Rebecca Hall made her New York stage début, in 2005, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, playing Rosalind in “As You Like It,” and if you were lucky enough to see her in the role it is unlikely that you have forgotten the experience. Hall, who was twenty-three at the time, exquisitely conveyed the sometimes tremulous combination of knowingness and naïveté that characterizes Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most winning comic heroine. Hall’s performance felt perfectly naturalistic—her Rosalind was absolutely real and present—and, at the same time, her delivery showed an adept grasp of Shakespearean verse: if you knew and loved Rosalind’s lines, it was thrilling to hear the subtlety with which Hall delivered them. It also did not hurt that Hall looked perfect for the part: like Rosalind, Hall is “more than common tall,” which meant that she was able to stand eye to eye and equal to equal with Orlando, her eventual beloved, played by a promising newcomer named Dan Stevens.
The production also showed the mastery of its director, Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the former head of London’s National Theatre, and Rebecca Hall’s father. Given Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the relations between fathers and their offspring, and with the complicated questions of lineage and inheritance, the casting choice looked less like nepotism and more like a fruitful artistic convergence. “My father was a real Shakespearean fascist, in that he had a view about how it should be done, in terms of how you speak the verse,” Hall recalled recently. “But, at the same time, he taught me that, instead of being restrictive, understanding how to play the verse gives up the meaning. Like, if you have a breath at the end of a line and the sentence isn’t complete, then you’ve got to find a reason why there’s a pause for thought there. And your reason is what gives you interpretation. So within those parameters, he gave me complete freedom.” Hall’s key to unlocking the character of Rosalind was in identifying the character’s trepidation—the fear experienced by someone who is cognizant of the demands entailed by the complexity of adult love, and finds herself on the brink of it for the first time. “Isn’t that, on some level, the experience of first love, and isn’t that what the whole play is about—how terrifying it all is?” Hall said.
More than a dozen years after that arrival in Brooklyn, Hall, who turned thirty-five this spring, is now a full-time resident of the borough: she lives in Brooklyn Heights, with the actor Morgan Spector, her husband of nearly two years, and the couple’s two cats, whom Hall can sometimes be seen walking with along the neighborhood’s leafy streets. One of them is leash-trained, and will pad down the sidewalk wearing a harness. The other prefers to be carried in a Japanese hoodie designed specifically for toting a pet, with a kangaroo pouch in front and pointy ears on the hood—a gift from Stevens, who is now a Brooklyn neighbor. “I’m very aware that it’s sort of an eccentric thing to do, and I love the eccentricity of it,” Hall told me. Hall and I spoke not in Brooklyn but sequestered in the aseptic luxury of a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Manhattan—rented for the day by the producers of “The Dinner,” a promising-on-paper, forgettable-in-actuality movie that was released last month. Hall was awaiting a “glam squad”—movie parlance for a hair-and-makeup team—to prepare her for television interviews later that afternoon.
She was not, it is worth pointing out, entirely lacking in glamour even before the squad arrived, as she poured the fussy cucumber-flavored bottled water with which the room had been supplied, made an ironical face, and sat cross-legged on the couch in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Hall has become best known to American audiences not for her work on the stage but on the screen—the kind of work that gets you a glam squad and a Manhattan suite for the afternoon. (Though not, as Hall noted with some chagrin, for an overnight stay). Last year, she won acclaim for her performance in the title role in “Christine,” a drama about Christine Chubbuck, the television reporter who took her own life on camera, in 1974. She was nominated for a Golden Globe, in 2008, for her winning turn in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Woody Allen’s Catalan comedy. In between, she’s appeared in a wide variety of roles, in movies ranging from excellent (“Frost/Nixon,” in which she played Caroline Cushing, David Frost’s girlfriend) to mediocre (like “Transcendence,” in which she played the wife of an artificial-intelligence expert enacted by Johnny Depp). Writing in the Times of her performance, Manohla Dargis called Hall “one of those actresses who always seem smart even in dumb roles.” Hall acknowledges the hazards of casting. “It’s not easy to get roles that are satisfying,” she said. “And, even when you get ones that you think are going to be satisfying, there is no guarantee that they are going to continue to be satisfying throughout the film, and indeed then when you see the film.”
This month, she returns to the New York stage—a perhaps slightly more predictable environment—in a production of a new play, “Animal,” by the British writer Clare Lizzimore. It would be spoiling the plot to say much more than that Hall plays a woman who fears she may be losing her mind. It’s a demanding role: Hall is onstage for the entirety of its ninety-minute length, and the part requires her to course along a wide emotional range, from playfulness to supplication to anger. It’s the first time that Hall has performed in New York since 2014, when she made her Broadway début, in a revival of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal.” (She met Spector in that production; he played her lover.) “Animal” is, she says, “a short, sharp shock of a play.” When we spoke, she was about to go into rehearsals. “She’s a very idiosyncratic character,” Hall went on. “She is very mentally dexterous, and she is also full of rage, and it is also a real expression of female rage, which I find quite potent. I think it’s going to be hard.”
