Rebecca Hall On Getting Into Character For ‘The Listeners’ & Why The BBC Series Is A “Four-Hour Movie”
EXCLUSIVE: Rebecca Hall has revealed how she got into the character of a woman who hears a constant, low humming sound in BBC series The Listeners.
Adapted from the Jordan Tannahill novel, Hall plays English teacher Claire, tormented by the sound and desperate to make it stop.
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Speaking to Deadline on the eve of TIFF, where it is world premiering, Hall said she developed a trick to help her get into character.
“What was helpful was we were shooting on film,” said the Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire star. “Digital is silent but with film you can hear the sound of the whir. Sooner or later I latched onto that as my hum. It was comfortable and helped me be where I needed to be.”
After a while, Hall said “it became the thing of the character, I knew it was there and it was a sort of companion.”
Director Janicza Bravo experimented with playing a low hum at points during filming, but she joked that there were complaints. “You don’t want to stress the crew out,” she added.
Airing later this year, The Listeners starts with Claire hearing the innocuous noise but slowly it consumes her, creating tension with husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and daughter Ashley (Mia Tharia). Despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found, but when she discovers that a student of hers, Kyle (Ollie West), can also hear the sound, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship, and then discover more who can hear the hum. Normal People maker Element Pictures is producing and Fremantle is selling.
Hall was immediately sold by the “intriguing premise” and was keen to work with Bravo, who she had admired after the pair featured on a Q&A panel several years back.
While the show could be deemed sci-fi and is exploratory in places, BAFTA-winning Parade’s End star Hall and Zola director Bravo said they were both attracted by its being rooted in reality compared to some of their previous projects.
“In relation to the people I have played of late she is quite normal and that appealed to me as I could play a sort of version of myself,” said Hall, whose prior TV role was Prime Video’s Tales from the Loop. “I thought about this idea that we’re all walking round thinking that the world operates exactly how it operates and everything is calm and then you think about physics for two seconds and suddenly you’re scratching the fabric of the universe away. The proximity to that chaos is with us all the time – the idea of something that seems so innocuous and banal as a noise can reframe and re-contextualize your very being.”
Hall was captivated by the idea of a show that “exists in the real world but is constantly making you re-evaluate what ‘normal’ is for you.”
Bravo said the project was “very straight” compared to some of her prior works, when “what tends to come my way is a little bit stranger.”
“After Zola there was certainly a tonality of things coming my way but what turned me on about this was it felt different,” she added. “I was excited by the challenge of making something ‘straight’ but also that didn’t have humor. I think of myself as a comedy director but this doesn’t have a lot of jokes in it.”
Bravo has tended to take on one or two episodes of TV shows such as FX drama Mrs. America but for The Listeners she helmed the entire block, spending months in the UK where the show was filmed around Manchester. She enjoyed the challenge, saying “it made me want to work outside of home more.”
“Most of my experiences in the U.S. have been episodic almost like an Airbnb experience,” she added. “This was definitely like, ‘We’re building the house, we live here and we bought land’.”
“Some movies aren’t that much shorter”
Hall will be promoting at TIFF where The Listeners is world premiering, which she said gives an “incredible platform.”
In the week that Alfonso Cuarón suggested his The Disclaimer Apple TV+vseries could potentially be re-tooled for Oscar consideration, Hall described The Listeners as a “four hour movie.”
“There is so much innovative TV happening and I feel very proud to be at TIFF because this stands up with the best films that I have been a part of,” she said.
“I don’t look at it like TV. It’s shot like a movie, it has the aesthetic ambitions of a movie and the point of a view of a movie. Some movies aren’t that much shorter.”
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