Rebecca Hall Finds Her Strength in Women on the Brink

What does it mean to lose your mind? For a decade now, the English writer, director, artist, and actor Rebecca Hall has been quietly exploring the edges of sanity and how we collectively define it. There was Christine, the 2016 drama in which she starred as the real-life Florida newswoman Christine Chubbuck, who committed suicide live on air in 1974. Then, in Clare Lizzimore’s off-Broadway hit Animal (2017), Hall took on a woman whose domestic life—and sense of self—broke apart at the seams. The Night House (2020) saw her as a woman grappling with grief in a remote lake home as the supernatural and the bounds of her own mind become blurred, while Resurrection (2022) placed her as a corporate executive disintegrating into paranoia just as her abusive ex showed up. Are these women going crazy, or are they simply responding to the unhinged world around them in the most logical way at hand? “It’s been a ten-year project of playing people on the brink,” says Hall over Zoom from the upstate New York home she shares with her eight-year-old daughter and husband, Morgan Spector. “I swore that I would never play someone descending into madness.”

Hall’s latest role in Janicza Bravo’s The Listeners will, for many viewers—at least at first reaction—sit within this ever-complex and artistically evolving terrain. She stars as Claire, an English teacher living a typical life in the British suburbs until she starts hearing a strange humming noise no one else can. Soon enough, Claire learns she’s not alone in picking up on the unnerving sound. The noise keeps her up at night, unsettles her in what should be calm moments, and leads her to seek out connection with those who understand—and question everything she took as normal. “I don’t think that she goes mad,” says Hall. “I’ve played a lot of people who unravel in a gaslit-induced breakdown—but I didn’t really think of her as one of those.”

The show is based on the 2021 Jordan Tannahill novel of the same name, an intricate, racing meditation on topics ranging from isolation, intimacy, and groupthink to the sometimes fragile line separating the grounded and unhinged and just how we define sanity, desire, and conspiracy in an increasingly insane world. “She’s actually an incredibly normal, relatable person with a straightforward job and a happy family or seemingly happy family—there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about any of that,” Hall notes. “I thought the more simple and the more I played it as myself—how would I respond to this being in this situation—the better.”

The result of this naturalistic approach—made even more so with the use of a range of emotionally charged humming tones developed by sound designer Steve Fanagan and the artist Dev Hynes—is a performance so subtle, so rich with nuance and layered intensity that you begin to question everything Claire agonizes over. It’s an intricately attuned style that has become Hall’s signature. Over the past few decades, the 44-year-old artist has made a name for herself by imbuing each role with incredible sensitivity. Her emotional range is as wide as it is deep, and a certain straight-to-the-heart realism (combined with healthy wit) has become her calling card.

She’s been living in her craft since she was just a few years old. “What would I consider my first role? My first professional role was when I worked for my dad,” shares Hall, recalling her job at ten in The Camomile Lawn, the Channel 4 miniseries directed by her father, Sir Peter Hall, the revered theater director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I don’t think he really entirely wanted me to do it, but he came round after I auditioned several times,” she laughs. “Apparently my dad asked me, ‘Is this something that you’re interested in?’ And at nine years old, I said, ‘Of course.’ I’ve always wanted to act.“

Acting—and storytelling in forms that now also include painting, writing, and directing—became a defining passion for Hall. She remembers picking up plays around the house and imagining each part in her head as she learned to read. Later, she studied English literature at Cambridge before dropping out to give performing a make-it-or-break-it try. “I think from the moment I started doing it, I realized I didn’t have anywhere near as much fun doing anything else,” says Hall. “I love disappearing into other people’s stories and living those thrills of having many life experiences in one life. I’ve always been curious about human behavior since I was tiny. It’s just the thing that gets me into a flow state or gets me excited about life.”

In addition to acting, Hall has been pouring herself into writing, painting and directing, to moving effect. Her debut feature film Passing (2021) was an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two childhood friends who meet again in adulthood, one living as a Black woman and the other passing as white. It looks to her own lineage. Hall’s mother, the esteemed opera singer Maria Ewing, passed. “It was my first film as a screenwriter and as a director, but it was more than that, because it was very linked to an extremely personal psychological unravelling that I was going through at the time and probably will go through for the rest of my life alongside my mother,” says Hall. “I instinctively felt that there must be a lot of psychological baggage that came with hiding an aspect of your identity or feeling shame around an aspect of your family and ancestry. That’s what I grew up with. But I didn’t really understand [the passing experience] until I read that book. It is about how being a Black woman in America can make you go crazy in the 1920s, but it’s also about how being anything other than true to yourself, whatever that may be, will make you go crazy at any time.”

Passing was fifteen years in the making and came together on a shoestring budget over twenty-one days of shooting. “I couldn’t believe it was happening and then it was over and then I was trying to release it,” recalls Hall. “And then at the end of it all, I’m like, There’s a movie that exists in the world that I’m extremely proud of.”

The film also led her to Bravo, whose film Zola Hall loved and who happened to be close friends with Thompson. “It was all very synchronistic and just felt very right,” admits Hall.

Since filming The Listeners, Hall has entered Ryan Murphy’s exuberant universe; made a film with Ira Sachs, The Man I Love, opposite Rami Malek; and starred in “a straight-up very tense action movie that is set in real time,” she shares. She’s also working on getting three scripts off the ground. (Passing won’t be her last writing and directorial offering.) And when it all calms down, she’s spending time with her daughter gardening, painting, and watching classic and cult movies as a family.

She hopes her work gets people thinking and talking in new ways. “I don’t really believe in telling people what any work that I do is about, and I’m a big fan of an interpretable text that is a bit mysterious that you can layer a lot of meaning onto. The more I say anything, the more reductive I immediately make it,” says Hall. “But I do think [The Listeners] hits on something very particular about the current moment. The sheer fact of a woman starting to have an experience of reality that is different to everyone else’s immediately isolates her from her community. It becomes a piece about what isolation does and how beliefs are formed inside of that and how strong they can be...But there’s a flip side to that: she’s a woman who’s not been asking for more. She enters the uncanny valley because suddenly her reality looks different and she suddenly realizes that she’s wanted a whole lot more out of life. There’s a good reading and a bad reading of the heart.”

The Listeners is now streaming on Starz.