Rebecca Hall had never worked with Ryan Murphy when he pitched her what she called “the most wild and fun and subversive wacky premise” for a new show titled “The Beauty.”
The tagline: “One shot makes you hot.”
“Ryan has a brilliant way of taking things that are very much in the zeitgeist and making them kind of thrilling while also having some substance,” she said of the series, starting Wednesday on FX and Hulu, in which she plays an F.B.I. agent on the trail of a sexually transmitted virus that transforms average Joes and Janes into specimens of physical perfection.
“It comes down to, ‘What is essential beauty?’” Hall added. “If everyone ends up being able to pay for something that looks exactly the same, then is that still the thing or is it something else?”
Hall admitted to existing in a realm of “permanent tension” between her desire to age gracefully and naturally, and appreciating that she works in an industry where how she looks matters.
“It got me jobs and I would be naïve to pretend that it didn’t,” said Hall, who will also star in Murphy’s upcoming “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.” “But what I do is about reflecting human beings and how they look at all stages of life. Hopefully I’ll have the good grace and sense to stick to my guns.”
In a video call from her home in upstate New York, Hall spoke about her mother’s piano, the brown and green cocktails her husband Morgan Spector makes, and things that go bump in the night. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Painting
I had a show at Half Gallery in Manhattan recently, which is definitely a new step for me with painting because it’s been very much, up until this point, very private. Then I had a moment of being like, “I don’t want to be precious about stuff that I make because that feels weirdly indulgent as I get older.” So I started putting it out into the world.
My Mother’s Piano
She was a diva, and I had a sort of complicated and wonderful relationship with my mother, but I think a place where we met and had some commonality was sitting around her white Danemann piano. Now it’s an object that, especially since she’s gone, has so much of her in it. It feels like a kind of communion to sit and play as much as I can.
Flower Gardening
It’s really one of the more hopeful things you can do in this sense that flowers are always going to die and they’re always going to come back.
The Brown Drink and the Green Drink
Morgan discovered he was quite a good mixologist during the pandemic and came up with these two house drinks. The brown drink is the winter drink and rye-based with this ancho chili stuff in it. The green drink is the summer drink and has got mezcal. But what I think of when he’s making them is making spaces for friends to gather and community to be around, which is something that I value increasingly.
Vintage Finds
I love the idea that you can root something out that is completely unique and special. Morgan bought me for Christmas this incredible Victorian egg designed for when bad smells are around. You put good smells inside your egg and then you open it and take a whiff. I’ve been slightly fixated on finding a way to capture the smell of the top of my daughter’s head.
Quiet Places
Something that I hold really sacred is spaces which feel meditative to me — just taking a pause so you’re not being hit by the onslaught of the day.
Gallimard Notebooks
A good notebook is a prized possession. My core is a writer.
Photography Books
Photography helps me think about the camera framing when I’m thinking about character or writing character or even painting faces. I find it very moving to look at a photograph and think about the story that it tells my brain.
Small Movie Theaters
I went to university in Cambridge, and there was this art-house cinema called the Cambridge Arts Theater. I would go regularly during the day when I should have been going to lectures or reading books or doing something useful for my English degree. It was like a cinema education and a sort of a holy place.
Animal Attraction
As soon as I started living with Morgan, I was like, “Well, I can’t ever imagine not living with this person.” It made such a difference to my life. But the other thing is that we started having cats and I’d never really had animals before. Now I find it weird when I go away and there are no noises of someone knocking over something or munching at the cat food or playing with a toy at 3 a.m., annoyingly keeping you up.
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