The “heartbreaking” movie that betrayed Rebecca Hall: “It was quite shocking”
If you enjoyed Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s mental 2024 body horror movie The Substance, then there’s a good chance you’ll want to catch Rebecca Hall in The Beauty as well, another fairly jaw-dropping effort from American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy.
The similarities to The Substance are clear; this is another story of high-end celebs attempting to prolong their good looks by virtue of injecting something, causing all kinds of monstrous dysmorphia, and people literally exploding for seemingly no reason. Hall plays an FBI agent trying to work out what’s going on, only to get dragged into it all herself.
Another major link is that Demi Moore’s former husband, Ashton Kutcher, is also in the show as a tech billionaire and creator of the substance they call ‘The Beauty’, which neatly closes the circle to Fargeat’s brilliant film that was nominated for five Oscars a couple of years ago. For Hall, meanwhile, it’s the first time she’s done a major US TV show, although she did lead a Prime Video sci-fi series called Tales From the Loop back in 2020.
Mostly she’s been known for a 20-year career in film, excelling in everything from the Ben Affleck heist movie The Town in 2010 to the uber-spooky horror The Awakening the following year, a performance that won her Best Actress at the British Independent Film Awards.
She made her breakthrough a few years before that, however, under Christopher Nolan, no less, in the twisty magicians drama The Prestige, again winning award nominations and garnering industry attention sufficient to land her a major role in Woody Allen’s 2008 comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem.
It proved an inspired choice, with Hall picking up a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actress’ and led to five years of success for her working with everyone from Bruce Willis to Will Ferrell, before in 2013 came the call many actors have their fingers crossed for, the chance to do a Marvel movie.
The film in question was Iron Man 3, a $200million movie that continued one of Marvel’s most successful franchises, with Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead roles as Iron Man dealt with the fallout from the first Avengers movie the previous year. Hall was handed the role of Maya Hansen, a genetic scientist working for Guy Pearce’s revenge-seeking tycoon Aldrich Killian.
But her excitement was cut short, as was her screentime in the end, when producers on the film decided evil female characters wouldn’t work as merchandise, resulting in her performance being considerably less prominent in the final cut.
Hall spoke of her disappointment some years later, saying: “I signed up to a role that played to the end of the film, and had a big part in the ending, a significant role. But halfway through filming, that all changed. It was quite shocking. It happens more than you think.”
Iron Man 3 was a vast hit regardless, bringing in over $1.2m at the box office and nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. But Hall dealt with it in the most admirable way possible, setting out to do things herself to huge success.
She added, “It was heartbreaking, but that was a few years ago now. They have to be able to sell female action figures now if they are putting women in lead roles. I hope everything will trickle down accordingly.”
She showed just how far she had come when she wrote and directed Passing in 2021, a film about two young black female friends in 1920s New York that was critically acclaimed across the board, winning Hall a raft of nominations and a nod for Ruth Negga as ‘Best Actress’ from the Golden Globes.
