Original-Cin Interview: Actor Rebecca Hall on the Thrill of Making Thriller The Night House
By Jim Slotek
A horror film fan she may be, but when it comes to ghosts, Rebecca Hall is Missouri. She’s in a show-me state of mind.
“I’m a bit of an empiricist,” says the London-born star of the suspense thriller The Night House by David Bruckner (The Ritual). “So, until I have hard evidence in front of me, I tend not to believe one way or the other. That’s my answer to that.”
In The Night House, Hall plays a teacher named Beth, whose husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) has recently committed suicide at their lakeside home with scant indication of what motivated him. As angry as she is frightened, she is visited in her dreams by Owen… and maybe by something else.
Read our review of The Night House
On a Zoom press call, Hall talks about the largely one-woman show that The Night House represented, and her empiricism aside, she did express some openness to things spiritual. “I’ve been asked a lot about haunted houses, and I feel terribly boring.” But she does have one anecdote that could reach back millennia, from her stage tour in 2008 in Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project, in which she played Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
“I’ve been to a lot of spooky places. This wasn’t spooky, but it was filled with history. It was the ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus. My father (the late theatre director Peter Hall) directed a play there when I was a kid.
“I was doing the production of The Winter’s Tale, and Simon Russell Beale makes a speech during which he references ‘the Oracle down the road,’” she says. And in fact, the actual temple of the Oracle of Epidaurus was literally down the road.
“And we’re all onstage doing this scene and it felt like the whole temperature of the area changed, it had been completely still and there was a huge rush of wind. And I remember we were all completely spooked in a kind of wonderful way.”
The Night House is spooky in a non-wonderful way. Hall’s Beth has yet to grieve, but her anger puts her in people’s faces, and the grieving process is pushed aside by an obsession with discovering her husband’s dark secrets. To my question about the horror and thriller genres being dominated by female characters for more than a century, going back to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, she asks rhetorically, “That’s interesting. Do we just enjoy watching women scream?
“What I do like about this movie is it takes existing tropes around horror of seeing a woman being a victim and being frightened and I think inverted it a little bit.
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“Beth isn’t entirely a victim. She’s had a terrible thing happen to her, but she’s sort of a detective; she wants to get to the bottom of what’s happened to her.”
Mood inspiration came from films like her long-time favourite The Changeling (the 1980 Canadian film by Peter Medak starring George C. Scott). “We also watched The Haunting, the ‘60s film by Robert Wise, which I think is great. Rosemary’s Baby, all those classics.
“The theme of a central character losing their mind is central to the horror genre. I suppose those are the ones I like.”
Some key scenes with Beth’s best friend (Sarah Goldberg) aside, The Night House was largely Hall playing by herself, including a scene where she has a passionate embrace, ostensibly with her dead husband, whom we do not see.
“I was very conscious of being the only thing the crew had to look at most of the time,” Hall says with a laugh. “I knew it was going to be challenging going into it. I thought ‘I’ve never done this before. I’ll give this a go.’
“But I don’t think I even guessed appropriately how challenging it would be. It’s a strange thing, you don’t even realize as an actor that you derive an awful lot of energy and stamina and even generate creative ideas from the actor you’re working with.
“It’s a bit like, you’re at a party and someone comes in who’s got a lot of charisma, and suddenly the party gets really great and you’re all sitting back bouncing off the energy. This is a bit like having a party with no guests, but you still have to make it good.”
The experience was good for some laughs, she admits. “Sometimes, when the material is particularly dark, you have to have a catharsis, a relief, or you go crazy. There was actually much more jollity and laughter on this set than on some of the more comedic things I’ve done.
“I was also very willing to get laughed at when I was making out with a ghost, which I found very funny.”
Next up: Rebecca Hall the director. Her debut Passing, starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in a friendship tale complicated by the ability to “pass” for a different race, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.
Hall says she’s been around sets and directors all her life, but doing it was a different game.
“I learned a huge amount about directing watching my father when I was a kid, handling actors, and I understood an awful lot about movie directors from spending my entire life on movie sets. And I always wanted to direct so I think I took lessons from all those things
“But none of that compared to actually doing it. You can’t measure the amount I learned. It’s just experience.”
The Night House. Directed by David Bruckner. Starring Rebecca Hall and Sarah Goldberg. Available August 20.