Interview: Rebecca Hall, actress

In person Rebecca Hall is 29, coltishly beautiful but also, in her words, “freakishly tall” at 5 foot 9. This may not sound the sort of altitude that will get you a job at the circus, but compared with many Hollywood actors and directors, it does qualify for a sharp intake of breath.

At the Cannes film festival’s premiere of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she recalls Woody Allen looking up at his leading lady in her three-inch party heels and saying wistfully, “I could never have taken you to the prom”. However, on the set of her outlaws-in-love drama The Town, the tables were finally turned. While sandwiched between Ben Affleck and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, the cinematographer tentatively asked Hall if she would mind simplifying the eyelines by standing on a ladder. Hamm is six foot, Affleck a couple of inches taller. “Sheer bliss,” she grins.

To appreciate the full dimensions of Hall, it helps to be a fan of swoony emotional pieces like Wide Sargasso Sea, where she played the first, maddened Mrs Rochester, or cool, smart dramas like Frost/Nixon, where she was the confident jetsetter who shored up Michael Sheen’s bumptious insecure star presenter.

The reason we’re meeting today is The Awakening, a gothic piece that broods like Edgar Allan Poe with a grudge. Florence Cathcart, proto-ghostbuster, was created by Nick Murphy especially with Hall in mind, which some actresses would find flattering. “When I told her that at our first meeting, I saw her face drop,” recalls Murphy. “She was clearly thinking, ‘Oh my god, a stalker.’ ”

Set a few years after the Great War and the Spanish flu epidemic, it is “a time for ghosts”. Or rather a time for the sceptical Florence to expose fraudulent psychics and sham séances – until a haunted Scottish boarding school defies easy explanation.

“It’s funny because in real life Nick Murphy is a rampant, militant ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ guy, but I’m much more susceptible,” says Hall. “During the filming, I constantly put myself in situations in the hope that I might see one, but I never did.” The idea of ESP and telepathic bonds also intrigues her: “Freud on his death bed said, ‘If I could do it all over again, I’d look into telepathy. It’s communication between humans that is much more than speaking and body language.’ And he’s the most empirical of the lot.”

The Awakening is the first film in which Hall appears in almost every scene. But she will take a similarly dominant role in a 14-part BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s aristocratic love triangle, Parade’s End, as the faithless wife to Britain’s other thinking person’s hottie, Benedict Cumberbatch. Filming began last month, and because her character, Sylvia, has several dance sequences, Hall has been on a Strictly Come Dancing-style crash course. “I love acquiring these sort of skills, I can get utterly caught up in these things.”

Upcoming too is Lay The Favourite, a comedy-drama about a woman who falls in with, and then manages, a pack of gamblers. Bruce Willis, Vince Vaughn and Catherine Zeta-Jones co-star, but initially the film’s director Stephen Frears was absolutely positive that he didn’t need Rebecca Hall.

“It was the worst meeting of my professional life,” according to Hall. “Stephen Frears said to me, ‘I don’t know much of your work, but I’m sure you’re very talented and that we will work together eventually – but you are everything that I am not looking for and I will never cast you in this role.’ And that was the end of the meeting.”

It speaks of Hall’s inner toughness that she decided to take his rejection as a challenge. “When I first read the script, I didn’t think I could do it either. It was the best character role for a young woman that I’d ever read and, like Stephen, I thought no-one would cast me. But that moment was like flipping a switch in my head! I thought, ‘I cannot let this go,’ and I suddenly realised that I could do it.”

It took her six months to persuade Frears to let her come back and read a scene for him. “He was equally vile to me,” she laughs. “But I did my one scene, and at the end he said an expletive, and then he said, ‘Well, you can do it.’ And as a result, Stephen and I had a particularly creative working relationship because we’d established there would be no mollycoddling. He’s one of the best directors I’ve worked with and I count him as a friend now.”

Of course, Hall knows what directors are like; her stepbrother is Edward Hall, who is artistic director at the Hampstead Theatre, and of course her father, Sir Peter Hall, started the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hall gives no sign of being exasperated when her father’s name comes up, nor is she surprised: he has cropped up in every interview she has ever done.

Yet the linchpin of Hall’s childhood was her mother, the American opera singer Maria Ewing. Ewing has a huge voice and a personality to match. At 18 she pulled herself out of working-class Detroit by her bootstraps, and by 23 was a star.

“My parents were famous in a way that opera stars and theatre directors aren’t really famous now,” she acknowledges, and when they divorced it made headlines. Rebecca was five at the time, and Ewing raised her daughter pretty much as a single mother, taking her on tour during school holidays. It was Ewing who taught her daughter that “if you stick to your guns, and have passion and integrity, then you can’t go wrong”.

To that end, she has dodged the ubiquitous romcom. Hall’s sense of humour is playfully ironic rather than broadly ditzy. “I used to get those scripts but after a while I think everyone got the message.” Hall may not be that kind of girl, but she still gets fitted for other pigeonholes. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the films I’ve tended to play so far. If my ‘type’ is ‘intelligent, complicated women’ then I’m okay with that. But I don’t think that’s all I can do.”

Her father’s role has long been perceived as giving his daughter two crucial nudges, the first when she was eight, when he cast her in his Channel 4 series The Camomile Lawn. But according to Rebecca, it was a producer who saw her waiting for her father to finish for the day who suggested that she audition for Sophy. Her father instinctively dismissed the idea and it was Rebecca who insisted: “‘Why not? Can I have a little read?’ And it all happened from there.”

The idea of following the rest of the family into the performing arts seemed almost too obvious and predictable to Hall, and she wrestled with the choice for some time before dropping out of Cambridge in her second year, reasoning that since she wanted to act, further delay was pointless. Her parents were furious but her father stepped in almost immediately to offer a starring role on London’s West End, as Vivie in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, despite no classical training. Bold strokes like this do not often end happily: when Francis Coppola cast his daughter Sofia in The Godfather III, it was one of the greatest acts of parental sabotage in modern drama.

But in the end, her performance was well reviewed and won her the Ian Charleson Award. “Part of me was prepared to flop,” says Hall. “It meant I had a really easy way out; but if I succeeded, then this is what I really should be doing with my life.”

• The Awakening is in cinemas from Friday.