Rebecca Hall is off and running around the world
LONDON — When Rebecca Hall was 10, her father sat her down for a serious talk. Peter Hall, the venerable British theater and opera director, told her she had a choice to make. “Do you want to be a child actress or an actress?” he asked.
It was a pertinent question. At the age of 9, long before she wowed movie critics and audiences alike in “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” “Frost/Nixon” and “Please Give,” Rebecca Hall had been lauded for her debut performance, clad in a dainty frock and ankle socks, in “The Camomile Lawn,” a British miniseries directed by her father. Offers for more roles had followed.
Recalling their conversation now, Peter Hall, 79, said in a telephone interview: “She answered, ‘I want to be an actress.’ And I said, ‘Then if I were you, I’d have my childhood be as rich as you can and then be an actor when you grow up.’”
Flash forward to today: Rebecca Hall, now 28, is among the fastest-rising, and most gifted, actresses of her generation. With no formal training she became an actress in 2002, after dropping out of Cambridge, where she studied English literature for two years. She triumphed later that same year on the West End stage in “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (her father directed), began making movies in 2006 with “Starter for 10” and hasn’t stopped working since.
“I saw her as Rosalind at BAM” — the Brooklyn Academy of Music — “in ‘As You Like It’ in 2003, and I was just dazzled by her,” said Juliet Taylor, the casting director who later urged Woody Allen to hire Hall for “Vicky Christina.” “She has a very real quality. There’s nothing too actressy about her. And her beauty isn’t larger than life, it’s a kind of real person’s great looks.”
In person, as on screen, there’s nothing showy about Hall. Yes, she’s tall (5 feet 10 inches) and lovely, but not in an I’m-a-movie-star, look-at-me way. When she walked into the outdoor patio of the Bluebird Cafe in the Chelsea neighborhood of London late one morning last month, heads didn’t swivel. She gracefully sank into the cushions of a love seat, ordered a cappuccino and croissant, and signaled that she was ready to talk about her career, life and “The Town,” a morally complex crime thriller starring Ben Affleck, who also directed, that opens Friday. Hall in conversation is self-effacing, articulate, analytical, quick to laugh and pleased to chew over the challenges and joys of acting. Unlike many other performers, however, she does not find herself to be an endlessly fascinating topic. “I don’t like talking about myself, if I’m honest,” she said. And her personal life is off limits for discussion. “If I don’t have that, I have nothing,” she said. (Her skittishness is understandable. Last spring Hall had her first brush with tabloid notoriety when a British newspaper speculated, baselessly, that her work friendship with the director Sam Mendes had contributed to the dissolution of his marriage to Kate Winslet.)
She does interviews like this one, along with magazine fashion shoots and red-carpet appearances, because they are part of being a professional actress today. “You can’t do what you want to do now unless you do some of that,” she said. “I wish it were otherwise. Now there’s just this incessant, ‘Who are you really?’”
Her American-born mother, Maria Ewing, a celebrated opera star, said Hall is able to keep the publicity machine in perspective, having seen her parents subjected to it. (Their marriage ended when she was 5.) “The only thing that matters — I know this sounds cliched — is the art itself,” Ewing said. “The fame stuff, that’s something you should never aim for, never. Rebecca doesn’t have that sort of ego. She’s never needed that.”
Hollywood directors and casting agents always want to know if Hall can do a convincing American accent. The answer is a resounding yes. Thanks to her mother, she holds dual citizenship and spent childhood vacations in New York and Los Angeles, where Ewing often was performing. “I very much feel half and half, and I’m as comfortable in New York as in London,” Hall said. (Her American half includes dashes of American Indian and African-American ancestry.)
Whether she could do an American accent was Allen’s sole question before hiring her as an American abroad for “Vicky Christina.” The director Nicole Holofcener also asked Hall about that for “Please Give,” in which she plays a dutiful Manhattan granddaughter. “I said, ‘Can you do one right now?’” Holofcener recalled. “Rebecca laughed and said it was hard just to do it like that, but she could. Unlike some English actresses I’ve worked with before, she didn’t need a coach.”
Affleck too sought accent reassurance. He wanted her to play the lead female role, a bank manager who is taken hostage during a holdup, in “The Town.” “I knew Rebecca’s work and knew if I met her and liked her, she’d be perfect for the movie,” Affleck said. “But I also needed to know she wouldn’t argue with me every minute — the actress whammy. She’s the opposite of actress whammy. Rebecca is beautiful, engaging, smart — I mean really, really smart — and a joy to work with.”
Told of Affleck’s “actress whammy” concerns, Hall hooted with laughter. “With good reason,” she said, “who wants to spend three months of your life working with someone you don’t get on with, or can’t share a joke with?”
“The Town” was shot on location in Boston, where Affleck is fondly considered a local boy. Hall had just finished an extended, globe-spanning tour in stage productions of Chekov’s “Cherry Orchard” and Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale.” “I did my last performance in this amazing amphitheater in Epidaurus in Greece, and then the whole cast stayed up all night — we’d been together for 10 months — and went skinny-dipping in the Aegean as the sun came up,” she said. “And then I literally got on a plane, flew to London and changed planes and on to Boston.”
A day later she had to film one of her most emotionally intense scenes. While in a laundromat, her character spots a bloodstain on a blouse she is folding, a leftover from the bank robbery. “Rebecca’s character is supposed to have a sense memory reaction and start crying out of the blue,” Affleck said. “It’s really the hardest thing to do, and on your very first day. She did it, and it was great. And then she did it again and again. I didn’t think we’d even get hot-cross buns, but she just nailed it. I thought, ‘Whew, OK, she’s good.’”
As Hall remembered it: “It was tough to do that scene, but it’s good to have to do a difficult scene first off the bolt, because you get over all that worry. The crew can calm down and — it’s important — be at ease and trusting of their actors. It helps to make a great set.”
Any set on which Hall works is apparently a great set. Past colleagues like Amanda Peet, Scarlett Johansson and Oliver Platt all took time out from work or summer vacations to express, either by phone or by e-mail, their admiration, respect and fondness for her. Jeremy Renner, who acts in “The Town,” said that during the production he, Hall and a co-star, Jon Hamm, hung out, singing blues and dancing around a piano that Renner had installed in his Boston hotel room. They also watched old movies together, Renner said, noting that Hall had pushed for “Arthur.”
“Yes, we had a little Dudley Moore festival,” Hall confirmed. “We watched ‘10’ too. Those are like comfort movies to me.”
Since shooting “The Town,” Hall has acted in three more coming movies: “Everything Must Go” (with Will Ferrell), “A Bag of Hammers” and “The Awakening.” Next up she starts rehearsals in November to play Viola in “Twelfth Night,” a production her father is directing at the National Theater in London to celebrate his 80th birthday.
Her immediate priority, though, is to rent a small apartment in London. While working nonstop for the past two years she has been living out of two suitcases — the rest of her possessions are in storage — and bunking in hotels and with friends and family.
“I’m OK this way,” she said of her vagabondage, “but I fully appreciate that I can’t carry on much longer. My friends and family who’ve put me up whenever I knock on doors, they are going to get bored of doing that.”