Regina Hall on fame, endurance, and coming into her own in the acclaimed new thriller Master
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In another world, Regina Hall might have been the one writing this article. She has a master's degree in journalism from NYU, though she only got to use it briefly before acting got in the way: "I was a professor for a short time," the star of films like Girls Trip and the Scary Movie franchise admits. "My mother was like, 'You just like to go to school!' and I did." Still, she couldn't have guessed that her current profession would send her back to campus more than two decades later in director Mariama Diallo's chilling Sundance breakout Master (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video).
In it she plays Gail Collins, a Black dean of students at a prestigious New England college whose faculty housing may or may not be haunted — both by the demons of a deeply segregated past and actual malevolent spirits. "I remember reading it and thinking it was such an interesting context for a thriller," the Washington, D.C., native says of taking a chance on a low-budget indie from a first-time filmmaker. "Mariama was so smart when we talked, and she definitely had a vision. And I loved that she was a woman. You don't get that many opportunities, white or Black or Latina, to have a female director."
"When I heard that she had read the script and she was contemplating it, I was a little numb with disbelief," confesses the Senegalese American Diallo, 34. "Then I was like, 'Now you've got to catch Regina. You've got to seal the deal!'" The pair met and quickly bonded over their shared geekery: "Regina and I were both Lisa Simpsons in a way," Diallo says. "I think she could've been a professional student, and I loved school when I was a kid. But then there's obviously another side of it, the social part of your experience. It's something that we definitely had a lot of conversations about."
Indeed, while the story is steeped in supernatural elements, the real terror often comes from the deluge of micro- and macro-aggressions that Gail and an incoming freshman named Jasmine (The Quad's Zoe Renee) endure daily at a university whose snow-covered grounds aren't the only overwhelmingly white thing about it.
"I think that was definitely a question that I wanted to pose: What's the most horrific thing going on here?" says Diallo, whose time as a Yale undergrad heavily informed the script. "For me, this entire film has been a process of unpacking my own experience and examining the ways that I was able to get through a really hostile environment and emerge on the other side, and what it took out of me to be able to do that. That core of menace hanging over the characters is so important in shaping the atmosphere."
Emily V Aragones/© 2022 AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC Regina Hall in 'Master'
The movie's success hinges in large part on Hall's ability to sell Gail's slow unraveling, often without saying a word, and she gives the kind of delicately shaded performance whose depth reveals itself in onion-like layers. That may be news to viewers who know the 51-year-old actress best from broad comedies like Think Like a Man and Barbershop: The Next Cut, but those who've caught her recent work on the limited Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers and the '80s Wall Street redux Black Monday, which recently ended a three-season run on Showtime, have seen the wild swings and subtle shifts she's capable of. An indelible turn in the 2018 indie Support the Girls as the frazzled, bighearted manager of a sports-bar "breastaurant" earned her some of the best notices of her career, including awards from several critics' groups.
"It was such a small movie," she recalls, "but the critics, they gave it life, which was so wonderful. And especially because it came after Girls Trip, which was such a different kind of film." Trip, costarring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, and Tiffany Haddish, became an unlikely phenomenon, earning more than $140 million at the box office and turning Haddish into a star overnight. For Hall, who literally soft-launched her career between classes in grad school — "My manager would be like, 'If you miss another audition…' and I was like, 'I'm doing a thesis!'" — it all still seems like a lucky accident. But bookings for soap operas and commercials soon led to small roles in movies like 2000's Love and Basketball and on the TV shows NYPD Blue and Ally McBeal (on which she eventually became a series regular). Four Scary Movies followed, and a host of ensemble pieces like The Best Man and Death at a Funeral.
"I was always just happy when I worked," Hall confesses, "For me, I love drama and comedy the same. But I did find that once I did it, it was maybe harder for me to get dramatic roles because people would say, 'Oh, she's a comedian.' So I felt like, 'Oh my goodness, am I ever going to get serious roles?'… I think there's always a part of you that's like, 'I hope I work again.' I don't know if that ever goes away."
Thankfully, she says, she no longer has to audition — in fact the logline on her next project, the splashy satire Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, in which she costars with This Is Us' Sterling K. Brown as two fallen televangelists, asked for a "Regina Hall type." (Guess who got the part.) Brown has a ball with his peacocking reverend, but Hall brings real pain and pathos to the film (which also premiered at Sundance, and is due in theaters this September) as a loyal church wife whose faith will be severely tested.
If the idea of an actress finding the richest roles of her career as she enters her 50s sounds like a Hollywood fairy tale, Hall — who seems confoundingly immune to the effects of time even barefaced in the blaring late-winter light of a Zoom screen, her hair scraped up into a messy bun — accepts it for the gift that it is. There are still plenty of items on her bucket list; she'll be one of three emcees at this year's Oscars, and would love to showcase her comedic skills one day on SNL. But the fact that peers like Salma Hayek, Halle Berry, and her Strangers costar Nicole Kidman are able to be whole and sexual and seen on screen in midlife matters: "Well, listen, Bette Davis was playing an ingenue at, what was it, 48?" she says, laughing. "But what I love now is appreciating a woman at every age. A baby's cute at 5, but you're not mad when it's 10. You're appreciating every version of this evolution. And I think that's beautiful."
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