reference scenes. I thought about “12 Angry Men.” I thought about “Witness for the Prosecution.” I very much planned my angles, but more than anything, I wanted to plan her perspective in terms of point of view, including the shots where there’s a crane shot where we empty the court out and we suggest her isolation in court.
I knew Elliot is a very intense and authentic performer, and the writing was great. I think 90 percent of filmmaking is actually about having the right script and the right actors. I knew I could let them fly and there’d be an intensity about what happened.
It was sobering to shoot. And the other thing was, the experience of having the crew there, because if we think, one in three people experienced sexual assault, we had to do a lot of looking after, not just in terms of the main cast, but in supporting our crew. Often we would have crew members in tears when we were shooting scenes because it was resonating for them.
You actually filmed at the Old Bailey. There’s so much history; it’s so imposing on screen, and it puts you in that headspace where you feel very small.
You feel the power of the institution. One of the things I came up with very early on and suggested to Suzie was the idea of shooting it like a music video at the beginning, you have all these figures in wigs looking on, [and younger lawyers in] sneakers moving through that august space, which is designed to intimidate you, I think, with the fabric of the law. It suggests that the law is really set very solidly in stone in these marble halls. Whereas probably the message of the film is, we want the law to evolve and be organic and adjust to the society we live in now.
The public spaces, these intimidating spaces, we shot for real, but then we did build a set of the court at the Old Bailey. So, that is entirely based on the real space, but we took it out and reconstructed it in a studio. For me as a filmmaker, it was really interesting, because Billy Wilder had been there before me and for “Witness for the Prosecution,” and he had exactly the same set as I did. So yeah, I shamelessly stole some angles from him. He came up with some really good ones!
Has Jodie Comer seen the film?
Not that I’m aware of, no. Well, not yet. I would have known, but I hope she will see it soon.
Tessa is, hopefully, going to go out into the world and speak to lots of people. That’s what we want. And there are a lot of different iterations of Tessa.
“Prima Facie” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
