Rebecca Hall is off and running around the world
Actress Rebecca Hall is seen Aug. 23 at the Bluebird Restaurant
in London. Hall, daughter of a theater director and an opera singer,
will star in Ben Affleck's latest film "The Town" scheduled to open in
theaters Sept. 17.
New York Times
New York Times
Published: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 8:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 4:31 p.m.
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.”
