GLASS battled a five-hour time difference and a telephone delay to grab half an hour with actor, Rebecca Hall. Born in London in 1982, she made her first professional appearance at the age of ten in The Camomile Lawn – a television series directed by her father, influential theatre director Sir Peter Hall, who passed away in September. Her mother is Maria Ewing, a noted American opera singer. Having dropped out of the University of Cambridge two years into an English degree to pursue acting, she began her movie career in British films like Starter for Ten and The Prestige, gaining further recognition at the age of 26 with Woody Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Never one to shy away from challenging roles – she was nominated for a clutch of awards for her performance as suicidal newsreader Christine Chubbuck in 2016’s Christine – Hall has recently taken on the part of Elizabeth Marston, the wife of Wonder Woman creator William Marston, in Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It charts an illicit ménage à trois between the two Marstons and psychology student Olive Byrne, and how it informed the creation of Marston’s female superhero.
Rebecca Hall. Photograph: Ssam Kim
I know you’ve already gone on the record about Harvey Weinstein, so I won’t ask about him. But how different are things in the UK? Are similar things to Weinstein and Jimmy Savile going on in the UK film industry?
Yes, I think it’s about the same. And I think it goes beyond [the film industry]. I have friends who work in all walks of life in England and I am hard pressed to come across a female friend who hasn’t got a story of something. And that doesn’t seem to be exclusive of the country that they are living in.
I can only hope that this is a tipping point and that we move from this moment into a more practical discussion that actually changes things. I am hopeful, in a strange way; I suppose we have been here before, but certainly in the movie industry this feels different.
There’s been a proliferation of films trying to redress the gender balance of history (Hidden Figures,Professor Marston) as well as films rewriting gender tropes (Wonder Woman, Ghostbusters 2). Do you think this is led by a genuine desire to redress the imbalance?
With Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, it was an independent film made in 25 days, and the woman that made it has, by anyone’s standards, is what you would call a voice that doesn’t get heard very often. She is a gay woman of colour making a film that she’s been trying to get made for eight years.
But at the heart of it, it’s quite uncommercial: it’s asking you to accept, on standard romantic movie terms, a ménage à trois. Which isn’t so standard, and historically in film has been treated with an air of transgression or otherness or “doomed-ness”. I think it is quite unusual and brave, and it doesn’t feel to me like it came out of a machine, or got made for any [mercenary] reason.
Rebecca Hall. Photograph: Ssam Kim
I didn’t mean to single out Professor Marston – I was referring to a more general trend.
I don’t think [this trend] is calculated. I don’t think that there are people sitting in offices thinking, “Do you know what I think will sell tickets? Movies about women.” They have let a couple of films through the net, and have thought, “Maybe these will work,” and they have, so now they are forced to look at that and say, “Maybe we should make more of those.” Which is a good thing. I would love to give them more credit, but I don’t think I will.
Professor Marston has been marketed as a biographical film, but William Marston’s granddaughter Christie claims the family wasn’t contacted, and events have been somewhat fictionalised. What do you make of films using real, recent people to tell a fictionalised story?
I think it’s very complicated; I have a lot of compassion for the family and really wish that Christie Marston would see the movie, because I think she would have a different perspective if she saw it.
I think Angela’s decision to not talk to the family was a valid one. She had information that she had collected and researched very carefully. It’s a complicated issue when it comes to a story that was deeply secretive, and hidden especially from family members. What Angela did was take the fact that these two women stayed together 38 years after this man died, and interpret it how she wanted. There was plenty of information that she had, to support the claims that she made.
Some of it is a hopeful and positive telling of the story; it is probably more complicated in reality. My feelings on it ethically – real stories and history – are complicated; there are many, many ways to interpret them and it is very difficult to find actual truth with anything. And film is film. To take the spirit, the idea of something, and to do it justice in a warm way – I think Angela does. It always felt well intentioned to me, so I didn’t worry about it.
Rebecca Hall. Photograph: Ssam Kim
You’ve described yourself as an “accent nerd” before. How did you develop Elizabeth’s unplaceable T.S. Eliotesque twang?
I’m glad you couldn’t place it. I didn’t want it to be placed. When I was doing a little research, I found out that Elizabeth Marston was born on the Isle of Man and then moved to Boston, [but] a lot of people say she never lost her Isle of Man accent. When I started to try to understand what an Isle of Man accent was, I fell down a rabbit hole; it is incredibly difficult to place. If there were such a thing as estuary northern English, it sort of sounds like that. But it’s quite mild, really; certainly in the 1920s it would have been very different. I thought, “What if that accent was transposed to academic Boston, which [also] has a very specific accent?”
