Interview: Rebecca Hall on her personal connection to ‘Passing’ and the perfect duality of Tessa Thompson

For English actress, and newly minted writer and director, Rebecca Hall, making her black and white meditation on racial identity — the Netflix distributed Passing — wasn’t a choice. It was a compulsion. 

Adapted from Nella Larsen’s classic, 1929 same-titled novella, the story follows Irene (Tessa Thompson), a Black Harlem resident, who’s capable of passing for white, married with children to Brian Redfield (André Holland). One day, she serendipitously bumps into an old childhood friend, the wild, blonde haired Clare (Ruth Negga), who’s presently passing as white to her racist husband John (Alexander Skarsgård). In each other Irene and Clare awaken long dormant insecurities and passions, destabilizing the respective identities they’ve built for themselves. 

Shot in Academy ratio, Passing is a claustrophobic narrative. It’s a film about looking and being looked upon, one where longing and sensuality simmers underneath, and what it means to be Black, along with the consequences of racial boundary crossing, flirt to radical aims. It’s also a story that struck Hall with a uniquely personal resonance. Hall’s mother is of African American, Native American, Scottish and Dutch ancestry. Her grandfather, who was also part-Black, passed as white for the majority of his life, and raised his children as white. A revelation that surprised Hall, and drew her even closer to Larsen’s novella.   

I met with Hall in-person, on the morning of the film being nominated for five Gotham awards, including Best Feature, to talk about the book’s resonance, casting Tessa Thompson and the act of physical code-switching.    

Congratulations on the Gotham Award nominations. How are you feeling?

RH: Very nice. Actually, I’m not going to lie. It’s meaningful, especially when you’ve been on a journey with something for so long. And everyone’s constantly telling you every step of the way, if you manage to get it made you’ll have to do it for no money, or it will never sell or be commercial. Well it did sell, and it’s going to be on Netflix. It’s nice. Being nominated for this stuff is a kind of extension of that validation that actually, this can be mainstream, that people can be interested in the emotional lives of two women of color.

What was the writing process like while adapting the novel?

It was so long, and I wrote other things in between. It’s not like this will be the only thing I’ll ever do. I really hope it isn’t. Honestly, it was a little weird because there was sort of a compulsion. I finished the book and I immediately opened my laptop and started going. I couldn’t not do it. I didn’t really think I was actually going to make it a movie, but I was so blown away by the capacity of the book, its ambiguity, its thematic resonance for now and forever.

As I was reading it, I got a few pages in and I could start seeing it in black and white. I started seeing it in 4:3 ratio. It had to be in a box, visually, and like imprisoned. I saw the tea room scene with that panning shot. And I started thinking about Irene in relation to being looked at and looking, this momentary voyeurism. These were all ideas that I had as I was reading the book. The movie just started playing and I just had to sit down and start writing.

And while I’m telling you all the good ideas that made the film, there were a ton of bad ideas that didn’t make the film 13 years ago. A lot of it was crude and impractical and didn’t make much sense, but it was, I think, a little bit out of my control, and honest in that way. It gave me this whole historical context and understanding about my own grandfather who passed his whole life. And it gave me language. But it also gave me compassion and empathy towards him and towards the repercussions of his decision. Because my mother didn’t have access to it. I didn’t have access to it. And it felt like a way of writing that a little bit. 

Did you ever consider casting yourself in the film? 

No, I never did. On a really basic level, I didn’t really want to act in something I was directing. On another level, I found it far more provocative and interesting and correct to A. redress the balance of very obviously white people playing these parts in the past and B. to have an audience have a fixed idea about these two characters’ racial identity as Black. It felt, to me, much more interesting for an audience to sit down and see them as Black because then it gives me a position from which to destabilize that fixed identity, which is really what the movie is about. 

We love to walk around going: I see this and therefore, everyone else sees this too. But that’s not the truth about the way any of us operate. All of us see different things according to many different shifting dynamics. So for example, the scene with John in the hotel room, and I’m only afforded to do this because of the black and white, because it turns it into an abstracted world, so you can play with metaphors, and you can accept these things that you wouldn’t necessarily accept in a world that looked directly like ours, that scene is very deliberately oppressively white. The walls are white. They’re wearing white. There’s a huge amount of light coming in from the side. That highlights the point that in this room, in this context, the person who has all the power is the white man. He gets to see what he wants to see. He can make them white, he can make that context because he has the power to do that. But from an audience’s perspective, they’re seeing them as Black, and they will always see them as Black. And that creates the stakes of fear. That’s much more interesting.

This performance by Tessa Thompson, outside of Little Woods, I haven’t really seen her like this before with regards to control and rigidity. What did you see in her that made you think she was perfect for this role?

