Women's Lifestyle June 13, 2026 0 Comments

Unlocking Timeless Beauty Secrets: Why Rebecca Hall Can’t Stop Watching Bette Davis’ Cold Cream Ritual—And What It Means for Your Glow-Up

Ever caught yourself wondering what it’d be like if your life suddenly got interrupted by a mysterious humming only you could hear? No? Just me? Well, that’s exactly the eerie twist Rebecca Hall explores as Claire in Starz’s The Listeners—a role that, like everything she touches, promises to be utterly compelling. Hall’s knack for drawing you into worlds layered with nuance and raw emotion has never been more apparent—from her subtle brilliance opposite Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar’s Day to her upcoming project with Ira Sachs, The Man I Love. It’s fascinating how an actress so grounded and yet so adventurous in her choices navigates career highs, the sting of rejection, and the sheer unpredictability of the acting grind. Intrigued yet? Stick around as we dive into her journey, the quirky ways she handles those dreaded “no’s,” and why this latest series might just be her most politically charged work yet. Grab a cup—this is a 9-minute read that’s worth every second. LEARN MORE

9 min read

Rebecca Hall is the kind of actress whose very presence in a project you can trust will make any movie, TV show, or play, worth watching. After a turn opposite Ben Whishaw in last year’s quietly brilliant Peter Hujar’s Day, she’s back on the small screen as Claire, an English teacher who suddenly starts hearing a low humming noise that she can’t decipher, and that threatens to derail her life in Starz’s The Listeners. Based on the novel of the same name by Jordan Tannahill, the short series is directed by Janicza Bravo. She is also reuniting with Ira Sachs in The Man I Love, his follow-up to Peter Hujar’s Day, a dramatic film he also co-wrote which stars Rami Malek as Jimmy George, a theater actor living with AIDS in 1980s New York.

Harper’s Bazaar’s newest questionnaire series, “First, Now, Next,” dives into the past, present, and future of some of our favorite creatives, spotlighting the moments and influences that have influenced them. We hopped on a call with Rebecca Hall a week before her latest series The Listeners debuts in the United States. The conversation flowed easily and Hall was thoughtful and open with her answers. Read on to learn about her teen idols, rejection rituals, and why The Listeners might be one of her most political projects to date.

What was the first film that cracked something open in you?

[Picking one] is almost impossible. I’ve been watching movies since before I can remember. My father was a theater director, so I was going to play and watching movies from when I was tiny, tiny, tiny. So I honestly can’t remember not having a love for movies and thinking about how that world worked. I do remember being utterly obsessed with All About Eve as a child, I was maybe nine. I found the way they all talked in this preposterously verbose intellectual manner that’s not really realistic to be just amazing. I was like, this world of adults in the theater with their tempestuous nightmarish personalities and Bette Davis putting on cold cream in front of a makeup mirror—this is everything to me.

What was the first project that made you realize that this was all going to work out for you?

Oh no, I think I’’m still looking for that one. I think it’s true the thing actors often say is that—or maybe it was Judy Dench who said it… the best thing about being an actor is the phone call saying you’ve got the job, and then the rest of the time you’re wondering if you’re ever going to work again. And if you are working, then you’re wondering if you’re good enough. So the only moment when you’re not worrying about whether you get to keep doing this for the rest of your life is the phone call when you’ve got a job.

Have you had a failure that ended up changing your career?

Yes, because I’m quite convinced that 90% of what you do as an artistic person is failure. It doesn’t necessarily look that way from the outside, but trust me, not everything hits, not everything works, not everything is even really seen. So I think every failure is part of that creative journey. At a certain point you do have to just take value in the work and not think about the outcomes in that respect. There are so many more nos than anyone ever knows about. It’s a vast amount. All actors work out a way of dealing with it fairly early on, otherwise you don’t keep going. I suspect there are many, many talented people who are not acting because that aspect of it was unbearable—which I understand by the way.

Will Robson-Scott

Rebecca Hall as Claire in The Listeners.

How do you deal with the no’s?

Extreme bitterness, alcohol, and voodoo dolls. (Laughs) How do I deal with it? It’s easier since I started directing because the thing that you get told a lot as actors is like, “It’s not personal.” Well, it is personal, but in the sense that the director had a vision for something and it just wasn’t you. But I guess there’s just always like 24 hours of misery and then I get over it is kind of how I look at it. I’m grumpy for a bit and then I go and garden, I paint something, and I feel better.

How did you define success at 16? How would you define it now?

I think when I was 16, I was very anti-establishment; it was that late ’90s, early 2000s counterculture. In my adolescence, your cool was defined by how unheard-of your music taste was, so I think actually that sort of filtered into how I thought of success as an artist and I was pretty avant-garde about it. I was like these mainstream markers of success are nonsense, you got to be this underground quiet, brilliant force.

The truth is that is the sort of path that I have paved actually. That is sort of my career and sometimes it annoys the shit out of me because I’m like… “Why?” But then other days I’m like, this is exactly what I wanted. As I’ve got older, the way that I’ve changed is that I’m less frightened to put my toe in a kind of mainstream situation. It’s like, does it look like an interesting, fun thing to do? I’m not thinking of it in terms of whether it’s mainstream or it’s not mainstream or whatever, but do I want to do it or do I not? That’s the kind of artist I always wanted to be. I keep thinking of my 16-year-old self now that you’ve asked me this question, and it’s like all of my idols were the ones that were doing things because they were interesting, so that’s good.

