The “offensively, profoundly good” performance Regina Hall is obsessed with
There’s long been a successful link in movie-making between comedy and drama, comic actors who are able to channel their inner issues and produce performances that belie the humour they built their careers on. There was Adam Sandler’s pivotal role in Punch Drunk Love. Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And this year, Regina Hall in another Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another.
Anyone who was around in the early 2000s will remember what a big goddamn deal the Scary Movie franchise was, parodying the slasher-thrillers Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer so effectively that they became huge films in their own right, pitch-perfect throwbacks to classic comedies like Airplane! and making hundreds of millions at the box office.
Hall was one of the original cast members alongside young actors like Anna Faris and ended up making four Scary Movie films between 2000 and 2006, reprising her role as Brenda Meeks, and she will do so again in the long-awaited sixth instalment, which is due out in June next year.
In the interim, Hall has secured her standing in Hollywood as a comic actor, appearing in TV shows like Issa Rae’s Insecure and major comedy films like About Last Night with Kevin Hart in 2014 and the Queen Latifah hit Girls Trip with Tiffany Haddish three years later, which brought her much acclaim and earned more than $150million at the box office.
The following year, she appeared in a role that was nowhere near as commercially successful, but that brought her a raft of award nominations and wins. Support the Girls was a comedy about the manager of a Hooters-style restaurant suffering the day from hell. That same year, she starred in a drama called The Hate U Give, showing her versatility, and indeed she took on several more serious roles over the next few years, including the Nicole Kidman thriller series Nine Perfect Strangers.
This year, she put in a fantastic performance as ‘French 75’ activist Deandra in One Battle After Another, tipped for massive Oscar success, and Hall’s love of more serious roles tinged with black comedy is reflected in her choice of favourite movies, where she picked out a 1990 Martin Scorsese mafia classic as a film that had a big influence on her.
Speaking to the Oscars site, Hall said, “Goodfellas is one of my favourite movies. Talking about a cast: A young Ray Liotta, De Niro – who I love – and Lorraine Bracco as Karen! Karen was out of her mind. I loved Karen. Joe Pesci. So good. Like, offensively, profoundly good. I don’t know what to say. And I love the comedy and the brutality. I love the juxtaposition.”
Scorsese has often said that he uses humorous moments in his movies in order to encapsulate the realism in his characters and situations. A famous example comes in Goodfellas when the psychotic Pesci launches into his “Funny like a clown?” moment while terrifying Liotta. There are rumours that Hall will get to work with Scorsese on one of his next movies, which will either be What Happens at Night with Leonardo DiCaprio or the historical serial killer flick The Devil in the White City.
Next year, Hall will appear with Ferrell on Judgment Day, a movie about a prisoner who takes a televised courtroom hostage, and she’s completed filming on Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie with Emma Thompson and Hugh Jackman. She’s also going to be making a sequel to Girls Trip and appearing in a TV series called The Five-Star-Weekend with an ensemble cast including Chloë Sevigny and Timothy Olyphant.
