Rebecca Hall is reflecting on her public statement denouncing director Woody Allen six years after the abuse allegations resurfaced.
After Allen’s ex-wife Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times calling out actors who still collaborate with the alleged molester, Hall shared on Instagram in 2018 that she had second thoughts about starring in Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York.” Hall had previously led Allen’s 2008 film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
“After reading and re-reading Dylan Farrow’s statements of a few days ago and going back and reading the older ones – I see, not only how complicated this matter is, but that my actions have made another woman feel silenced and dismissed,” Hall wrote at the time. “That is not something that sits easily with me in the current or indeed any moment, and I am profoundly sorry. I regret this decision and wouldn’t make the same one today.”
Hall also announced that she was donating her salary from the film to the Time’s Up campaign. Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Jude Law, Selena Gomez, Liev Schrieber, and Diego Luna also appeared in “A Rainy Day In New York.”
Now, Hall is telling The Observer that she regrets wading into the controversy at the during the MeToo movement.
“I struggle with this one,” Hall said when asked her thoughts on Allen today in 2024. “It’s very unlike me to make a public statement about anything. I make the stuff, that’s how I am political. I don’t think of myself as an ‘actor-vist’, I’m not that person. And, I kind of regret making that statement, because I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation.”
Hall cited a particular scene during production that led her to make a public statement.
“I was outside, shooting a street scene with Jude Law where, literally, my dialogue was, ‘You’ve got to stop sleeping with these fucking 15-year-olds.’ And that day, the Weinstein scandal breaks,” Hall said. “There’s a bank of journalists and paparazzi right there, because Weinstein’s a producer on [the film], and they’re all listening to me say this.”
She continued, “And I was in a tangle. Like, in this moment, it’s the most important thing to believe the women. Yes, of course, there’s going to be complications and nuances in these stories, but we’re redressing a balance here. So I felt like I wanted to do something definitive. But it just became, ‘another person denounces Woody Allen and regrets working with him’, which is not what I said actually. I don’t regret working with him. He gave me a great job opportunity and he was kind to me.”
And outside of Hall’s own interactions with Allen, the actress/director is saying that she can’t speak to others’ experiences.
“I have no idea. I don’t talk to him any more, but I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this,” Hall said, adding if the allegations were made public now, “I wouldn’t say anything – my policy actually is to be an artist. Don’t come out and state your stuff so much. I don’t think that makes me apathetic or not engaged. I just think it’s my job.”
Hall went on to make her own directorial debut with “Passing” in 2022 and is set to direct her sophomore feature.
The allegations against writer/director Allen were first made public in 1992. Allen went on to later marry Mia Farrow’s other adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. The allegations from Dylan Farrow were revisited in HBO docuseries “Allen v. Farrow” in 2021.
