'Resurrection': Rebecca Hall Wants People To Ask 'What The Bleep Was That?'

Rebecca Hall hopes anyone watching her new movie Resurrection comes out with a strong reaction—good or bad.

The BAFTA-nominated actress stars in the new mystery thriller as a woman whose dark past catches up with her in the form of a menacing man played by Tim Roth. Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection is out in movie theaters now before being released on-demand on Friday, August 5, 2022.

Looking ahead to the release, Newsweek spoke to Hall about her expectations for the movie, her relationship with Roth on and off screen, and her next career moves which will take her back behind the camera.

When logging on to the virtual call to speak to Newsweek, Hall had a vastly different hair cut to the one she was sporting in Resurrection.

"I literally cut all my hair off directly after finishing the shoot. So I think I maybe thought 'this haircut now has bad vibes and I need to cleanse the palate'," Hall joked.

Hall plays Margaret in the movie, a strong character who is unsettled by the return of an unassuming man named David. By today's standards, his behavior towards her would be classed as "gaslighting."

"I was watching a lot of NXIVM (cult) documentaries, Bad Vegan, and it always made me think about cult mentality, and how damaging that is. I see Resurrection as a cult of one story." She continued, "Ultimately it's retribution, and an outcry of rage against being trapped and controlled like this."

Without spoiling anything within Resurrection, the ending will stir a debate between anyone who watches it. That's the view of Hall who wants the movie to stay with you.

"What I do look for is something that is the kind of experience that you can only have cinematically where a roomful of people go on an emotional thrill ride," Hall told Newsweek, explaining why the project appealed to her. "There is something, dare I say, fun about that, even in the context of something very intense, very upsetting."

Hall loves a movie that incites conversation once the credits roll, listing Darren Aronofsky's Mother! and David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future as two recent movies that got her and her friends talking.

"There is something fun about that, to come out of something going, 'what the bleep was that?' I think it's unique.

"I was like 'people are gonna watch this, and if we pull it off people watching are going to be utterly baffled by it, whether you like it or you don't like it, you're not going to forget it'. And that's something I want to be a part of."

British actress Hall got her breakthrough in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige before going on to star in the likes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Town and Iron Man 3. In Resurrection, she plays an efficient and caring single mother. Her life is running as she designed it until the return of someone from her past throws everything askew.

Roth (Pulp Fiction) is the actor tasked with playing the troublesome role in Hall's character's life. While their onscreen relationship is fraught, tense and unsettling, the reality was far from it.

"Neither of us are method actors. If anything I'm the polar opposite. I really do believe in making the space of acting playground. That doesn't mean I'm not taking it incredibly seriously when I'm doing it, or that I don't believe the person I'm portraying when I'm doing it, I do. But in order for me to get there, I need to feel that there's an atmosphere of play, that is fun."

She continued, "Tim really is a like-minded actor. He really supported that way of working and was always happy to tell me an anecdote when I needed to giggle and also very happy to walk away when I needed to just retire to a quiet corner and be by myself."

Method acting has fallen out of favor recently, with several actors speaking out against using it. Hall says she's never really used method acting, with her movie Christine being the only exception as she needed to stay in the voice of the real-life reporter Christine Chubbuck.

Within Resurrection, Hall's character Margaret suffers an emotional spiral. Without going method, and since scenes were shot out of sequence, Hall had to improve.

"I literally make charts to sort the emotional journey from A to Z that I carry around with me everywhere. So that I know what level the character is at, and so that I can at least give the director a hope of being able to cut together a coherent journey.

Hall continued, "For the later scenes where she's physically very run down, I would force myself to do about 20 push ups before action, so I was physically out of breath. Doing that all day, by the end of it you're completely exhausted."

Hall took a big but ultimately successful swing recently in her career, as she made her writing and directing debut with the Netflix movie Passing. At the time of writing, Hall's IMDb page features no upcoming project. Rest assured, she's working hard in the background on something new.

"I have two projects that I'm sort of toiling away on as a director and a writer also. And I'm not going to talk about them yet." She added, "It's early days as they say.

"I love directing. It's everything I've ever wanted to do. I also love writing. I just had a patch of madness of doing a lot of press for Passing, which felt like it was my life for nearly six months. And then I took a break from that. Suddenly, oh, I can sit in my garden and just dream up the next thing that someone might let me make as a filmmaker. And that has been heaven for me. I would like to sit in my garden writing forever. It was very nice."

Resurrection will be released by IFC Films in theaters on July 29 and on-demand August 5. Shudder will be the exclusive streaming home in November 2022.