Jonathan Sim
Rebecca Hall has never been easy to categorize, and that seems to be exactly how she likes it. Over a career spanning nearly two decades, Hall has demonstrated a remarkable range: she held her own opposite Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in Christopher Nolan‘s The Prestige, brought layered grief to the supernatural horror of The Night House, anchored multiple entries of the Monsterverse franchise opposite legends like Kong himself, and delivered what many consider a career-defining performance as the real-life broadcaster Christine Chubbuck in Antonio Campos‘ Christine.
Now, with Ryan Murphy‘s The Beauty, a darkly comic, body-horror-inflected series about the terrifying costs of physical perfection, Hall is in the thick of Emmy season once again, playing Jordan, a charming and funny investigative figure drawn into a world where beauty, quite literally, can be lethal.
Hall heard about the show before she ever read a script. Ryan Murphy, she explains, took her out to breakfast and laid out the entire concept himself.
“My first reaction to it didn’t come from reading the scripts. It came from Ryan Murphy taking me out to breakfast and describing to me the entire show. Which was, for me, a very thrilling thing to listen to, because it’s arguably the most Ryan Murphy concept you could imagine, being described to me by Ryan Murphy himself, with tremendous enthusiasm. And I will never forget it. I just remember thinking, ‘Yes, of course I want to be a part of this. This sounds completely insane and absolutely what everyone’s going to want to watch.'”
Part of what Murphy described was the show’s now-notorious opening sequence. Hall’s response at the time was not unlike the audience’s. “He described to me the first five minutes of the show, including Bella Hadid exploding. I was like, ‘I’m sorry, what? What’s going to happen?’ He’s like, ‘Yep, that’s going to happen. She’s going to explode from being too hot.’ I’m like, well, she is extremely hot. So yes.”
Murphy also described Jordan’s dynamic with her partner Cooper—a will-they-won’t-they tension that Hall found immediately appealing—and told Hall he wanted someone who would make audiences root for the character before the show’s darker turns took hold. But what drew Hall in most was something more personal: the chance to play light.
“It was quite refreshing to be asked to play something that was sort of light, I guess. Her job is very serious and dark, but she, as a character, has quite a lot of light in her. She’s quite funny, she makes jokes a lot. And that was something I hadn’t really done before, but really enjoyed playing. So yeah, I loved it absolutely.”
That lightness, of course, exists alongside some genuinely unsettling material. Balancing those tones, Hall says, is the central challenge of the whole project—and, she has come to believe, the central challenge of acting itself.
“Understanding what the tone is is always the challenge for an actor, actually. We talk about lots of other things, but I am coming to believe that one of the greatest challenges is working out what the tone of the show or the movie is. What does this story need of me? What’s the right kind of acting style to bring to it? Because there are genuinely different ways to do it. Ryan Murphy’s world often balances something very shocking, often frightening, definitely provocative, but also very funny and heightened and entertaining.”
It’s a balance Hall knows how to strike from experience. Her work in the Godzilla vs. Kong franchise required exactly the same instinct: finding the human frequency inside an inhuman context. For Hall, the question is always the same, regardless of scale.
“Whatever you do, the tone is always slightly different, but you’re always bringing credibility. It’s like: how can I make this character credible in this context? What is the mode of being? And that’s always rooted in truth, in the relatable human thing about this person, whoever they are, whatever the context.”
Hall is also candid about the industry’s historically complicated relationship with genre work—the tendency to dismiss horror or blockbuster performances as something less than serious. “It’s definitely changing. I think we also have to acknowledge that genre films, or any kind of popular films, can be well-made and well-performed. There seems to be this strange distinction between prestige and certain other kinds of things, and I don’t know—I think something’s good or it isn’t, right? The more that we just acknowledge that and just let everything in, probably the better.”
Her own career has always resisted that distinction. She appeared in Iron Man 3, which she cheerfully agrees is a Christmas movie. She’s noticed that fans tend to hold onto whichever version of her they found first, often unaware she’s the same person in all of it.
“I think a lot of people don’t necessarily think it’s me doing all the same things. Some people think I’ve only ever been in The Town, and some people only think I’ve only ever been in The Gift, and some people only think I’ve only ever been in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. They don’t necessarily put all those things together. And the people who love Christine don’t think I’ve done any of the other things. It’s super interesting, and I kind of love that. I kind of love that I’m not necessarily recognizable for all of the things, that people hold on to certain performances. I find that quite moving, actually.”
