By James Mottram
It’s now been ten years since the wonderfully willowy British actress, Rebecca Hall, slipped onto the film scene in the low budget comedy, Starter For 10, opposite James McAvoy. Since then, she’s clocked up a number of fascinating films, including Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon; Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona; Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige; Nicole Holefcener’s Please Give; Ben Affleck’s The Town; and Joel Edgerton’s The Gift. The daughter of Sir Peter Hall, the famous theatre director who started The Royal Shakespeare Company, and opera soprano, Maria Ewing, Rebecca Hall was nine-years-old when her father cast her in a television production of The Camomile Lawn, and she has never looked back since. “I knew then that I wanted to be an actress,” Hall told FilmInk in 2010, and she’s certainly ticked that box.
In this week’s The BFG – Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic about a behemoth (Mark Rylance) who invites oodles of scorn from his even more massive brethren by refusing to eat children, and provokes them further by actually befriending a lonely orphan girl (Ruby Barnhill) – Hall plays Mary, a lady-in-waiting to Penelope Wilton’s Queen. “I didn’t study them, but I was interested in what the role actually means,” Hall replies at The Cannes Film Festival when asked if she did any research for the film. “I looked at the woman who has been Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting for a long, long time. It’s not much like the one that I actually ended up playing…this is a very different, very Roald Dahl situation,” the actress laughs of the author’s famously perverse sense of humour. “She actually dresses exactly like the Queen, and she looks rather like the Queen, and it’s almost like she’s an invisible stand-in…she’s almost like a double for her. It’s very interesting. But I did notice that there were definitely protocols for how you behave in Buckingham Palace. Very much so.”
Rebecca Hall was also well and truly across the works of Roald Dahl, who remains a truly titanic figure in the world of British children’s literature, and indeed literature in general. “I know them back to front,” the actress says of Dahl’s books. “I was born in 1982, so most of them, like The BFG, came out around that time. My parents definitely read me some of them, but I do remember the moment that I started to read myself, and discovering this book, The BFG, about a little girl who can’t sleep very well, and who stays up all night with her glasses on reading. I was literally doing that at the time myself, so there was this sense of gasp, ‘It’s okay to be this bookish child!’ That’s definitely what I was, and that was a wonderful thing for me. I feel very close this book.”
And according to Hall, that book remains just as relevant today. “It’s a tribute to how children see adults, and how adults see children, and more importantly, what adults can learn from children, as opposed to the other way round,” she says. “The story works so well because it’s about this huge, huge man who gets it so wrong, and who isn’t perfect, and says all the words in the wrong way. In this weird way, everything goes a bit topsy-turvy. That’s a very beautiful thing – to maintain your childlike naivety about the world, and you learn that from children. Grandparents learn that from their grandchildren, and so on, and that’s what the story, in a way, does. Steven Spielberg is eternally youthful, and he sees the world with the same imagination and the same sort of excitement that a child does. It’s about embracing the oddities, and the outsiders.”
Adept at arthouse and low budget fare, The BFG represents Hall’s biggest budget turnout since she featured in the cast of Marvel Studios’ Iron Man Three. “I’m dead in The Marvel Cinematic Universe, but one of the producers said, ‘No one dies in The Marvel Universe,’” Hall laughs. “They could reassemble your particles in cyberspace or something, but I think my time is over with Marvel…that was probably it.” Did that make Hall want to do more big scale movies? “Doing a mix of the two is really important,” Hall replies. “Doing big scale movies helps my inclinations towards the independent films that find it harder to get made. I’m not really at the place where I can fully finance most of the films that I’d like to get going, because it’s very hard to get financing for anything these days, so from that perspective I’d love to do bigger films, if that was the side effect. Also, I don’t have anything against bigger films…some of them are incredibly exciting and good, you know? Like this one! My interests hover around, ‘Where’s the good story?’ I’ll go wherever it takes me, and if a good story does involve, say, flying on a harness, then sign me up.”
The BFG is in cinemas now. Check out our interviews with The BFG’s Mark Rylance and Jemaine Clement.
