‘I’ve had a wild, chaotic, beautiful life’: Rebecca Hall on race, regrets and learning to be herself

Actor and director Rebecca Hall has always had to fight to define herself. Now, more comfortable than ever with where she is, she opens up about painting, working with Woody Allen, her BYO wedding – and her greatest indulgence

We all thought that we knew Rebecca Hall – English rose, on stage since childhood, daughter of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s founder Sir Peter Hall, regularly described in Hollywood as one of the best actors of her generation. But in 2021 she took what she calls now “a big swing” and suddenly the whole story cracked in half.

The big swing was her directorial debut, Passing, a film about two women of colour, one of whom is “passing” for white; Hall had been working on the story for 15 years, but thinking about it for far longer. Her maternal grandfather, a doorman from Detroit, passed as white, as did Hall’s mother the opera singer Maria Ewing, whose experience of growing up with internalised racism contributed to mental health issues that Hall had to navigate throughout her childhood. Her parents split when she was young and her mother brought her up alone in a grand country house in Sussex. But very little parenting was done – Hall (later head girl at school, later a Cambridge drop-out) was her mother’s caretaker. Because, “that kind of hiding [from who you are] leads to a certain amount of chaos. I think it’s safe to say that that stuff gets passed on. And I definitely grew up in an environment where my mother didn’t see me. She wanted me to be a certain kind of thing.”