The Telegraph
After years in supporting roles on screen, Rebecca Hall is ready for the challenge of her first leading role, in The Awakening.
'I want to be really well respected and successful at what I do and utterly anonymous. Can anyone make that happen? Is that OK?' Rebecca Hall is aware of the ridiculousness of what she is saying. Not least because as she says it she is sitting on the floor of the photographer Nadav Kander's studio having just finished a cover shoot for this magazine. And also because she is the actress Rebecca Hall, daughter of the celebrated British theatre director Sir Peter Hall and his third wife, the Detroit-born opera star Maria Ewing. Even before she mouthed her first line on camera or on stage she would have found it impossible to be totally anonymous.
But she still means it. Hall, 29, is at the point when her status as a critically admired actress is morphing into something altogether more starry. Her profile has risen steadily throughout her twenties thanks to well-received supporting performances in carefully chosen productions: she was part of the inaugural cast of the Bridge Project, the transatlantic theatrical collaboration set up by Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes; she won a Bafta for her portrayal of a bereaved mother in Channel 4's Red Riding: 1974. On film she has carved out a niche playing a string of notably intelligent young women: she was the right-on romantic focus of James McAvoy's student in Starter For 10 (2006), the sharp-witted consort of Michael Sheen's David Frost in Frost/Nixon (2008), the sensible and studious Vicky in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe, and most recently, a well-heeled Boston bank manager who becomes unwittingly involved with a career criminal in last year's Ben Affleck-directed hit thriller The Town.
This autumn, Hall takes the lead role in a film for the first time. The Awakening is a British-made ghost story set in 1921 in an isolated boys' boarding school, directed and co-written by the debut feature director Nick Murphy. Hall admits that the opportunity to head a cast was her primary motivation for accepting the role of Florence Cathcart. 'It's a slightly superficial reason, but I really wanted to do something where I carried a movie from start to finish,' she says. 'I had shied away from it before.'
Although The Awakening could be pigeonholed as a genre film – and therefore perhaps not the choicest career move – Hall says she jumped at the chance to do some 'running-and-screaming acting. I wanted the physical challenges. I've been all about sedate personal drama, sitting around having subtle, ironic chats about things.'
Despite the running and screaming, Florence Cathcart is classic Rebecca Hall casting. Cathcart is a brainy young widow, an author on a mission to disprove the claims of the spiritualists and mediums that were so potent in the wake of the First World War and the 1918 flu pandemic. She is asked by a boarding school master (Dominic West) to investigate a reported haunting, and ends up having her rock-solid beliefs dramatically shaken by what she finds. Nick Murphy had Hall in mind from when he began work on the screenplay.
Sitting on the floor among the flight cases in the photographer's studio – the most convenient place to site our interview – Rebecca Hall is thoroughly good company, a lively conversationalist, full of 'have-you-reads' and uncanny mimicry (she does a great Dominic West). She is geekily passionate about her field. Excitably, she describes her obsession with David Lynch, whom she once sat behind on a flight. 'I got really fascinated by the top of his head because you could just see that sort of quiffy bit. I spent the rest of the plane trip thinking, "I've got to say something to him", and then couldn't think of an opener and felt too embarrassed, so I just sat there staring.'
Neither in her sensibility nor her appearance does Hall fit Hollywood norms. When she received her Golden Globe nomination for Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2009, she missed the awards owing to her commitment to the Bridge Project. 'I suppose I've never prioritised my career over the work.'
She possesses very real good looks: at 5ft 10in (she had grown to that height by the age of 11), she is lean and willowy without being at all slight. Her long face is more handsome than pretty, her large dark eyes joined by an outsized gummy smile and a dimpled chin. 'She's a bundle of imperfections that happens to be beautiful,' Nick Murphy says. 'She's not been put together in the actress shop.'
Today she is dressed unfussily and androgynously, in a light tweedy jacket over a pale beige-coloured top, black trousers and mannish tasselled loafers without socks. It all looks very unassuming, although she has admitted in a previous interview to having 'stupidly expensive taste'.
At the moment her peripatetic life suits her – she lives in central London, but it remains a temporary base. When she is working elsewhere she keeps up with her friends by arranging 'Skype lunches' – she has a close circle from her time as a student at Cambridge University, including Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner) and Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey). 'Me and a group of friends fix a date – it might be their breakfast and my lunch, or vice versa.'
Hall is alert to the small, strange occurrences that come with her increasing international success. When, a couple of minutes into the interview, one of the photographer's team scurries over and places an upturned milk crate with a lit scented candle on it next to her, it briefly stuns her into silence. 'Oh, look at that!' she exclaims at this improvised touch of celebrity treatment. 'Ha ha ha… Very weird.'
