“I don’t know where I got the balls”: Rebecca Hall campaigned for a role she believed was destined for her
Rebecca Hall has had to do some unorthodox campaigning to get the right film roles.
Hall is one of the many actors with a background in theatre who have tried to break into the film scene and experienced the inherent difficulties of that transition. Her struggle was certainly not out of lack of trying, but some of her ambitious endeavours ended up not yielding her the success that she may have imagined.
Hall had starred in Starter for 10 alongside James McAvoy, and while it was a crowd-pleasing hit in the United Kingdom, it didn’t become the type of crossover success in the United States that would have made Hall seem more desirable to American casting agents.
Even though she managed to score a leading role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, expecting to receive the career boost that many female stars of Woody Allen films receive, all the attention seemed to go to Penélope Cruz, who ended up winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
It’s hard not to feel sympathetic for Hall, who is a terrific actor, because she has picked good projects and shown a tremendous amount of range. When not even working with Ron Howard and Christopher Nolan was enough to get her a true breakout, she took to personally campaigning to cinch a role that she wanted.
Stephen Frears may not be a household name in the same way that Nolan, Howard, or Allen are, but he’s responsible for more than a few masterpieces over the course of the last few decades, including High Fidelity, The Grifters, The Hit, and Dangerous Liaisons. Hall, who is British, actively sought out a role in his romantic comedy Lay the Favourite, despite the fact that the script had expressly called for an American actor.
“He didn’t want to read anyone who was not American for the part, but I told him that I was, I am, half American, I have an American passport,” she said, “I think you just feel like you. I had Halloween and Thanksgiving sometimes. If pressed, I would say I feel British. It’s where I grew up and where I choose to live, the culture that I love, but I feel perfectly at home in America, I don’t feel like a tourist or anything.”
Hall said that she was surprised to find how ambitious she was, especially when working with a director whom she admired, adding, “I don’t know where I got the balls to do that, to be honest. I’m usually very deferential and British and polite about these things, but something just kind of went off in me and I thought, ‘I’ve got to play that part, it’s too nuts and looks like too much fun and I understand it, I don’t know why I should understand it, I don’t know why I am better for it than anyone else’, but I just knew I had to do it. It was a curious thing.”
The somewhat tragic irony of the situation is that Lay the Favourite ended up being one of the worst-reviewed films of Frears’ career, although most of the blame for its ineptitude fell on Bruce Willis, and not Hall, who has nonetheless staked out a place for herself in arthouse cinema and has been working consistently ever since, even helping create more opportunities for female actors by directing her own film, Passing, which was well-received when it debuted on Netflix in 2021.