Hall grew up in the theatre, often quite literally. Her mother, Maria Ewing, is an internationally known opera singer. When Hall was born, her father had been the director of Britain’s National Theatre for almost a decade, overseeing its controversial move from the Old Vic into its current home, on London’s South Bank. “There’s a very funny picture of my father trying to do what looks like change my nappy on the desk of the National Theatre, while being on the phone dealing with all that—the strikes, and all the criticism,” Hall said. Sir Peter, who is eighty-six, is now ailing from dementia. To celebrate his eightieth birthday, the National invited him to direct “Twelfth Night,” in which Rebecca took the role of Viola. While Hall had strenuously tried to be just another actor for her father in “As You Like It,” performing in his “Twelfth Night” was a very different story. “That was totally about doing something that I knew he really wanted to do, and it was very emotional as a result,” she said. The usual question that might be asked of the creative person—did you always know you wanted to do this?—does not even apply in Hall’s case. “I know that’s the privilege of the family I was born into,” she said. “It’s not a question of ‘Oh, I would really love to do that,’ it’s more a question of ‘I am one of those people. I am that, too, so I am going to do that, too.’ The relationship to the dream is much more simple.”
As a child, Hall lived in the shadow of her parents’ lives on the stage. “I remember being taken to dinner parties when I was very small, and being allowed to stay up very late just to sit and listen to people,” she said. “I remember sitting in rehearsal rooms and going to performances, and I remember noticing the way people looked at my father and mother, and noticing there was a sort of a level of importance or gravitas—that the energy changed when they walked into the room.” She was frequently backstage when her mother was performing. “I often had free rein when she was onstage, and if I was in the theatre I would run around in the foyers and then run into the auditorium and peek to see where they were,” she said.
Hall’s parents divorced when she was seven or eight, but not before Sir Peter had directed Ewing in a daring production of “Salome,” a role Ewing would continue to perform for a decade. “I couldn’t not watch the last three minutes of that, where she gets smashed to death,” Hall told me. “The way it was choreographed was that soldiers would all run together in a circle, and she would be in the middle, and she would jump up through the middle and contort her body, so it looked precisely like she was being crushed to death. Every night, I forced myself to watch. You know the way you have childlike superstitions: if I don’t watch it, that would be the moment when she actually gets hurt.” The production was also notable for the fact that Ewing’s Dance of the Seven Veils ended in complete nudity: “She said it would be vulgar if you put on a bikini, and that what is not vulgar is the female form.”
Hall’s upbringing was bohemian and somewhat chaotic: “Like, how’s she getting to school, has she been to the dentist, has she done her homework—that kind of stuff. I don’t think either of my parents ever asked me that,” she said. Her older siblings—there were four of them, from Peter Hall’s two earlier marriages—had all gone to arty boarding schools, but, because Roedean was conveniently located close to her mother’s home, Hall went at the age of fifteen to that institution, favored by aristocrats and the conservative élite. Ultimately, she became head girl. The school “was very sure of its place in raising young girls to go out and be great career women; and then there was this other side of it,” she recalled. One Speech Day—an annual end-of-year ceremony, with distinguished guests and prizes for the best students—a teacher stopped Hall in the corridor. “She said, ‘You’ve got to stop looking so sloppy, pull your socks up. This will be the most important day of your life, apart from your wedding day.’ ” Other teachers gave better advice that still resonates, particularly about the need to read ambitiously. “There was one who said, ‘There is nothing wrong with being pretentious. Pretentious is often the place you have to start if you want to get somewhere else,’ ” Hall said.
Surrounded by titled young ladies, Hall was something of a class oddity. Though her father was knighted in the nineteen-seventies, for his services to the theatre, he came from more humble circumstances: his own father was a stationmaster. Her mother grew up in a working-class family in Detroit, discovering her gift for opera by singing along as her father played piano. Ewing’s father, a doorman at a hotel, was African-American and possibly Sioux, and married to a woman of Dutch descent; it appears that he passed as white when Hall’s mother was a girl, living in a working-class white neighborhood. (He died when Hall’s mother was sixteen.) “She catapulted herself out of a biracial, impoverished, confusing situation, into this high-art world, as my father did on some level,” Hall said. “And I sort of feel that in me. Neither of them fit into some sort of class mold. When I did hang out with these people who did operate in those worlds, I did feel slightly observational. I don’t know where me and my family fit in.”
In her teens, Hall flirted with not being an actor—she thought of following a career in the visual arts, and remains an adept painter, as is occasionally evidenced by her Instagram feed. “My husband laughs at me, because I have to be doing several things to incubate one thing,” she said. “There’s a sort of trail between my desk, where I think about things, and the piano, where there will be some open music, and another area, where I will have some drawing up, and I will dock between those three things.” But there was never really any doubt that she would act. Hall did not go to drama school: she already knew how a rehearsal room worked, and needed no help finding an agent or making contacts in the world of the theatre. She’d already worked as a professional actor, at the age of ten, in a television drama, “The Camomile Lawn,” which her father directed. “And I didn’t want to be given a system of coping mechanisms to deal with how awful it all is,” she said. “My father was a huge influence in that respect. He always said to me, ‘If you want to be a good actor, acting holds everything.’ It’s the art form of interpreting human behavior. So one of the things that will strengthen that ability to do that is engaging with your mind. That means reading books, that means looking at art, that means interpreting the world analytically and having an analytic involvement with life.”