Her father describes her as 'a wonderfully silent, very talkative creature. She's a great paradox.' She takes little pleasure in addressing the well-worn details of her biography, for instance her time as head girl at Roedean ('I still to this day don't understand how that happened'). She does not discuss her romantic life. Rumours surfaced last summer that she had grown close to the Bridge Project director Sam Mendes around the time his marriage to Kate Winslet broke down. She has firmly refused to comment on the matter, beyond confirming they are friends.
The overall impression is of a young woman who is notably self-possessed and sure-footed. She has been making clear-sighted decisions about her destiny since she was in double figures. At the age of 10, she played Sophy in The Camomile Lawn, the Channel 4 adaptation directed by her father. He recalls, 'She worked very seriously and very well. Then we had a conversation about whether she was going to go on doing child acting. She decided not to. She wanted to go through university and then join the ranks.'
Rather than trying to separate herself from her father's towering reputation and dodge charges of nepotism, Hall has embraced opportunities to work with her father. Having left Cambridge University after two years (where she read English and acted in numerous student productions, including playing Lady Macbeth opposite Dan Stevens's Macbeth), she took a role in Sir Peter's production of Mrs Warren's Profession, launching her professional career. For his part, he did not hesitate in casting her. 'I don't say I couldn't have made a mistake, of course I could, but I didn't think I would. I knew enough to feel fairly confident,' Sir Peter says. Hall won the Evening Standard Ian Charleson Award for her portrayal of Vivie and went on to perform for her father in Man and Superman and As You Like It.
'Now I've directed her more than anybody,' Sir Peter says proudly. Last autumn Hall went into rehearsals with her father once again to play Viola in his 80th-birthday production of Twelfth Night
at the National Theatre. She had never acted there before, although she had spent plenty of time there as a toddler when her father was the director. 'All the other times we've worked together it was very professional – "This is a really good director I want to work with; this is a really good actress I want to work with. The fact that we're father and daughter has got nothing to do with anything." This time it was all about the fact we were father and daughter,' she explains. 'It was very heartfelt, the whole experience, and lovely and warm. It was good to spend time with him.'
Hall is quick to credit both her parents, who split up when she was five, with passing on their 'diametrically opposed' approaches to their work. 'My mother is incredibly instinctual and emotional, so I've got all of those tools from her and all the analytical tools from my dad. I'm very grateful to both of them for that.'
She has developed her own habits; she never reads her reviews, although her father does so 'religiously… He gets all of them and lays them out on the kitchen table and goes through everything in detail. I remember being a kid and the day after press night was so nerve-racking.'
Her most vivid childhood memories are of watching her mother perform on tour, particularly as Salome and as Carmen. 'YouTube her if you haven't already,' she urges. 'She was, and is, an extraordinary performer. I remember being so convinced by her. Even though I saw Salome every night probably for most of my childhood, I remember thinking every night in the big death scene, maybe someone's going to break her when they crush her with those spears.'
Hall says she especially admires her mother for being 'self-made' – Ewing grew up with few advantages in working-class Detroit to a Dutch mother and a father who was half American Indian, half black. 'She works very hard, my mum. She's incredibly determined. When she did Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District she practically learnt Russian. That's a huge inspiration for how I do everything.'
Though Hall can never claim the description 'self-made', she has tenacity. Last autumn she secured what she describes as 'the part of a lifetime' in Stephen Frears' forthcoming Lay the Favourite, the true story of Beth Raymer, a stripper from Florida who becomes a professional sports gambler – but not without a fight.
'When I went to meet Stephen he said to me, "How's your father?" And then he said, "Well, it's very nice to meet you… but you're everything that I'm not looking for, for this role, and I will never cast you." '
Hall's agent then lobbied for her to get an audition. 'Literally for six months he wouldn't let me read. He kept saying, "Americans only." But I am half-American!'
Eventually Hall got wind that Frears was auditioning actresses in New York while she happened to be there, and he agreed to see her. 'I did all the things that I've never really done before: I wore the tightest jeans I could find and stuffed my bra with socks and curled my hair,' she says. 'Stephen was even worse than before. He said, "So here
I am against my will. I know you're wrong for this, you know you're wrong for this, so let's get it over with." '
'And then,' Frears recalls, 'she was absolutely tremendous. She was so convincing and outrageous and extraordinary. So I lost and I won.'