This Emmy season, Hall arrives not just with The Beauty but with two films premiering at Cannes. The first, The Man I Love, marks her second collaboration with Ira Sachs after Peter Hujar’s Day. Shot in New York and set in the 1980s, it stars Hall alongside Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, and Eben Moss-Bachrach in a story centered on a group of artists.
“I adore him and feel so lucky to be a more than one-time collaborator with him. I love working on his films. It’s very delicate and unusual. I’m in awe of Ira for somehow managing to make the kind of films that seem impossible to make nowadays, and he’s out there doing it in America.”
The second Cannes film, The End of It, is something else entirely: a dystopian dark comedy from a first-time director in which Hall plays a 250-year-old performance artist in a future where death has been rendered optional.
“It’s set in a world where nobody dies anymore because everyone can hook themselves up to these smart dialysis machines and somehow reorganize their cells. So everyone looks roughly somewhere between the ages of 30 and 45. Noémie Merlant plays my daughter. And I guess it shares some things, funnily enough, with The Man I Love because the discourse is very much: what is art if you can live forever? What is anything if you can live forever? What is life? Because as a 250-year-old performance artist, I’ve slightly lost my edge. That’s what the character is going through. She has some ennui, and she decides she’s sick of it all and is just going to end it. And that’s her last act of performance art.”
Hall has thought carefully about how performance works, and not just on set. Asked about a director’s note that has stuck with her, she reaches for something she didn’t even hear directed at herself. She overheard it, years ago, from Tom Stoppard.
“He said to this actor: ‘It’s not that I can’t hear you, it’s that I’m not being asked to listen.’ And that one has always stuck with me. It’s very poetic; you can think about that one for a while, and I think it’s helpful.”
Her relationship with directors, she says, is fundamentally intuitive, and she prepares rigorously precisely because she wants to be free in the moment. “It’s a sort of intuitive dance, and it either works or it doesn’t. It’s very chemistry-based. My role, my job, is to serve the director’s vision. I’m always trying to work out: what is your world, and how can I help you get there in a way that feels right for me as an artist and feels truthful? I do work; I make a sort of chart so I understand the emotional journey of every character. I’m pretty rigorous about that sort of stuff. But I like to think I’m also pretty flexible in the moment. Sometimes you can turn up and it can be completely different to what you thought the director wanted, and you’ve got to pivot quickly—or have an argument, which happens too.”
When unhelpful direction comes her way, and she confirms, with some relish, that it does, her approach is characteristically pragmatic. “I just nod,” she says, “and then try to do something different.”
Hall has also sat on the other side of the camera. Her directorial debut, Passing, earned widespread acclaim, and she is open about the fact that it fundamentally changed her relationship to the work she does in front of the lens.
“I think I let go a little easier. After directing, I trusted myself a little more. I think directing rekindled my love of acting, perversely. Not that it went away, but I think I was getting a little disenchanted, or like, aware of how easy it was for me on some level. Which sounds very arrogant, but I sort of was like, ‘Well, this isn’t brain surgery. I can turn up and do this. I can learn the lines, I can feel feelings. What’s the big idea? Why is everyone making such a fuss about it?’ And then I remember being behind the camera and watching Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga and André Holland and all of the incredible actors I had on that film give so much of themselves every day and be vulnerable at the drop of a hat. And I realized that’s what you do as actors. You turn up and you make yourself willing to be completely vulnerable in front of a camera for all time. I’d sort of forgotten that. And then I came away from it just loving acting and having more respect for it than I’d had for a minute. Not that it had entirely gone away, but there was a blip. It was a blip.”
She has three directing projects she’s trying to get off the ground. She’s not worried about which one goes first. One of them, she says simply, will happen.
In the meantime, she has one film she’d like to go back and revisit—one she feels has not yet received its due. Christine, her 2016 collaboration with Antonio Campos, is approaching its tenth anniversary, and Hall would love to see it find a new audience.
“It was a really hard thing to pull off, and it was a real shocker that we made it. It’s coming up to its 10-year anniversary this year, actually, and I would love to see it have a bit of a re-release, or something on a streaming deal—have people look at it again. Because I do think it’s actually an extraordinary film and I’m very proud of it.”
With The Beauty positioning her squarely in the Emmy conversation, two films at Cannes, and the quiet, growing reputation of Passing behind her, Hall seems less interested in being recognized for all of it at once than in continuing to confound expectations. She’s happy to be the actress some people know only from the Monsterverse, and the one others know only from a quiet 1980s New York art story.
Comments
Loading…