Who were some of those idols?

I didn’t have ones that were particularly easy to follow. My heroes were Barbara Stanwick and Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands, but also my heroes were artists and poets and musicians.They weren’t people that you couldn’t follow their path because their path was unique. But that was the lesson—you make your own path. You’re following a vibe.

Photographer: Des Willie

Can you hear it?

What attracted you to The Listeners?

Speaking of vibes… The Listeners was the most vibey thing that I think I’ve ever come across. I remember it really clearly, I was taking a meeting with my agents in LA and I was having a real slightly despairing kind of grumpy moment where I was like, “Where’s the interesting shit?” And then one of them said, “Oh, there’s this project about a woman that starts hearing a noise and she doesn’t know where it’s coming from and everything starts unraveling from that.” And I was like, “A noise?” And they’re like, “Oh, and it’s directed by Janicza Bravo.” And I was like, “That’s it, that’s the one that I’m talking about. Get me that script and get me that job.”

The project is so off-kilter. It’s so unlike anything and I think it defies all expectations and doesn’t fit into any box, and that’s the kind of thing that I do like doing. As a result, it’s difficult to place—it’s too short to be a limited series and it’s too long to be a movie. Instead it’s five hours of an art house, very interpretive movie. I like a text that you have to engage with and interpret and doesn’t make a ton of sense. It’s got flavors of Lynch, but it’s also got the sort of romantic, New Wave French cinema in there as well—but they’re very real characters at the center of it, grounding it. Everything about it was just my cup of tea.

The show came out in England in 2024 and now it’s being released in the States, so you’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it. Has the way you see it changed throughout the years?

It’s changed because I think it’s one of the more quietly political things that I’ve ever done. I don’t really know what I mean by that, because I think what it’s trying to say is very complex, and I would leave that up to the audience to work out what I mean by that. But it seems to only get more potent as time has gone by and I go back to it and I’m kind of astonished by it. It’s a sort of brilliant articulation of how beliefs get formed in isolation, if that makes sense, which is something that I think on a macro and micro scale, we’re always dealing with in our increasingly bifurcated, isolated society. It’s like we don’t get real-time check-ins with each other about what our reality is so much; instead, we’re in these kind of echo chambers. I think the story of this woman who has this very unusual experience that is not credible to anyone around her is a really interesting metaphorical articulation of that, that yields a lot. It’s very potent.

What are you saying “no” to now? What are you saying “yes” to?

I think I’m maybe saying no to things that feel a little heavy on my soul for a minute. I’ve done a lot of stuff where I felt strong enough to go to a place that was going to be psychologically hard and live there. And I feel stronger in many ways, but I think I feel so strong that I don’t need to do it for a minute. I want to do more things that have more light in them, more comedy or comedy-leaning, not necessarily straight comedy, but I want more of that.

I’m saying yes to the same things that I’ve always said yes to—the things that seem like they’re going to give me joy.

What’s something your mom/dad did that drove you crazy but that you do now too?

Work too much.

You’ve worked with Ira Sachs twice, first on Peter Hujar’s Day and now on the forthcoming The Man I love, what’s your favorite thing about working with him?

I like working with anyone that has a unique point of view and has a precise will. Those are the filmmakers that I’m interested in. It’s not about their version of reality particularly, it’s just about them having a version of reality. I want to be involved in it and get inside their brains and be a part of that world for a minute.

Were there big differences between those two sets?

Well, Peter Hujar’s Day was a very unique sort of set because there was only the one location, and we were shooting for not a very long amount of time, and it was just me and Ben. I don’t think any set that I will ever be on again will be anything like that one.

It was like workshopping a play over the course of a week or whatever. So we’d be working and talking and then suddenly Ira would be shooting it—he’d also shoot the stuff when we weren’t doing it. There was this sort of whole meta element going on, so we didn’t really know what the hell he was making on some level. We were like, “Oh, he’s shooting me, getting my makeup done. What is this? What’s happening?” And it was sort of mysterious, but we were all game. It felt genuinely experimental, not like trying to be experimental in a performative way.

The Man I Love felt more like a movie set, but still, it’s an Ira movie set and it’s very particular. Everything is exactly so. Every color of the wall, every costume, every way of delivery. He really doesn’t want actors to act in any way, which is a really interesting exercise for an actor because you have to really reckon with yourself about your tricks and things that you do because he just wants to dissolve all of that. You never rehearse because he wants all the messiness to be on camera. His sets are very unique to him.

If you could single-handedly dictate the next big trend in culture, what would it be?

I would make being enigmatic cool again. Like, when’s the last time that someone became famous for being completely unknowable? I’ve been thinking about this a lot because everyone’s talking about Love Story, and [Carolyn Bessette Kennedy] was never really interviewed. She was so enigmatic and that’s part of the appeal. You can’t do that these days because there’s so much in the way you get famous, the way you get is to just bear it all the time. So let’s bring that back.

If you retired from your industry today, what would you do in your next act?

Oh, I would design gardens.