‘I’ve had a wild, chaotic, beautiful life’: Rebecca Hall on race, regrets and learning to be herself

We all thought that we knew Rebecca Hall – English rose, on stage since childhood, daughter of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s founder Sir Peter Hall, regularly described in Hollywood as one of the best actors of her generation. But in 2021 she took what she calls now “a big swing” and suddenly the whole story cracked in half.

The big swing was her directorial debut, Passing, a film about two women of colour, one of whom is “passing” for white; Hall had been working on the story for 15 years, but thinking about it for far longer. Her maternal grandfather, a doorman from Detroit, passed as white, as did Hall’s mother the opera singer Maria Ewing, whose experience of growing up with internalised racism contributed to mental health issues that Hall had to navigate throughout her childhood. Her parents split when she was young and her mother brought her up alone in a grand country house in Sussex. But very little parenting was done – Hall (later head girl at school, later a Cambridge drop-out) was her mother’s caretaker. Because, “that kind of hiding [from who you are] leads to a certain amount of chaos. I think it’s safe to say that that stuff gets passed on. And I definitely grew up in an environment where my mother didn’t see me. She wanted me to be a certain kind of thing.”

Making Passing and then, perhaps even more, talking about the film, “changed me profoundly”, says Hall today, generous but watchful, drinking coffee in a hotel bar overlooking the Thames. “My public-facing world was stuck in some sort of performance of English rose, theatre actor, posh, privileged… Which is true, but also, not actually my experience. I was always confused by that, but I didn’t really know how to present my actual shape to the world. So I was, ‘It’s OK, I’ll just carry on doing what I love quietly,’ and I’ll pretend to be whatever they want me to be.” Since the film, she’s insisted on a kind of clarity. She wants to be precise about the Grey Gardens complexity to her seemingly privileged upbringing; she wants not just to act, but also direct and write and paint. She wants to say, turning brightly to face me: “I’m more than what you think I am.”

This is what her typical day looks like: she’ll wake beside her husband, actor Morgan Spector, in their house in Upstate New York. They used to live in Manhattan, where she would walk their old cat on a lead. “It would be like walking down the street with Madonna,” she cackles with light grief. After breakfast, she’ll drive their six-year-old daughter, Ida, to school and then take the dog for a walk that will end up at her studio, where she’ll paint until she has to stop. At which point she will write until she “burns out”, then return to her easel.

“I find acting completely fulfilling when the camera’s rolling, but then, the rest of the time, I get frustrated by it. Whereas painting… Oh I could do that all day long, every day.” And her paintings are great – sort of neo-expressionist, emotional, alive. Recently she’s been painting audiences – they smile and gasp from the canvas in purples and green. Why audiences? “Well I’ve spent an entire career, a pretty long one actually…” 42 now, she made her screen debut aged 10 in The Camomile Lawn, a series directed by her father, and was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2008 for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona… “An entire career doing things for people to look at and I realised that, every time, I have something of a relationship with those people. It feels like an active ignoring.” The hotel fire-alarm test slices through our conversation and we wait, eyebrows raised.

We’re meeting to talk about The Listeners, a haunting new BBC drama directed by Janicza Bravo, in which Hall plays a teacher who, one day, starts to hear a low, unidentifiable hum. When her family starts to doubt her sanity (could it be anxiety? Could it be, one doctor suggests, menopause?), the story slips into a gripping exploration of why ordinary people search for answers in dark places. Hall has, Bravo tells me, “harnessed both the approachable and the enigmatic. She feels like someone you know, want to know. She’s striking, which makes her delectable to watch, of course.”

When the alarm stops, leaving in its wake a silent ringing, Hall continues: “It almost felt to me like I was exhaling when I first read the script,” she smiles, “because I was like, ah, someone’s daring to make something that feels really about this moment, a time when reality is pretty fragile, actually.” As particular as her character’s story appears, “it feels like an experience we’re all having on some level. There’s a certain amount of desperation and we’re all going crazy, individually and collectively!”

Ha! we say uneasily. Ha. This unstable character sits comfortably on a timeline of Hall’s recent roles, like in Christine, the true story of a news reporter who died by suicide live on air. “Yes, I suppose all the people I play have a mask, and a reality that’s behind the mask, and there is this tension between trying to define the middle ground.”