They filmed in spring and early summer mainly in New Orleans. 'It was a marvellous adventure for us all,' Frears says. 'Rebecca's very mature and incredibly wise about herself. She's on her way to being a great actress.'
When we meet, Hall is about to start eight weeks filming Parade's End for the BBC. Tom Stoppard has adapted the quartet of Ford Madox Ford novels set before and during the First World War. Hall is playing 'a magnificent cow', the society wife of the aristocrat Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch). As is her habit, Hall has concocted a playlist to help her get a feel for the character – La Traviata, some music hall and ragtime.
After Parade's End Hall says she is without particular plans, though she has set herself the task of learning how to DJ so she can man the decks at her own 30th birthday party next May. 'I'd really like a party, but if I have a party then I have to waft around and talk to everyone and that's quite anxious-making. So what better than to stand behind the decks, choose all the music and look out and see all of your friends dancing.'
Hall mentions a desire to take time out to 'write something' and also to direct films, 'though I'm loth to say it to your readership because then I have to live up to it one day'. In this regard, she would love to emulate Nicole Holofcener, the American director for whom she played a caring and conscientious granddaughter in the nuanced family drama Please Give (2010).
'Of all the directors I've worked with, Nicole probably commands the most respect on the film set with the most ease,' she says. 'There's no sense of hierarchy, everything is dealt with, and yet, everything's running immaculately, everyone is desperate to impress her and do everything on time. She just sort of glides through it making funny comments about everyone, but is utterly in control.'
Somehow, it is not much of a stretch to imagine the capable, commanding, funny, serious Rebecca Hall being just like that.
'The Awakening' is out on November 11
Neither in her sensibility nor her appearance does Hall fit Hollywood norms. When she received her Golden Globe nomination for Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2009, she missed the awards owing to her commitment to the Bridge Project. 'I suppose I've never prioritised my career over the work.'
She possesses very real good looks: at 5ft 10in (she had grown to that height by the age of 11), she is lean and willowy without being at all slight. Her long face is more handsome than pretty, her large dark eyes joined by an outsized gummy smile and a dimpled chin. 'She's a bundle of imperfections that happens to be beautiful,' Nick Murphy says. 'She's not been put together in the actress shop.'
Today she is dressed unfussily and androgynously, in a light tweedy jacket over a pale beige-coloured top, black trousers and mannish tasselled loafers without socks. It all looks very unassuming, although she has admitted in a previous interview to having 'stupidly expensive taste'.
At the moment her peripatetic life suits her – she lives in central London, but it remains a temporary base. When she is working elsewhere she keeps up with her friends by arranging 'Skype lunches' – she has a close circle from her time as a student at Cambridge University, including Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner) and Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey). 'Me and a group of friends fix a date – it might be their breakfast and my lunch, or vice versa.'
Hall is alert to the small, strange occurrences that come with her increasing international success. When, a couple of minutes into the interview, one of the photographer's team scurries over and places an upturned milk crate with a lit scented candle on it next to her, it briefly stuns her into silence. 'Oh, look at that!' she exclaims at this improvised touch of celebrity treatment. 'Ha ha ha… Very weird.'
Her father describes her as 'a wonderfully silent, very talkative creature. She's a great paradox.' She takes little pleasure in addressing the well-worn details of her biography, for instance her time as head girl at Roedean ('I still to this day don't understand how that happened'). She does not discuss her romantic life. Rumours surfaced last summer that she had grown close to the Bridge Project director Sam Mendes around the time his marriage to Kate Winslet broke down. She has firmly refused to comment on the matter, beyond confirming they are friends.
The overall impression is of a young woman who is notably self-possessed and sure-footed. She has been making clear-sighted decisions about her destiny since she was in double figures. At the age of 10, she played Sophy in The Camomile Lawn, the Channel 4 adaptation directed by her father. He recalls, 'She worked very seriously and very well. Then we had a conversation about whether she was going to go on doing child acting. She decided not to. She wanted to go through university and then join the ranks.'
Rather than trying to separate herself from her father's towering reputation and dodge charges of nepotism, Hall has embraced opportunities to work with her father. Having left Cambridge University after two years (where she read English and acted in numerous student productions, including playing Lady Macbeth opposite Dan Stevens's Macbeth), she took a role in Sir Peter's production of Mrs Warren's Profession, launching her professional career. For his part, he did not hesitate in casting her. 'I don't say I couldn't have made a mistake, of course I could, but I didn't think I would. I knew enough to feel fairly confident,' Sir Peter says. Hall won the Evening Standard Ian Charleson Award for her portrayal of Vivie and went on to perform for her father in Man and Superman and As You Like It.
