A Conversation with Rebecca Hall

When she was a child, Rebecca Hall noticed that her mother didn’t look quite like all of the other mothers in the English countryside.

“At a certain point when I looked at my mother I thought, ‘That’s a Black woman,’ but no one ever said it.” Her mother intimated that her father, who had died when she was young, may have had Native American blood or maybe even Black blood. But they never really talked about it with any resolution.”

Netflix hosted an exclusive conversation with Rebecca Hall about her film, colorism, and honoring her black history.

Based on the novel by Nella Larsen, Hall’s film, Passing, film follows two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who can pass as white and choose to live on opposite sides of the color line in 1929 New York.