She hasn’t consciously chosen to spend time exclusively inside women on the edge and breaks them up with starring roles in noisy blockbusters, like this year’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. “But it’s just sort of happened along the way. Someone, actually, accused me of being ‘The queen of the gaslight narrative.’” Were they correct? “Well, I don’t like being told I’m anything, ever,” Hall laughs.

In 2018, after Woody Allen’s daughter, Dylan Farrow, expressed anger that Hollywood continued to support her father, despite her allegations he’d sexually assaulted her as a child, Hall made a statement saying she saw “that my actions have made another woman feel silenced and dismissed” and was “profoundly sorry. I regret this decision and wouldn’t make the same one today.” She also pledged her salary from her recent project with Allen to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. How does she feel about that today? “I struggle with this one,” she says, twisting her body into a series of crosses. “It’s very unlike me to make a public statement about anything. I make the stuff, that’s how I am political. I don’t think of myself as an ‘actor-vist’, I’m not that person. And, I kind of regret making that statement, because I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation.”

She was in a peculiar state, she tells me – newly pregnant, deeply affected emotionally by Farrow’s allegations and, at the time, working on A Rainy Day in New York, directed by Allen. One morning, “I was outside, shooting a street scene with Jude Law where, literally, my dialogue was, ‘You’ve got to stop sleeping with these fucking 15-year-olds.’ And that day, the Weinstein scandal breaks. There’s a bank of journalists and paparazzi right there, because Weinstein’s a producer on it, and they’re all listening to me say this.”

Every interview that followed revolved around Allen and Weinstein, “and I was in a tangle. Like, in this moment, it’s the most important thing to believe the women. Yes, of course, there’s going to be complications and nuances in these stories, but we’re redressing a balance here. So I felt like I wanted to do something definitive.” That’s when she made the statement, trying to articulate her discomfort, but remain balanced. “But it just became, ‘another person denounces Woody Allen and regrets working with him’, which is not what I said actually. I don’t regret working with him. He gave me a great job opportunity and he was kind to me.” Beyond that? “I have no idea. I don’t talk to him any more, but I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this.” How would she respond if it were to happen now? “I wouldn’t say anything – my policy actually is to be an artist. Don’t come out and state your stuff so much. I don’t think that makes me apathetic or not engaged. I just think it’s my job.”

And it’s a busy job, a rich job – she’s just wrapped on a film with Jamie Lee Curtis, and a biopic about the photographer Peter Hujar with Ben Whishaw, but she makes time for pleasure, too, which for Hall means reality TV. “Morgan doesn’t understand it – he’s like, ‘I thought I married this sophisticated, cultured, literate, artistic type?’ But I just find it utterly fascinating. It’s such a good way to look at human behaviour, in performance, which obviously is my interest.” She leans in as she talks about the magic and artistry of Real Housewives and its sister shows, all these people “trying really hard to be themselves” and “the little blips when it breaks down, the raw desperation”, the way, “social constructs get remounted in these weird microcosms where they’re even more crazily hetero-normative or insanely gendered”. Delayed on a plane recently she watched eight hours of Vanderpump Rules (“Profound!”), and now plans to watch it again, backwards.

Another project she’s working on is her second film, Four Days Like Sunday, loosely based on her relationship with her mother and the cast of queer and beautiful characters who raised her. Her mother died at the beginning of 2022 – that summer Hall wrote the script. Not long ago Hall came across her mother’s Desert Island Discs, from the early 90s. “It was shocking to hear her voice – she was in this patch where she spoke in a very serious English accent. And in the interview she talks about her dad being Black. I was like, are you kidding me? Because she would never talk about it to me.”