So if you really listen, occasionally you can hear some northern English or Isle of Man sounds. There is a heightened posh American, almost, that’s in there too. It’s an accent that I created for her, and it sort of exists in a vacuum. The fact that you couldn’t place it means that I did it right.
Both Elizabeth and Olive end up with their fellas after the fellas pursue them rather persistently. Your character, for instance, rejected William’s marriage proposals until – well, until she didn’t. But doesn’t that vindicate the men’s persistence? How might you square that with “no means no”?
I think that is a very specific reading of the movie. [Laughs.] I think the movie deals with the question of consent very well. Because even when the characters are being coerced or, to use Martin’s language, “induced” into doing things, they get called upon it eventually. Then the question “Is this what you really want?” becomes prominent, again and again and again. There is no moment where one of the three people doesn’t entirely check with the other before doing something.
I think Angela handles that really successfully with the lie detector, turning it into an erotic game around the notion of consent. It’s something she really thinks about in the film. We talked about it on set – she didn’t want any of the erotic elements of the movie to be light. It had to be a consensual act between three people who are growing up and finding out what their sexuality is.
Do you feel more at home on stage or on screen?
I don’t feel more at home on either one – I really love doing both. I can’t imagine not doing one ever again. On balance, I don’t know. I was brought up a creature of the theatre, I understand it. It’s in my bones I suppose. But I think there’s something in me that just loves movies, and loves being on movie sets. So yeah, I don’t have a preference
Did Christine, for which you were multi-award-nominated, lead to a change in the kind of role you get offered?
No, it hasn’t really. I think people came to see that quite late. People are just seeing it now; it got released on Netflix not that long ago. It is strange how that works, what gets people [into] the cinema. I think Christine was a hard sell; people thought, “Don’t really wanna go and see that,” but the truth is that it is quite a rewarding watch. I think word of mouth is finally working, a year after the fact. [But] in movie business terms, it wasn’t a slam dunk of success, or a “here come all the offers” moment.
Rebecca Hall. Photograph: Ssam Kim
Which of your own performances are you most proud of or happy with?
Christine, because it was hard, and it was difficult to go there. I did what I wanted to do, and I feel proud of that. I’m also pretty proud of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and I hope that people go and see it.
I don’t know … I don’t spend a lot of time obsessing about what I’m proud of and what I’m not proud of. There are ones that I think worked, and ones that I think haven’t quite worked. This profession is geared up for disappointment if you spend too much time dwelling on the successes and failures of every individual thing, and ultimately you only have the experience itself. It’s better to dwell on that than on the outcome, I guess.
What’s the first stage or screen performance you saw that really brought home the power of acting?
[Thinks awhile] I’ve had a lot of those experiences. I remember being completed bowled over by seeing Waiting for Godot as opposed to reading it, and suddenly understanding it. If I’m being completely honest, the first time would probably have been my mother in Salomé. It was an extraordinary performance I saw a lot when I was a kid; it never ceased to frighten and move me.
Did being Sir Peter Hall’s daughter change the way you work with directors? Do you interact with them differently from how other actors do, or have a better understanding of what they need?
No, I don’t think so. I respect that every director is different and has a different way of working. And I try to accommodate that, as I think it’s important to work out what their vision is and do your best to get it done.
I think I probably have a greater understanding of some of the director’s vulnerability. My father would always talk about when he asked an actor to do a part and they would turn him down – that rejection is quite painful. And I think as actors we spend so much of our time dealing with rejection, and not getting roles, and things not turning out, and the horribly competitive nature of this business, that we don’t really think that other people suffer from that situation. So I think I have that perspective on directors – that they are often put in that position of feeling rejected. Not to the extent that actors are, but nonetheless, it’s interesting.
by Arjun Sajip
From the Glass Archive – Glass Magazine, Decade, Issue 32, Winter 2017
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Photographer: Ssam Kim
Styling: Sara Paulsen
Make-up: STEPHEN SOLLITTO at TMGLA using CHANTECAILLE
Hair: JONE D at FORWARD ARTISTS using TRESEMMÉ
Manicure: PILAR NOIRE using CHANEL Le Vemis in Pirate
Photo assistant: DAVID PAUL
Special thanks: MR. C BEVERLY HILLS LOS ANGELES
Talent: Rebecca Hall
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