HALLOWED HALL
By mixing independent cinema with big-budget Hollywood films, Rebecca Hall’s career is shaping up to be a blockbuster.
Even when Rebecca Hall is going incognito in rumpled hair, a black knit shirtdress, and some admirably clunky boots, she still manages to magnetize a room—in this case, Café Cluny in New York City’s West Village on a grisly afternoon in early March. When the waitress delicately places a cup of no-milk, no-sugar tea in front of the 30-year-old actress, her “here you go” is borderline hushed.
Hall owes the loss of her anonymity to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 2008 project that cast the then-unknown opposite Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz. Not only did she hold her own, she was nominated for a Golden Globe. Hall suspects she landed on Allen’s radar thanks to reviews of her performance in a 2005 stage production of As You Like It. “He met me for all of two minutes, and then sent me a script with a little type-written note—when nobody had been cast, by the way—that said, ‘Have a read. I think you would be great in the role of Vicky. Let me know if you would like it.’ My first thought was, ‘Is this a joke?’ And my second was that Vicky was a two-line part. But then, the first sentence was, ‘Vicky and Cristina spend a summer in Barcelona,’ and I practically fell off my chair.”
She leans back and laughs at the memory, revealing perfect teeth that do not, thankfully resemble, the falsies flashed by so many of her peers. Vicky Cristina, she says, changed her life irrevocably, but not immediately. “I remember being really unemployed for a year after [filming], and trudging around being broke. But when it did come out, I think it made me the kind of actress I wanted to be in the sense that it showed that I want to work with interesting directors and do offbeat stories and have diversity. That, to me, was the big change, not the other stuff that comes with becoming ‘successful.’”
Ever since, Hall has tempered films like Ben Affleck’s 2010 project, The Town, with theater and indie fare, such as the recent HBO-via-BBC-Two miniseries Parade’s End, based on Ford Madox Ford’s novels of the same name. As the promiscuous Sylvia Tietjens, she’s the least stable element in an upper-class love triangle that engulfs her husband (Benedict Cumberbatch) and a young suffragette (Adelaide Clemens) during the outbreak of World War I.
Sound a little Downton? “There is a fad for this era,” admits Hall, who experienced it firsthand earlier in the day during brunch with her college friend Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley on the hit series. Their waiter, who had clearly devoured both shows, first thanked Hall for coming. “Then he looked at Dan and said, ‘Mr. Cumberbatch, I really enjoy your work.’” The two were confused until they realized that the guy was making a joke. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Stevens—I’m a big fan. It’s just so funny to see you two together.’”
Hall takes a sip of her tea as she ponders the American fascination with English period fare. “It’s interesting because it’s alien, but to English people, it’s alien as well. The whole world of the stiff upper lip is gone—we’ve assimilated so much to American culture.” This is all top of mind because Hall is half-Yankee. Her father, Sir Peter Hall, is the British director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, while her mother, Maria Ewing, is an American opera singer. But she grew up in London, and speaks with a charming British inflection. “You’re probably just seduced by the accent,” she chides. “Which makes you think that we are much more intelligent. But let me tell you, it is not true.”
Now is probably a good time to mention that Hall was educated at Cambridge. Her intellectualism is partly a product of circumstance—she was indoctrinated into the Shakespearean scene practically at birth, and she first set foot on a stage as a 10-year-old in her father’s television adaptation of Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn.
But if anyone can make Hall feel dim, it’s Parade’s End screenwriter Tom Stoppard. “I’ve known him since he was tiny, because he worked with my dad a lot,” she explains. But the series provided an opportunity for the two to reunite professionally. “If everyone else thinks in a straight line, he thinks sideways,” she says. “He’s insanely charismatic and sparky and attractive for a senior gentlemen. But he never, ever brings his intellect into the room—you can feel completely at ease until he drops something that makes you remember he is easily the smartest person you have ever met.”
She may be a habitué of the highfalutin, but Hall is game for tempering her brainy side—with action films, for example. “I had many hesitations about doing these,” she admits. “I had turned some down. But life is too short to be snobby about something you haven’t tried.” When offered a role in May’s Iron Man 3, Hall was feeling indulgent. “Iron Man is a big-budget Hollywood franchise, but it employs actors who historically don’t do those sorts of movies, and are very funny in them,” she says. “I was able to jump out of my comfort zone and still do the stuff I like, which is act with proper actors in interesting situations with witty dialogue.” Because her character, the scientist Maya Hansen is frequently wardrobed in a lab coat, Hall admits that she never learned, say, jujitsu. “I really wish I could say I spent six weeks at the gym,” she says with a smile. “But I didn’t, because I am fundamentally lazy and nobody told me to.”
Hall seems to have had enough fun goofing around with Robert Downey Jr. on set in North Carolina that she may—just may!—have developed a taste for Hollywood behemouths. In August, she’ll appear opposite Eric Bana in the thriller Closed Circuit, and she’s about to start filming Transcendence, which features Johnny Depp as a guy who turns into a supercomputer.
But Hall will require a few palate-cleansers in between, such as French director Patrice Leconte’s romantic drama A Promise, a lo-fi indie she filmed in a small house with two other actors. “It was incredibly leveling and sane to go from making a huge film to a very, very little one,” she says. “I hope I get to spend the rest of my life doing just that.”