Rebecca Hall has complicated feelings about her Woody Allen apology
In 2018, Rebecca Hall made a statement saying she was "profoundly sorry" for working with Woody Allen on A Rainy Day In New York, saying, "I regret this decision and wouldn’t make the same one today." In 2024, she now says she regrets her decision to make the statement, and wouldn't make the same one today. "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," she says in a new interview with The Guardian. Feelings about Allen and his alleged actions aside, "I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation.”
Hall recalls being "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. There’s a bank of journalists and paparazzi right there, because Weinstein’s a producer on it, and they’re all listening to me say this." From then on she "was in a tangle" being asked in every interview about not just about Allen—who was accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow—but Weinstein's, too. She made her apology (and a pledge to donate her Rainy Day salary to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund) out of a desire "to do something definitive" in a cultural moment of "redressing a balance" about believing women's stories.
However, “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," Hall says. She specifies that she doesn'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." An actual judge found that Allen's behavior towards Dylan was "grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her," but what happened in 1992 is not Hall's point. She says her "policy actually is to be an artist," and regardless of personal beliefs she just wouldn't make that kind of public statement today: "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."