Rebecca Hall is ready to show us her secret project
If you are meeting Rebecca Hall for the first time at her 1840s farmhouse about two hours north of New York City, you may accidentally wander into the English-American actor and filmmaker’s overgrown vegetable garden. This is upstate New York, where the sprawling farms are dotted with solar-powered sheds and other oddball additions, so you would be forgiven for mistaking her home for the shed on her property, or even her two-storey artist’s studio, which is not a home but certainly the size of one. She waves me over from the front yard, where she’s been puttering around her six-year-old daughter’s raised flower garden, with her Ridgeback puppy, Stella, trailing closely behind.
Hall – barefoot in satiny olive-green shorts and a navy striped T-shirt – leads me into her kitchen. The cluttered counter looks a lot like mine: mint-flavoured toothpicks, electric bug repellents, a hardcover copy of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time. Aside from a modest facelift, the farmhouse has never been renovated. That modernist studio I confused for her house – and the swimming pool, hidden from street view – were big draws for her and her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, when they moved here with their daughter and two cats in 2020.
“I thought I’d be isolated and never see anyone,” she says. “But our friends come up every weekend, like, constantly.” There’s an open-door policy; parties are always happening. Her mother-in-law lives in a barn next door. “She’s like: ‘This place is ridiculous. You’ve got to work out a system with sheets and towels, and make people wash them, because it’s a hotel.’”
Hall has a way of holding your gaze when she speaks – and she speaks exceedingly well. Her beauty is hard to ignore, yet barefaced, wearing a cap inscribed with the title of the Robert Altman movie, 3 Women, she exudes domestic ordinariness. A self-described eccentric, the 42-year-old star of this year’s blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire insists you’ll just have to deal with “whatever batty version of me it is today”.
Performance has shaped her identity. Her late father, theatre director Sir Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company; her mother, Maria Ewing, was a gifted opera singer who performed at the Metropolitan Opera. “She had a tremendous joy of life,” says Hall in a crisp London accent shaped by years of shuttling between her father’s home in London and her mother’s house in East Sussex. They separated when she was five. “There was no one more fun to be around than her.”
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Hall made her television debut at the age of 10 in The Camomile Lawn, a hit adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel. Then, two years into a three-year degree studying English literature at Cambridge, she dropped out. An acclaimed production of As You Like It, directed by her father, followed at 21. Her breakout moment came in 2008, when she played the conventional Vicky to Scarlett Johansson’s impetuous Cristina in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Hollywood felt daunting, initially. But “it felt somehow natural to be working in film”, she says. “Eventually, I found myself drawn to it more than anything else.”
Despite often playing women on the sidelines, be it in respectable blockbusters (The Prestige, Frost/Nixon) or forgettable indies (The Dinner, Teen Spirit), Hall has carved out a path playing women on the edge. Sometimes they’re unstable newscasters (Christine – based on the true story of the news reporter who died by suicide on a live television broadcast) or successful single mothers with a horrifying past (Resurrection). At other times they are victims of circumstance (as in the play Machinal) or wives mired in pitch-black despair (Animal). Soon she will appear in a BBC drama, The Listeners, based on the Jordan Tannahill novel in which a teacher is haunted by a low hum nobody else can hear.
“If you look at a film like Christine, that performance is so powerful,” says actor Dan Stevens, her long-time friend and co-star in Godzilla x Kong. “It’s drawing on so much about womanhood and the female condition. Some of that is personal to her, and some of it is more societal angst, but it all comes through in a performance that is so nuanced.”
Hall marks
2008 Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2011 Twelfth Night
2012 Parade’s End
2016 Christine
2021 Godzilla vs Kong
“I am interested in questions that are so fundamental for all of us,” Hall says of these characters. “Who is to be trusted? What can make someone who is completely together completely disintegrate? What’s the margin that separates a relatively sane person from madness? Any story that engages deeply with these questions is inherently dramatic – and I think oddly contemporary.”
Acting hasn’t proved enough, though. In 2021, Hall exploded the taboo of “passing” for a certain race with her piercing film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, her directorial debut. Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, the film won many plaudits and was nominated for a slew of big awards, including at the Baftas and the Golden Globes.
Last year she shared a completely different side to her portfolio, with the revelation of her paintings, a practice she has pursued more privately for many years. Inside her studio, the walls of the airy, light-filled space are covered with canvases of all sizes. A brooding self-portrait rests on the floor. A cluster of snapshots clings to a wall. My eye settles on an impressively detailed painting of two friends laughing. “I’m so not interested in making faces like this any more,” Hall says. “This is kind of where I’m at now.” She nods to a pair of paintings deliciously untethered from reality – theatre audiences racked with emotion. “It’s not realistic any more.”
Art has been an outlet for Hall since her school days; she would draw faces while sitting in the back of the rehearsal room at her father’s theatre. “My dad would give me a choice,” she says. “‘Do you want to be with a babysitter or do you want to come to rehearsal?’ I liked to be able to capture some kind of emotion. And then, when I got older, I found that a really interesting tool for acting.”
The confinement of 2020 prompted “a go with oil painting”, she says, adding she was always inspired by taking pictures of friends, which she would later frame and use as a starting point for a painting. “I like photography, I like the idea of seeing a frame of something, but to me, if they’re not moving it’s less interesting.”