I spent a day, or more, watching as much Tessa Thompson footage as I could because I really fell in love with her for the part. She has this sort of quiet sensuality, or vulnerability that is sensual somehow. I don’t know how to describe it, but it felt to me like the thing that Irene can’t be, but is, somewhere underneath. Imagine if this is forced underground, and then all the layers of social performance are piled on top of it, then you’ve got Irene. Then you’ve got this perfect expression of it. And it will be devastating because you don’t want someone who’s so good at playing, “I’m doing the right thing” because she’ll be incredibly annoying. You don’t want someone who is playing the interiority so much that you don’t believe that she’s confined by this rigidity. You have to find that restraint. 

I have always been obsessed as an actor in this idea of playing two things at the same time. Everyone says you can’t play one thing and its opposite at the same time. It’s just categorically impossible. And I just don’t think that’s true of human beings because we’re always projecting to the world. We’re always somehow accidentally revealing the thing we want or the thing that we are underneath it. I could just see that Tessa could do that. Because she had that thing underneath that shines through, it’s heartbreaking and she has this instinctive relationship with a character, and also an analytical one.

My favorite scene is the Black dance party that Irene, Clare, and Brian attend. It’s the most elaborate of the scenes due to the number of extras. What was your approach toward shooting it?

The movie was always designed to be this sort of very claustrophobic, tight, uncomfortable experience with this one moment of release, and that’s the dance. Then it all goes back in again. That’s very much tracking with us finding out more about Irene because in that moment, in the dance, you see this flash of the person she might be under a different circumstance. She might be this acerbic, brilliant wit actually, who may not be a mother or a wife or any of the things that she is trapped by. She might be kind of dazzling, not saying those things aren’t dazzling. But to her, they don’t feel appropriate.

It is a moment to open the can and just allow a bit of the pressure out. And it is all propelled by Claire and her joy of life and her desires, her need to have fun and live life. As a result of all of those things that I just said, it was genuinely the most joyful scene to shoot. It also happened to be the last day of shooting. We shot through the night and I mean, for me, it was about catching as many different things going on as possible. It was the only time, apart from the very end, deliberately, that we used handheld, and only a little bit really. We had an extraordinary number of dancers, both three or four professionals who were sort of teaching people some of the classic moves from the time, but mostly people who were just letting it rip and having fun. It was a moving expression of everybody being free, and it was very beautiful to watch and to get to film.

So often, when we think of code switching, we think of it in the verbal sense. But in Passing, there’s also a kind of physical code switching. 

Yes. That’s absolutely true. I think there’s lots of shades of it going on because there’s also the interactions between Irene and Clare and Zulena, the maid [played by Ashley Ware Jenkins], which are all slightly complicated and interesting. Clare goes from sort of relating to her as a peer to treating her very much like a kind of white lady of the house, and Irene doesn’t know how to respond to her. 

The challenge of the piece, always, was finding a kind of visual language that suggests the subtext because nobody says what they’re really feeling. So there are all these key shots and sequences about Irene and Clare’s proximity to each other, and also these moments when one of them is looking at the other, where they can reveal so much about longing.

But the problem is even when Irene’s in her house, the social performance doesn’t go away. She’s still bound by her own constraints of how to be. Finding the moments where she could be free of that, or maybe was thinking about being free of that, was challenging. That had to be about destabilizing how we see the world through her eyes. So gradually you understand that she’s not seeing clearly because the frame gets murky. She’s actually dangerous in the sense that she drops things. Inside of her house she doesn’t know what to be. She’s in that chair by the window that doesn’t look very comfortable or she is awkwardly passing out in her bed in the middle of the day. These are all little signifiers. But then when she is awake and conscious, you get the sense that she is dressing to be someone which is why there are a lot of mirrors. She has these moments where she thinks: Maybe I could be somebody else.

What do you hope audiences today take from the movie?

What’s brilliant about the book is that it has this ambiguity, and this universality. It transcends the things that it claims to be about and becomes much more about, broadly speaking, the ways in which our insides don’t match up with our outsides. Which is still true today in the sense that we’re all struggling with the negotiation of how to present our identity. What is the world telling me that I want to be, and what is the thing that I want to be? 

There’s work for an audience to do with this film. You have to lean in and pay attention in a funny way because you’ll be rewarded for it. That’s actually what the first three minutes were about. I was trying to train the audience that you’ve got to really listen and look, because if you just sort of let it wash over you you’ll take it at face value and nothing really happens. But if you come to it with your experiences, you will struggle with your own identity, whatever that may be: gay, straight, Black, white, man, woman, rich or poor, that’s where the work happens. And there are going to be conversations between people who think it’s about one thing or it’s about another, and both those things are true. The conversations that happen between those two people is where it gets exciting and is still relevant because there are things that people are going to feel very strongly about.

Passing is in select theaters today, October 27, and on Netflix in the U.S. on November 10.

Photo: Emily V. Aragones/Netflix