Clockwise from main:
Passing
protagonists Clare (Ruth Negga, left) and Irene (Tessa Thompson);
Alamy, Shutterstock
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Rebecca Hall was given a copy of Passing, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom was passing for white and married to a racist white man. It was a “revelation” for the actor, who had been getting to grips with her own family’s history; the actor’s father was the late, English theatre director Sir Peter Hall, and her mother was Marie Ewing, a Detroit-born biracial opera singer.
“There was a certain amount of mystery about her background,” Hall tells Empire. “My mum increasingly told me about incidents of very ugly racism towards her father and that was shocking for me, being raised as this privileged white kid.”
As she got older and began living in the US, Hall felt a responsibility to speak up about the continuing struggle for African-Americans. She began vocalising her heritage in white spaces that earned uncomfortable responses (“That says more about [them] than me,” she says), but after reading Larsen’s New York-set novel, she finally had the context to understand her family’s past.