Rebecca Hall "waged an aggressive campaign" to land The Listeners role

This unravelling is portrayed beautifully by Rebecca Hall, who is mesmerising as Claire.

A veteran of stage and film, it’s a thrill to see her on the small screen again, starring alongside Prasanna Puwanarajah (The Crown, Ten Percent) and Gayle Rankin (Perry Mason, The Greatest Showman). "Claire craves a depth and intensity to her life," says Hall, when asked what drew her to the role. "Hearing this hum changes her understanding of the world. We all have an understanding that reality is exactly like this and then, when you delve into the physics and scratch the surface, suddenly the fabric of the universe peels away. And actually, it’s chaotic. Nothing about this is ordered or normal."

"Oh, weird!" she suddenly exclaims. "There’s steam coming out of the top of your head. What is that? They’re pumping a smell into the atmosphere. It’s intense."

At first, I think she’s riffing on her theme of chaos, but turning around, I see that we appear to be sitting next to the source of a pungent odour, with vapours billowing through a vent in the wall that presumably pass for room fragrance in the upscale hotel we’re in. "I’m very easily distracted by my environment," Hall apologises.

Based on Jordan Tannahill’s bestselling novel of the same name, The Listeners is beautifully shot, with a whimsical quality that amplifies the unsettling nature of the story. Claire is happily married but unfulfilled, yearning for a connection that she finds in the unlikeliest of places, after discovering that one of her pupils, Kyle, can also hear the hum.

Their pursuit of its source takes them on a journey that, like the hum itself, can be read as a metaphor. "There are many meanings," Hall agrees. "What’s great about long-format television is that there is the opportunity to go on the journey with Claire down the rabbit hole and have a belief system as a viewer that is then subverted and shifted again and again. Or if you’re not really sure what your belief system is, that, in a sense, is what the show is about – how beliefs are formed in isolation."

Convention is another theme, explored through Claire’s friendship with Kyle, which some view as problematic. "The Kyle relationship is really complicated, [and in some ways] an inappropriate relationship. But Claire is not predatory. She’s utterly isolated in an experience which is destabilising her own reality. So, when she comes across someone where there is parity, it feels necessary to connect.

"Every aspect of this story makes me think of the way we exist now. There’s an absence. We don’t have the structures that we had in the 20th century of community, whether you take that to mean unions, social clubs, church – all these things that would bring us together in a space where we could fact-check our experience with each other in real time. Instead, we’re living in these entirely algorithmic environments, where our experience is sort of tailored and so our experience of reality becomes isolated."

Five minutes with Hall is enough to discern that the 42-year-old is incredibly bright. She wears the benign expression of someone used to engaging with people on a shallower intellectual level, but she’s utterly affable and warm. She’s also an actor who picks her projects with great care, which is likely why we haven’t seen her on our TV screens since Parade’s End some 12 years ago (though she did appear briefly in Amazon Prime’s Tales from the Loop in 2020). Is this because nothing has appealed? "Yeah," she laughs. "I mean, is it that? Plenty of stuff has appealed that I haven’t got offered."

The appeal of working on The Listeners was very much linked to its director, Janicza Bravo, whom Hall had met before. "I’d developed a complete admiration crush on her. She's so insightful and so brilliant, and we immediately got on. I’d been hoping there would be an opportunity to work with her and when my agent told me about The Listeners, I definitely waged an aggressive campaign. I immediately got in touch with Janicza and asked to read it [the script]."

She says she didn’t do any research into hearing impairments – "not out of laziness, but because it was important that the character was ordinary and relatable. In that sense, the best job that you can do as an actor is to ask how you’d behave if this happened to you. So it wasn’t really rooted in anything beyond that."

At first, the sound department gave her an earpiece to wear during a take to enable her to hear the hum that no one else can hear, but she didn’t use it throughout the shoot. "I didn’t want to latch onto any sound that was too consistent. Claire goes to many different emotional places, so I wanted the sounds to shift. In a sense, imagination became easier than actually having something that was real."

Although she was helped, inadvertently, by the sound of the camera that Bravo used to shoot The Listeners. "It’s incredibly rare [to use 35mm film] for TV. One of its weird idiosyncrasies is that when the camera starts rolling, there’s this tick-tick-tick sound of the film turning over inside the camera. I’m a real believer in film. The granular quality and softness allows you to focus on different things, whereas the HD experience can sometimes create an alienating effect. There’s an immediacy to film that I think is closer to our experience of the world."

She says she shares a few characteristics with Claire. "Sound generally drives me a bit nuts. I’m very sensitive to it – this chair right now is driving me crazy. I can barely eat if there’s too much noise." Like Claire, she’s also a bad sleeper. "I’ve been terrible since I was seven years old."

Has she tried any remedies? "Everything. I have a system. I can sense if it’s going to be a bad patch and I know what to do. It’s a combination of magnesium, maybe a little melatonin, CBD oil.." She says she doesn’t know what started it. "No idea. Well, probably I do. I had quite an insane childhood, so it probably kicked off around then. But it quickly became something that was just my reality. It means I’ve always got a lot done," she says brightly. "I read a lot."

Interviewed by The New Yorker in 2017, Hall recounted how her parents, the opera singer Maria Ewing and the theatre impresario Sir Peter Hall (who divorced when she was seven) would take her along to dinner parties as a child and allow her "to stay up very late just to sit and listen to people". Can we assume she prefers to listen than talk? "Yes. I’m naturally a person that is curious about people. This is very unnatural for me," she smiles, alluding to being interviewed.

I tell her it’s unnatural for me, too, and that – no offence – I prefer writing to the interview process itself. "I'd rather be writing, too!" she smiles. "I'm writing a couple of things. I’ve always got a couple of things going."
She acknowledges that it’s not the easiest time for independent film-makers. "It’s difficult to get things off the ground at the moment. It’s a very risk-averse climate, although there are obviously big swings still being taken.

"Nobody really knows what the formula is for success. No one has ever known. I wish there were better avenues of funding for people who want to take artistic risk in this country, and also in America, where there’s no government subsidy at all."

Hall was born in London and read English literature at Cambridge, but has lived in America for the past ten years, a fact that surprises her. "I never really thought I’d moved. And then I woke up one day and realised that I had, without quite ever making the decision. I always thought of myself first and foremost as a Londoner." She lives in upstate New York ("rural nowhere – happily") with her husband, actor Morgan Spector, and their five-year-old daughter, Ida.

She confirms she's following up her 2021 directorial debut, Passing, with Four Days Like Sunday, a mother-daughter drama inspired by her own life, in which she’ll also star. "I timed out of getting fully financed this summer, and it’s a weather-dependent movie, so I have to regroup and take stock. But hopefully I’ll shoot that next year. I also have a couple of other things that I’m attached to directing. I’m in a slight 'throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks' situation".

Let’s hope it all sticks, for the world needs more Rebecca Hall.

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