Monster mash
FROM THE LAND OF GIANT GORILLAS TO INTENSE DRAMAS, IT’S BEEN A BUSY YEAR FOR REBECCA HALL
For an action movie about two giant monsters, there was an awful lot of levity when Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens made their Godzilla and King Kong movie in Australia these past few months.
The Vicky Cristina Barcelona star and the Downton Abby actor have been friends – and were former flatmates – since they met at university more than 20 years ago, and have performed together often since, including on the 2017 comedy-drama Permission.
But the fact that they were together again doing a big-budget blockbuster on the other side of the world led to a few incredulous discussions about how the hell they both went from Cambridge’s prestigious Marlowe stage society to mixing it with an oversized ape and a rampaging reptile.
“Yeah, we’ve had a couple of those conversations,” admits Hall with a laugh over Zoom from her New York home, still battling jet lag from her stint shooting on the Gold Coast.
“It’s been lucky that we’ve had so many opportunities to work together but yes, I think the combination of me, Dan and Brian (Tyree Henry) it was just a recipe for giggling disaster. I mean, it was hysterical, actually, like really wecould-barely-hold-it-together hysterical, but I think that probably translates into quite a lot of fun.”
Hall also shot the previous Godzilla V Kong on the Gold Coast – her daughter learned how to walk there on that film and learned how to swim there on this one – and says she now has a special fondness for that stretch of Aussie coastline, having spent a “shocking amount of time there”. She says she was excited to return to her role as anthropological linguist and Kong whisperer Dr Ilene Andrews, and while she can’t say how the new film will top its predecessor (“I’m NDAed out the wazoo”), she guarantees it will.
“I had such a good time on the last one and I loved everyone involved in it,” she says. “I loved (director) Adam Wingard – he’s such an eccentric visionary in terms of a filmmaker and I really enjoy just being a part of his neon inflected universe.
“The people in it are great, the
people behind it are great. I was really excited to get to work with Brian Tyree Henry, who I didn’t get to work with on the last one and this time, we have a lot of stuff together so that was great.” Hall’s time in the sun also made a nice change from a couple of very intense dramas as well as the all-consuming task of writing, directing and producing her first film, last year’s acclaimed Passing. Her four months on the effectsheavy, ensemble cast creature feature could not have provided more of a stark contrast to her new psychological thriller Resurrection, which was shot in just 20 days and features a towering, riveting performance by Hall in just about every scene.
In it, Hall plays Margaret, a highlycapable, professionally-driven single mother with a daughter on the cusp of adulthood and about to leave for college. Her world is turned upside down when an abusive figure from her past (played by a creepy Tim Roth) suddenly reappears and slowly starts to insinuate himself back into her life. The dark drama explores themes of coercive control, gaslighting and parental fear, and Hall thinks motherhood made her react to it – and invest in it – in a way that she might not have done earlier in her career.
“I’d be really interested to chat to my younger, premotherhood self as to whether it would have responded to this script in the same way, because I do think one of the things that really hooked me in about it is how viscerally it gets to the core of the existential terror of being a parent,” she says.
“Yes, of course, there’s the big horror of ‘I’ve got to keep this thing alive, and it’s my responsibility to keep it safe’. And that’s really scary because you can’t really be responsible for keeping anything safe at a certain point. But also, it’s dealing with the terror of when a child leaves home. It’s not for nothing that Margaret’s child is 18 and about to walk out the door. And there is a reading of it that she’s unravelling because of that.”
Coming off the back of Resurrection and last year’s The
Night House, Hall says she has no idea why she’s so drawn to dark, intense, demanding roles of late but concedes she might be responding to the fact “society seems to be processing a lot of trauma right now”. “I think I am sniffing out something in the culture that I’m responding to that feels like I want to mine for some reason,” she says. “I’ll probably look back on this all in a certain amount of years and understand exactly why I was so obsessed with playing these types of women.” But regardless of how allconsuming any given role is, Hall says she has learned to check her character at the door when she leaves for the day.
“Being a parent means you have got to snap out of it,” she says. “I’m very rigorous about this and I refuse. I’ve been haunted by this in my past and I’ve grown up enough now to realise that it does not serve me as an actor to take it home and to let it eat away at my soul.” Resurrection will be available to buy or rent on all major digital platforms on November 30.