Actor and director Rebecca Hall has always had to fight to define herself. Now, more comfortable than ever with where she is, she opens up about painting, working with Woody Allen, her Byo wedding – and her greatest indulgence

We all thought that we knew Rebecca Hall – English rose, on stage since childhood, daughter of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s founder Sir Peter Hall, regularly described in Hollywood as one of the best actors of her generation. But in 2021 she took what she calls now “a big swing” and suddenly the whole story cracked in half.

The big swing was her directorial debut, Passing, a film about two women of colour, one of whom is “passing” for white; Hall had been working on the story for 15 years, but thinking about it for far longer. Her maternal grandfather, a doorman from Detroit, passed as white, as did Hall’s mother the opera singer Maria Ewing,...