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The Amazing Rebecca Hall

There are certain actors and actresses whose names in the credits immediately make me more interested in whatever I'm about to watch. I don't really need to know the plot. I don't need to know who directed it. I don't necessarily need to know whether the movie is any good. If Rebecca Hall is in it, I'm interested.


I think Rebecca Hall is one of the best actresses on the planet.


She's one of those performers who brings intelligence, gravity and credibility to everything she does, whether she's starring in a tiny independent drama, appearing in some dark psychological horror movie, wandering around inside a gigantic Godzilla sequel, working with a major filmmaker, doing a television miniseries or showing up for three scenes in a movie that otherwise doesn't work. Rebecca Hall is almost always good. Actually, she's usually great.


With Hall appearing in the new movie Onslaught, where she has a relatively small and pretty strange supporting role but still manages to be one of the most interesting things in the movie, I thought this would be a good time to look back at her remarkable career and pick my ten favorite Rebecca Hall film performances.


And she's had one hell of a career.


Rebecca Maria Hall was born in London in 1982 into an extraordinary artistic family. Her father was Sir Peter Hall, one of the most important British theater directors of the twentieth century and the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.


Her mother was the acclaimed American opera singer Maria Ewing. So performance, theater, music and art were basically part of the atmosphere from the beginning.


Hall first appeared on screen when she was just ten years old in the television adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, directed by her father. She later studied English literature at Cambridge, became heavily involved in student theater, started her own theater company and eventually left school before finishing her degree because acting had clearly become the direction her life was taking.


And before she became a movie star, she was already a serious stage actress.


Her professional stage debut came in her father's production of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, and she won the Ian Charleson Award for that performance. She continued working extensively in theater, doing Shakespeare, Chekhov and other major classical work, eventually performing on Broadway as well.


That background matters when you watch her.


Rebecca Hall doesn't perform like somebody who simply learned how to hit a mark and say dialogue into a camera. There's an enormous amount going on underneath everything she does. She listens. She reacts. She can remain completely still and somehow communicate three conflicting emotions at once.


And because of that classical training, she can handle complicated language and difficult psychological material without making it feel theatrical.


Her first feature was Starter for 10 in 2006, and that same year she appeared in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. I'm not nearly as enamored with that movie as a lot of people are (I find plenty of Nolan's work overly calculated and pretentious) but Hall is terrific in it. She plays Sarah, the wife caught inside this increasingly obsessive and destructive world of competing magicians, and she gives the movie an emotional reality that it desperately needs.


Then came Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2008, and that's really the first time I remember thinking: Who the hell is this woman?


Woody Allen's movie has Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson, three enormously famous performers who were already established stars. Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for the movie. And yet when I saw it, the person who really stayed with me was Rebecca Hall.


She plays Vicky, one of two American women spending the summer in Barcelona who become involved with Bardem's artist character and his extraordinarily volatile ex-wife, played by Cruz.


Hall has to be the grounded presence inside a movie filled with very large personalities, and she completely holds the screen with them. She's smart, funny, confused, restrained and quietly emotional, and she never feels like the fourth person in a movie with three stars. She belongs there.


From that point forward, she just kept showing up and being great.


She appeared in Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon. She was excellent in Ben Affleck's The Town, giving that movie considerably more emotional weight than most crime thrillers bother to give their female characters.


She's done comedy. She's done science fiction. She's done superhero movies like Iron Man 3. She appeared in Steven Spielberg's The BFG. She was in Transcendence.


She's been in the gigantic MonsterVerse movies Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and even in those enormous movies where the primary attraction is watching giant monsters beat the hell out of each other, Rebecca Hall somehow manages to create an actual person.


That's one of her gifts. She never seems embarrassed by material. If she's appearing opposite Godzilla, she commits to Godzilla. If she's starring in some deeply disturbing psychological nightmare, she commits to that. If she's doing comedy, she's funny.


And if the movie itself isn't particularly good, she still somehow finds something worthwhile to play.


Her television work has been equally impressive. She won a BAFTA for Red Riding: 1974, received another BAFTA nomination for Parade's End, and has continued to show up in really interesting streaming and television projects.


She was terrific in The Listeners, which gave her another deeply complicated character to explore. She appeared on Horace and Pete, showed up in The Studio, and she continues to move back and forth between film, television and streaming without treating any of those forms as somehow more important than the others.


But for this list I'm sticking specifically to movies. Because some of Rebecca Hall's film performances are extraordinary.


The obvious one is Christine.


