The leading British actor and director Rebecca Hall regrets making a public apology for having worked with Woody Allen, she has revealed. Actors, she now believes, should not feel pressured into taking positions on contentious issues.
The film star, who starred to great acclaim in Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, made her high-profile statement six years ago in the initial wake of the Harvey Weinstein abuse story when she was due to appear on screen in Allen’s 2019 romantic comedy A Rainy Day in New York, alongside Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez and Jude Law. Her comments were made when she was in an emotional “tangle” and pregnant, she tells the Observer magazine this weekend. She had understood, she said, the significance of the moment and of a need to believe women, “so I felt like I wanted to do something definitive”.
Now, however, the actor does not recognise that impulse: “It is very unlike me to make a public statement about anything. I don’t think of myself as an actor-vist. I’m not that person.”
Hall’s original decision to say that she was “profoundly sorry” had followed not just the breaking of the Weinstein scandal, but a public call made a month before by Allen’s daughter, Dylan Farrow. Farrow had urged Hollywood to stop supporting her father in the light of sexual assault allegations she had made against him, an assault she had recalled from childhood. Farrow’s claim had already prompted a number of Hollywood figures to speak out against the critically acclaimed American film director, among them Mira Sorvino and Greta Gerwig.
The statement Hall issued back then in a post on Instagram – and which she now believes was a mistake, “because I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation” – had laid out a pledge that she would no longer work with Allen. She saw, she said, “that my actions have made another woman feel silenced and dismissed”. She also donated her salary from the newer Allen film to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, set up in response to revelations about Weinstein’s crimes.
Hall, who is the daughter of the late British theatre director Sir Peter Hall and the late American opera star Maria Ewing, explains she had been shooting a street scene with Law when journalists arrived at the location, asking questions about Weinstein, a producer on the film. She had to deliver lines in front of them that discussed sex between men and teenagers and says she has never forgotten the moment. But she now also says: “I don’t regret working with him. He gave me a great job opportunity and he was kind to me.”
Hall added that she did not talk to Allen any more, “but I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this”. Her policy now, she said, “is to be an artist. I don’t think that makes me apathetic or not engaged. I just think it’s my job.”
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A new BBC television drama, The Listeners, starring Hall, goes out on Tuesday 19 November. She is also working on another film directing project, Four Days Like Sunday, that will follow her acclaimed first film, Passing. The new project is inspired by her relationship with her mother, who died almost two years ago.