She enrolled at Cambridge University to study English Literature, in which she had specialized in high school. As a wedding gift, she gave Spector a trousseau of canonical British books that he had never had occasion to read: “The End of the Affair,” “Sons and Lovers,” “The Rainbow,” “Persuasion,” and George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”—the fact that he had failed to read the last, she said with a laugh, “nearly derailed my marriage.” When I told Hall that she would have been the ideal actress to play Dorothea Brooke, the serious, ardent heroine of “Middlemarch,” she told me I am not the only one with that notion: Sam Mendes, with whom she was in a relationship for several years before marrying Spector, had hoped to adapt the novel to the screen. There had even been a script that she’d read, but for one reason or another it never came together. “I went through my twenties praying that someone would make a ‘Middlemarch’ film,” she said. “And now I am too old, probably. I would have loved it.” (Mendes did direct her onstage, in “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Winter’s Tale,” which played in an ambitious double bill at the Old Vic in London, and at BAM, in 2009.)
At Cambridge, Hall spent much of her time in student theatrical productions—she first met Dan Stevens when she was cast opposite him in “Macbeth”—but left Cambridge two years into her three-year degree. “The trajectory of ‘head girl from Roedean School, degree from Cambridge’ suddenly felt really undesirable,” she said. “I thought, If I can buck this and walk away from this, then, A), I will have no other option—that I will have to be an actor, in other words. And B), I won’t have a sort of shorthand calling card that proves my intelligence. I thought that, if I have the strength to walk away from this thing that everybody wants, and is so wonderful, maybe I will have the strength to make those bold decisions for the rest of my life.” Not having a Cambridge degree, she says, provides her with an impetus to keep learning. It leaves her with something still to prove.
These days, Hall is attempting to expand her artistic horizons: “I feel I am coming into my own in lots of ways, and that I can step beyond just doing the acting, and feeling more confident showing the world that I can write, and thinking about directing,” she says. She is working on an original script, and has recently tried to write a play. She’s also adapted as a screenplay the novella “Passing,” by Nella Larsen, the Harlem Renaissance writer, and is shopping it around with the hope of directing it, in part as a way of exploring her maternal grandfather’s life and her own racial heritage. “Spending any time in this country, and living here, you just think, This question of race is so integral to the very heart and soul of everything this country is built upon,” she says. “It’s huge. And so I find myself thinking about it increasingly and wanting to engage with that history, whatever it is.” She expresses a perhaps surprising desire to be on the show “Who Do You Think You Are?,” in which celebrities have their genes publicly analyzed. “It seems like a fascinating story that doesn’t benefit from being hidden,” she says.
Marriage has granted her a kind of peace of mind, she says, and an expansion of her creative capacities. As a “well-educated child of divorce,” she thought that she would never marry; she certainly thought she would never marry another actor. “And then it came up, and it felt, like, absolutely that’s what I want,” she said. “If you are born of things that are disparate, and you are a bit nomadic and your life is a hodge-podge of beautiful, loving chaos, you can end up going through a large chunk of your life thinking that’s what you need, or that is what makes you comfortable. And I feel really lucky that I had some sort of realization that, actually, I needed an anchor. And I got married, and I realized this is what I have been craving.”
Spector plays Hall’s husband in “Animal,” and before the show started previews, at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s stage on Sixteenth Street, the company rehearsed a few blocks away, on an upper floor of the Google building.* I stopped by one afternoon to watch them work. At first, Spector, who is bearded, with dark curly hair and saturnine features, was doing stretches on the floor in a corner, while Hall worked on a scene with another actor. Then they worked on a scene together: an intense confrontation, in which Hall was fey and fickle and furious by turns, while Spector stood on in helpless frustration. When a break was called, they leaned fondly against each other for a moment.
For the role, Hall had to switch between high heels and flat shoes. I had noticed when we’d talked in the hotel suite that on her ankle is a small tattoo: an inscription, she explained, in her own handwriting. It reads, “This above all:”—a fragment of a line from “Hamlet,” spoken by Polonius, the pedantic adviser to the King, to his son, Laertes. (The rest of the line is more famous: “To thine own self be true.”) “It’s a useful reminder for me for a lot of reasons,” Hall told me later, in an e-mail. The ink has blurred, and Hall said that she has thought of having it removed and redone. “Tattoos seem to be a good exercise in living with regret,” she said. “But I love them, actually. I love the regret factor, too.”
*This article has been updated to include the correct location of the Atlantic Theatre Company stage where “Animal” is in performance.
