Katie Holmes Steps into the Fire: Opening The Old Globe’s 2026 Season as a Dangerous, Dazzling Hedda Gabler

By Cesar A Reyes

When Katie Holmes walks onto the stage at The Old Globe next February, she won’t just be opening a new theater season. She’ll be stepping into one of the most dangerous, demanding roles ever written for an actor—and daring audiences to follow her into Hedda Gabler’s restless, combustible mind.

From February 7 through March 8, 2026, Holmes stars as the title character in a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 masterpiece, opening The Old Globe’s 2026 season in San Diego. Directed by Barry Edelstein and newly adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson, this production isn’t interested in polite reverence for a classic. It wants to crack the play open and let something raw and unsettling spill out.

Hedda Gabler is not an easy woman to like. That’s the point. She’s bored, sharp-tongued, manipulative, and trapped by marriage, by society, by her own hunger for control in a world that offers her very little power. When the play begins, Hedda and her husband, the earnest academic George Tesman, have just returned from their honeymoon. The glow has already faded. Hedda paces her elegant prison, pulling strings, provoking old lovers, testing how far she can push before everything collapses.

It’s a role actors whisper about with equal parts desire and fear. Like Hamlet, Hedda lives or dies by the person playing her. She can be a victim or a tyrant, seductive or cruel, funny one moment and devastating the next. Get it wrong, and the character feels brittle or cartoonish. Get it right, and the audience can’t look away.

Barry Edelstein believes Holmes is exactly right.

“Katie’s Hedda is going to be something rare,” he’s said, describing her as an artist at the height of her powers. Edelstein knows her work well. He directed Holmes in The Wanderers, an Off-Broadway production in 2023 that marked a creative reunion after the play’s earlier premiere at The Old Globe in 2018. Their collaboration built trust and a shared appetite for emotionally complicated storytelling.

This new Hedda Gabler brings in a third essential voice: playwright Erin Cressida Wilson. Known for her sharp, female-centered writing in works like Secretary and The Girl on the Train, Wilson has reworked Ibsen’s text with what Edelstein calls a “frank and dynamic voice.” Translation: this Hedda won’t be dusty or distant. She’ll feel uncomfortably close.

Set in late-1800s Oslo, the story remains rooted in its original world, but the emotional terrain feels startlingly modern. Hedda’s dissatisfaction, her craving for agency, and her destructive curiosity about other people’s lives echo loudly today. Wilson’s adaptation leans into that urgency, sharpening the dialogue and heightening the emotional stakes without sanding down the play’s moral complexity.

For Holmes, the role arrives at a moment when her stage work has been drawing particular attention. After co-starring on Broadway last fall in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, she has continued to lean into theater as a place for risk where performances unfold live, without the safety net of editing or retakes. Hedda Gabler demands exactly that kind of bravery.

This isn’t a comeback or a reinvention headline. It’s something quieter and more interesting: an actor choosing material that refuses to flatter her. Hedda is not heroic. She doesn’t ask for sympathy. She dares the audience to sit with her contradictions, her cruelty, and her fear of being insignificant.

That tension—between glamour and emptiness, control and collapse—is what has kept Hedda Gabler alive for more than a century. In this version, Holmes stands at the center of that storm, surrounded by a creative team unafraid to let the play burn.

The Old Globe itself provides an ideal home for such a production. Long known for blending classical works with bold reinterpretations, the San Diego theater has built a reputation for premieres that ripple outward to Broadway and beyond. Opening the 2026 season with Hedda Gabler signals confidence—and a willingness to challenge audiences right out of the gate.

At its heart, Hedda Gabler asks an uncomfortable question: What happens when someone with intelligence and imagination finds herself with nowhere to put it? In Holmes’s hands, that question promises to feel intimate, dangerous, and impossible to ignore.

When the lights come up on Hedda’s drawing room this winter, audiences won’t just be watching a classic revived. They’ll be watching an actor and a role collide—two forces meeting at exactly the right moment, daring each other to go further.