Rebecca Hall Talks Her Sundance Directorial Debut 'Passing,' Her Family's Bi-Racial Ancestry, Questions Of Identity & More [Interview]

You know Rebecca Hall from her celebrated acting career, Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Frost/Nixon,” Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Joel Edgerton’s “The Gift,” Antonio Campos’ striking indie “Christine,” Amazon’s “Tales From The Loop” and many more.

But she’s about to embark on presenting her directorial debut, “Passing,” a seemingly risky endeavor, to the world at the upcoming 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

“Passing” is based on Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of the same name that explores the practice of racial passing, a term used for a person classified as a member of one racial group who seeks to be accepted by a different racial group. The film stars Tessa Thompson and Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga, and as Sundance describes it, while “both are African American women who can ‘pass’ as white, they have chosen to live on opposite sides of the color line. Now, their renewed acquaintance threatens them both.” It’s also a story about the mutual obsession between them that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities.

But, the first thing you might be asking yourself—aside from obvious questions about cultural appropriation—is, what permits Hall to tell this story, an ostensibly posh privileged white British woman?

Yet, her personal identity, or at least one of her parents, is much different from what it seems on the surface. Hall’s mother is from Detroit, Michigan—perhaps an unlikely place as any to birth an opera singer—and bi-racial with African American and Dutch ancestry. Her grandfather was also bi-racial, and Hall says both of them had a very complicated and complex struggle with their identity and how they presented to others in the world, keeping much of it hidden from her.

“It wasn’t hidden from me exactly… but it was hidden from me and not talked about,” Hall explained in the Playlist conversation. “When I got older, I would have these conversations with my mother where it would come up, ‘Can we talk about where you came from?’ And sometimes she would say yes and sometimes say no.”

Hall says her grandfather was likely passing for white as well, and the reasons behind these complicated choices are heartbreaking. “I still don’t know enough about it,” she said about the identity her family presented, “But the legacy of that choice, sadly, tragically, is some sort of internalization of shame, and a very potent force in a family.”

It’s this struggle, this question of identity and who you pass as in the world, that Hall tries to unpack and reckon with in “Passing,” the adaptation of which she also wrote and something she’d been hoping to make for years.

No matter her intentions, ancestral background, or experiences her parents endured, Hall knows the film is potentially loaded. “I came across [‘Passing’] at a time when I was trying to reckon creatively with some of my personal family history, and the mystery surrounding my bi-racial grandfather on my American mother’s side,” she said when the project was first announced. “In part, making this film is an exploration of that history, to which I’ve never really had access.”

At the time of its announcement, she described “Passing” as an astonishing book “about two women struggling not just with what it meant to be Black in America in 1929, but with gender conventions, the performance of femininity, the institution of marriage, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the ways in which all of those forces intersect.”

This Deep Focus Podcast chat is actually a callback, an excerpt from an hour-long podcast chat I had with Hall last year about “Tales From The Loop” and her entire career. But given “Passing” is about to be presented to the world, and we had a long 20+ minute chat about the film, the risks she’s taking in writing and directing it, and how timely the story feels, it felt write to represent it again, this time solely focusing on this directorial debut.

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