'Now I've directed her more than anybody,' Sir Peter says proudly. Last autumn Hall went into rehearsals with her father once again to play Viola in his 80th-birthday production of Twelfth Night
at the National Theatre. She had never acted there before, although she had spent plenty of time there as a toddler when her father was the director. 'All the other times we've worked together it was very professional – "This is a really good director I want to work with; this is a really good actress I want to work with. The fact that we're father and daughter has got nothing to do with anything." This time it was all about the fact we were father and daughter,' she explains. 'It was very heartfelt, the whole experience, and lovely and warm. It was good to spend time with him.'
Hall is quick to credit both her parents, who split up when she was five, with passing on their 'diametrically opposed' approaches to their work. 'My mother is incredibly instinctual and emotional, so I've got all of those tools from her and all the analytical tools from my dad. I'm very grateful to both of them for that.'
She has developed her own habits; she never reads her reviews, although her father does so 'religiously… He gets all of them and lays them out on the kitchen table and goes through everything in detail. I remember being a kid and the day after press night was so nerve-racking.'
Her most vivid childhood memories are of watching her mother perform on tour, particularly as Salome and as Carmen. 'YouTube her if you haven't already,' she urges. 'She was, and is, an extraordinary performer. I remember being so convinced by her. Even though I saw Salome every night probably for most of my childhood, I remember thinking every night in the big death scene, maybe someone's going to break her when they crush her with those spears.'
Hall says she especially admires her mother for being 'self-made' – Ewing grew up with few advantages in working-class Detroit to a Dutch mother and a father who was half American Indian, half black. 'She works very hard, my mum. She's incredibly determined. When she did Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District she practically learnt Russian. That's a huge inspiration for how I do everything.'
Though Hall can never claim the description 'self-made', she has tenacity. Last autumn she secured what she describes as 'the part of a lifetime' in Stephen Frears' forthcoming Lay the Favourite, the true story of Beth Raymer, a stripper from Florida who becomes a professional sports gambler – but not without a fight.
'When I went to meet Stephen he said to me, "How's your father?" And then he said, "Well, it's very nice to meet you… but you're everything that I'm not looking for, for this role, and I will never cast you." '
Hall's agent then lobbied for her to get an audition. 'Literally for six months he wouldn't let me read. He kept saying, "Americans only." But I am half-American!'
Eventually Hall got wind that Frears was auditioning actresses in New York while she happened to be there, and he agreed to see her. 'I did all the things that I've never really done before: I wore the tightest jeans I could find and stuffed my bra with socks and curled my hair,' she says. 'Stephen was even worse than before. He said, "So here
I am against my will. I know you're wrong for this, you know you're wrong for this, so let's get it over with." '
'And then,' Frears recalls, 'she was absolutely tremendous. She was so convincing and outrageous and extraordinary. So I lost and I won.'
They filmed in spring and early summer mainly in New Orleans. 'It was a marvellous adventure for us all,' Frears says. 'Rebecca's very mature and incredibly wise about herself. She's on her way to being a great actress.'
When we meet, Hall is about to start eight weeks filming Parade's End for the BBC. Tom Stoppard has adapted the quartet of Ford Madox Ford novels set before and during the First World War. Hall is playing 'a magnificent cow', the society wife of the aristocrat Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch). As is her habit, Hall has concocted a playlist to help her get a feel for the character – La Traviata, some music hall and ragtime.
After Parade's End Hall says she is without particular plans, though she has set herself the task of learning how to DJ so she can man the decks at her own 30th birthday party next May. 'I'd really like a party, but if I have a party then I have to waft around and talk to everyone and that's quite anxious-making. So what better than to stand behind the decks, choose all the music and look out and see all of your friends dancing.'
Hall mentions a desire to take time out to 'write something' and also to direct films, 'though I'm loth to say it to your readership because then I have to live up to it one day'. In this regard, she would love to emulate Nicole Holofcener, the American director for whom she played a caring and conscientious granddaughter in the nuanced family drama Please Give (2010).
'Of all the directors I've worked with, Nicole probably commands the most respect on the film set with the most ease,' she says. 'There's no sense of hierarchy, everything is dealt with, and yet, everything's running immaculately, everyone is desperate to impress her and do everything on time. She just sort of glides through it making funny comments about everyone, but is utterly in control.'
Somehow, it is not much of a stretch to imagine the capable, commanding, funny, serious Rebecca Hall being just like that.
'The Awakening' is out on November 11
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