In 2016 she played real-life television journalist Christine Chubbuck, who died by suicide during a live broadcast in 1974. That's incredibly difficult material, and Hall's performance is astonishing. She never turns Christine into a symbol or a case study. She makes her complicated, difficult, lonely, ambitious, wounded and completely human.


It is one of those performances where you become aware of how much work an actor can do without visibly showing you the work. Hall should have received far more awards attention for Christine than she did.


Then there's The Night House, which I think contains one of the best performances in any horror movie of the last several decades.


Hall plays Beth, a woman whose husband has died by suicide and who begins discovering increasingly disturbing things about him while living alone in the lakeside house he built for them. The movie becomes supernatural and frightening, but what makes it work is Hall's performance.


Because underneath all the supernatural stuff, The Night House is about grief.


It's about losing somebody and discovering that perhaps you never completely knew them. It's about death. It's about the possibility of nothingness. It's about the terrifying thought that there may simply be nothing waiting for us after this.


Hall takes all of that incredibly heavy material and makes it emotionally immediate. She's heartbreaking, angry, sarcastic, frightened and damaged, sometimes within the same scene. It's a spectacular performance.


And then there's Resurrection. Jesus Christ, that movie.


Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth essentially perform a psychological duel in that film, with Hall playing a successful woman whose life begins collapsing when a man from her abusive past suddenly reappears.


For long stretches it feels like an intense two-person psychological thriller, and then the movie becomes increasingly disturbing until eventually reaching one of the craziest, grossest and most completely insane final stretches I've seen in a movie in years.


And somehow Rebecca Hall grounds it. That's something she does better than almost anybody. Give her outrageous material and she makes it believable. Give her supernatural material and she finds the emotional truth. Give her body horror and she finds the psychology underneath it.


She seems particularly drawn to damaged characters, to women dealing with trauma, grief, isolation, obsession, fear, broken relationships or some enormous psychological wound they're desperately trying to hide from the rest of the world.


And maybe that's one of the reasons I respond to her work so strongly. She likes the dark stuff.


She isn't afraid of uncomfortable material. She takes risks. She doesn't appear particularly interested in protecting some glamorous movie-star image. She wants complicated characters, and complicated characters aren't always likable or stable or easy to understand.


But she also has warmth and humor.


She's very funny when she wants to be. She can bring lightness into very dark movies, and that's incredibly important because otherwise those films become unbearable. Even when she's playing somebody damaged or emotionally exhausted, there's usually some spark of wit or intelligence underneath the pain.


And then Rebecca Hall did something else that made me admire her even more. She became a filmmaker.


In 2021 she wrote, directed and co-produced Passing, adapted from Nella Larsen's 1929 novel. The movie, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, is an elegant, beautifully controlled piece of filmmaking about race, identity, repression and the complicated psychological consequences of passing as white.


The material was deeply personal for Hall because of her own family history. Her maternal grandfather had identified himself publicly in ways that obscured his Black ancestry, and Hall later learned more about that side of her family, including the history of her great-grandfather, who had been born into slavery and later became a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s Black community.


So Passing wasn't simply an actress deciding she wanted to direct something. There was a real connection to the material. And the movie proved that the intelligence we had been watching in her performances for years translated behind the camera.


Passing is restrained, visually sophisticated and very confident filmmaking. Hall received BAFTA nominations for her work, and I hope she continues directing because she clearly has something to say as a filmmaker.


That's what makes Rebecca Hall such an exciting artist. She's not simply a reliable actress. She's curious. She's adventurous. She's willing to move between gigantic commercial movies and tiny independent films.


She can appear in a Godzilla movie and then turn around and make a psychologically complicated period drama. She can star in a horror movie, produce something challenging, direct something personal and then show up in a strange little supporting role where she completely steals the movie.


Even in something like Onslaught, where the part isn't particularly substantial and the movie itself doesn't do much for me, Rebecca Hall walks into a scene and suddenly everything feels more interesting.


That's star power, but it's also craft.


There's always thought behind what she's doing. There is always something happening behind her eyes. And after following her work for nearly two decades now, I've reached the point where Rebecca Hall's name in the credits is enough for me.


I'm there.


So I've gone through her film career and picked the ten performances that have stayed with me the most. Some are leading roles, some are supporting roles, some come from huge studio movies and some come from strange, dark independent films.


And because this is about performances rather than ranking one piece of acting against another, I'm presenting these in no particular order.



TOP 10 REBECCA HALL MOVIE PERFORMANCES (in random order):















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