Rebecca Hall on Moving Beyond the Biopic—and Entering Ryan Murphy’s Universe

As an actor, Rebecca Hall is forever tuning in to the hard-to-catch frequencies and day-to-day idiosyncrasies that make people, people. In 2024, she starred in Janicza Bravo’s eerie drama The Listeners, playing a teacher whose life unspools as she begins to hear a low, pulsating sound that nobody else can. This year, she starred in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, an intimate snapshot of 1970s New York that recreates a real-life conversation between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) over the course of a day. This tender and magnetic movie—about friendship, memory, and the spectre of a generational creative scene—racked up five nominations at the forthcoming Independent Spirit Awards, promising good things for the awards season ahead.

Over the past year, Hall has remained just as attuned and even more busy; this month she appears in James L. Brooks’s political dramedy Ella McCay with Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Ayo Edebiri. She’s also stepped into Ryan Murphy’s flamboyant and expansive universe with a role in the next season of Monster, about Lizzie Borden, and a part opposite Evan Peters in The Beauty. (The duo play FBI agents who, while investigating a string of gruesome supermodel deaths, discover a sexually transmitted disease that’s making people more beautiful—with horrifying consequences.) Today, Hall is toggling between a stack of new scripts and mulling her next steps, whether that’s picking up her oil paints again or directing another feature. Following her acclaimed directorial debut Passing, Hall has plans to make a mother-daughter drama called Four Days Like Sunday, inspired by her own life; it will focus on a 12-year-old girl navigating her relationship with her mom (Hall), a fading Broadway star. Her recent exhibition at Half Gallery, which features pieces pulled from different eras of Hall’s life, has also nearly sold out.

“I have a broad palette,” says Hall with a shrug, speaking to me from Los Angeles. It’s a sentiment that applies as much to her various artistic mediums as to her recent sartorial swings: she still finds it amusing that the Thom Browne trompe l’oeil gown she wore to the Academy Museum Gala convinced half the room that she’d painted her own torso. “I mean, it was possible! People were looking at me, quite shocked. But, no, actually, I’m more dressed than you are right now,” she recalls with a wicked smile.

Below, Rebecca Hall checks in with Vogue about independent movie-making and “dodo” films, pushing herself with style, and the simple act of listening.