Finally, she began sharing her work on Instagram. “There’s an immediacy to her paintings that I’m drawn to,” says her friend, the folk-rock musician and painter Ian Felice. “It’s as if they’ve been conjured out of thin air.” Their success, he says, “often relies on a simplification of form in order to arrive at the deeper meaning of a subject; a lyrical articulation of colour adds intimacy and emotional charge.”
Hall is not yet represented by a gallery. When asked what she loves about the process, she says it’s the “freedom of painting feeling”. Self-expression is what drives her: “I don’t do well unless I’m quiet and in my head and creative in some capacity for a chunk of the day.” When she paints, it’s incredibly solitary. And the process is fluid. “I can be in the space where I just get a canvas out and have some paints left and just paint something,” she says. “If I can’t think of anything, I’ll paint these pod people.”
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She and Spector – a star of HBO’s The Gilded Age – have been together nine years. They have worked together four times, most recently in the 2017 play Animal. “We have that conversation of weighing up,” says Hall, describing how they try to balance career and family. But still, “I have a strong sense of: ‘I must give up everything and only be there for my child, and how am I meant to do this? How the hell can you be an artist and be a decent mother? It’s impossible.”
She has been thinking a lot about motherhood recently. Passing positioned her for her next project, Four Days Like Sunday, which she hopes to start shooting next summer. Loosely based on her relationship with her mother, Four Days offered Hall some catharsis when Ewing died in 2022. “She passed away in January, and the script came tumbling out of me some time in July,” she says. “It was my way of writing a love song to certain aspects of my childhood as well as the not-much-loved ones.”
Growing up, Hall often found herself playing the role of her mother’s caretaker. “She had a lot of anxiety, issues with depression, and sometimes the weight of what she did as an artist was too much for her to actually get out of the house.” Attending a “very, very English, very, very posh” all-girls boarding school full-time from the age of 13 offered Hall a slight reprieve, though she was acutely aware of her outsider status among her peers.
“It was like: ‘Who is this girl with this mother, who arrives with her entourage of queer amazing-looking friends, with their floor-length black leather trench coats and sunglasses and red lipstick?’ And everyone else there was driving a Range Rover.”
Her mother – who obsessed over outward appearances to the point of telling Hall exactly how to wear her hair – did little to assuage Hall’s growing anxiety about her own identity. “My sense of her background was really confusing,” says Hall. “There were times when she would say to me things like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black.’ And I’d go, ‘Huh? Well, what does that mean? Do we have relatives? What’s my cultural heritage?’ And I would ask again. And she would clearly present it to me in a way that was like: ‘Don’t ask me anything else about it.’ And so I wouldn’t. But then I’d try, gently at another time, and she’d say, ‘Oh no, I don’t know. I think actually maybe Native American, I don’t know.’”
The revelation of her mother’s true heritage – Hall’s maternal grandfather, who was Black, passed as white – brought her own into focus. “If you come from a white-passing family… unless it’s open and history has kind of processed it, you just inherit shame. The narrative you’re told about your Blackness is that it’s not to be spoken about, you’ve gotten away with it because you look white, so you don’t talk about this, and it’s only shameful. And anything that’s in any way Black, you don’t go there.”
The film raised awareness of Nella Larsen and her novel, a story Hall holds up there with The Great Gatsby and the other great works of American literature. Ultimately, however, she was most proud of the fact that it provoked a long overdue conversation within her family. “It meant that this thing, this secret that was kept even until the 2020s, could be released,” she says. “It ended up being very healing, at least for my mother and I.”
Walking back toward her house, I ask Hall whether she ever discussed her desire to direct with her father – the man responsible for bringing the first production of Waiting for Godot to London, whose role in British theatre was so profound that, on his death in 2017, the National Theatre released a statement saying his “influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled”. No, she says wistfully. “I would love to have that conversation with him now.” She has “zero interest” in directing theatre. “For me, the fun of being onstage is being an actor.”
The control freak in her doesn’t like the fact that as a director of a play you’ve got to be able to walk away. “In a film, you’re crafting exactly what anyone is looking at, at any time,” she says. “I think to be able to do that on the stage is a very particular skill. I would rather find the frame, and fill it with the image I know is going to create a kind of feeling.”
Hall also loves fashion, and has become a regular on certain front rows, recently at Loewe’s men’s SS25 shows. She’s experimental on the red carpet: wearing a scarlet bustier gown by Erdem or the beaded Bode bra and trousers she wore to promote Godzilla x Kong earlier this year. The Brooklyn-based fashion stylist Laura Jones has worked closely with Hall since 2014. “She certainly has fun with it,” says Jones. “She has an adaptive approach to clothing, following her creative instincts and where she’s at in her life at that time.”
That ability to follow her instincts is something she hopes to impart to her daughter. “I think that’s a big part of my parenting with her,” says Hall. “That there’s no right answer. She can be whoever she wants to be. We just try and celebrate all the possible eccentric ways there are of being in the world.”
For now, Hall’s world is here in New York: a six-hour flight to California, where Spector grew up, and seven hours to London. When she wakes she often turns on BBC Radio 4 and leaves it on all day. It keeps her company as she writes, paints or gardens with her daughter – and shops compulsively online, she laughs. “My whole life I’ve shifted from one place to the next, and I feel anchored here in a way that I never have in my entire life,” she says. “This is like the dream situation, and I can’t foresee myself ever leaving it. But I don’t know. If it happens, it happens. I’d be all right with it.”
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