When Passing was greenlit, Hall called to tell her. Her mother hung up. The next day she phoned back. “You’re really going to make a movie of that?” Hall quotes, in a low Detroit accent, but it cracks slightly as she continues, “and it actually breaks my heart to tell this story, but she did say, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Rebecca. It could be dangerous’.” She pauses. “‘Look at you, you’re white’, is what she said.” She felt her childhood flash before her: “Silly stuff. Like, I’d come back from holiday and she’d be like, ‘you’ve got too tan’. It would be loaded, there was something else there. And lots of, ‘don’t wear your hair like this, don’t swear’, I mean, it was all controlled around her particular internalised, racist idea of what blackness was, you know? The reality of going on this journey is that you realise it’s all, obviously, a bloody construct. We’re all performing something – and this was such a big piece of my childhood.” And yet, when the film came out, it turned out to be a “profound release for my mother”. Some of her relatives in Detroit, Republicans, born-again Christians, have thanked her, too, “but I could tell that it was a complicated gratitude”.

One reason she lives in New York is because it’s fairly equidistant between her family in the UK and Spector’s in California. They’ve been together for nine years and have acted opposite each other four times. Once she told a newspaper that the greatest achievement of her life was getting married. Does she stand by that? “For me, the idea of marriage was anathema. I was politically opposed to it, fundamentally opposed to it. And I think I didn’t believe in the possibility of monogamy either – I had no example of it growing up. It was just divorces everywhere and lonely people. So it probably is the greatest thing I have achieved in the sense that I managed to get to a place where it seemed a completely rational choice.”

She had come to a realisation that it was possible for Spector and her to define what marriage might be. “Which makes it this completely wonderful and hopeful thing. The idea you can get to a place where you’re like, ‘I choose to believe in the impossibility of things’. It’s the most hopeful thing you can do, isn’t it? And insane in a world where it’s difficult to find places for that. So I love it, actually. I’m shocked by how much that kind of stability and anchor has actually allowed me to… fly.”

Similarly, she had decided from a young age that she didn’t want children. “Having been brought up by very preoccupied and brilliant artistic types, I couldn’t imagine a world where I, a preoccupied artistic type, could be a good parent. But I married someone who is so committed to making up for whatever deficit I might have and allowing me to be that, but also making sure I’m present for my child and holding it all together. I got lucky.”

As she’s talking, I’m remembering an exquisite monologue about motherhood towards the end of The Listeners. “I used to look at my mother and wonder, why aren’t you happy?” it goes. “I used to think, you made a decision to live a small life. And I will never let that happen to me.” It resonated with Hall, despite the fact that, “my life has never been little,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of life already, and it’s been extreme. I understand that fear, though, because I’ve had a wild and chaotic and beautiful life. And I’ve been frightened of doing something that might limit it. Because I’ve grappled forever, in the way that people who are raised by a narcissistic personality type do, with the idea I might be silenced in some way.”

Hall was forever working not to overshadow her mother, but also to satisfy her need to live vicariously through her daughter, an impossible balance. Now though, “I think I’m more rooted in myself. I had a tendency to hide.” In what way? “When I was young, my choices were all about: how can I be as invisible as possible while also being the biggest star in the world?” She laughs darkly.

When she and Spector decided, finally, to get married, she found herself becoming fixated on the idea that people plan their fantasy weddings and the more precise the plan, the more likely it is they will be disappointed. “And I was like, can we manufacture some circumstances where we have no idea what’s going to happen, so that we can just experience it?” They came up with the idea of, “bring your own wedding, like bring your own bottle? We’re just going to gather in a house and we’re going to eat and drink and dance and have fun. And if at any point anyone wants to marry us,” if anybody wants to perform a ceremony, “please do.”

One friend, artist Rob Roth, leapt out of the shrubbery dressed as a werewolf and sang, ‘If a double-decker bus / crashes into us…’ Another, the actor Dan Stevens, called everybody out to the pond as a blood moon was rising and gave them a candle to hold. “He was like, ‘OK, this is my thing,’ and he made Morgan and I stand way up, high over there, while everyone else was on the other side of the water, and said, ‘I just want you to have an experience of seeing us, your community.’” We both sit for a moment, grinning stupidly. “It was about saying, ‘This is our world, these are our people and we will define ourselves exactly how we want to’.”

The Listeners will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on Tuesday 19 November

Styling by Bailey Moon at Brigade Talent; hair by Ben Skervin using ColorWow at Walter Schupfer Management; makeup by Sam Addington at Kramer + Kramer