Iron Man 3's Rebecca Hall on new BBC drama The Listeners
For Rebecca Hall, conspiracy theories and cultures have become an integral part of the Western world.
But the 42-year-old BAFTA-winning English actor and director, who plays Claire in a new BBC One series The Listeners, and stars in Iron Man 3, still wants to be incredibly objective about the matter, because of the growing need for community.
The Listeners, based on the novel of the same name by Jordan Tannahill and directed by American film director and screenwriter Janicza Bravo, is about a popular English teacher who starts to hear a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear.
"I see Claire as a person. I see her as me,” says Hall. “How would I behave if this happened to me? It was basically my preparation for acting. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s pretty simplistic, but also feels honest. Understanding that she could be any of us is important.
“She starts the story very much living in an empirical-based world. All of her belief systems are about empirical veracity and then it all shifts because of something relatively small. It was very important to me, that I played it at that level and didn’t make her special or unusual, she’s relatable.”
As the noise starts to interfere with Claire’s day-to-day life and increase tensions between herself and her husband, Paul, played by British actor Prasanna Puwanarajah, 43, who stars in The Crown, and daughter, Ashley, played by Mia Tharia, 19, Claire finds no medial answers. But she discovers that a student of hers, Kyle, played by Ollie West, 20, can also hear the seemingly innocuous noise.
As the pair forge an unlikely and intimate friendship, they become increasingly isolated from their loved ones, and fall in with a disparate group of neighbours, who also claim they can hear The Hum – and who believe it could be a gift, heard only by a “chosen few”.
"I think the relationship with Kyle is not the one that you think it might be from the outset, in terms of the tropes,” reflects Hall. “It’s more about the notion of connection, she is forced into a situation where she has parity with someone that she would have [none with] on some level, or have no grounds for a connection that is shared by an experience unless this happened, and so it’s sort of unavoidable.
"She has to talk to him because he’s going through the same thing. We all would, if you’re going through something, and you think you’re the only person in the world going through it, and then you come across someone else who’s going through it, whoever they are, you would want to have that connection because that’s human.
“But of course, it’s charged and dangerous because it’s an inappropriate connection, because of the power imbalance, and of all the reasons why it’s wrong. She’s his teacher but at the same time it’s unavoidable, but it’s not as simplistic as it’s an attraction. It isn’t an attraction. It’s something different.”
The Listeners comes to BBC One and iPlayer on Tuesday, November 19