Welcome to Casting Call. In this series I’ll be taking a look at the people who, arguably, most profoundly and most visibly effect our response to cinema; the actors. Each week I’ll profile and look at the career of an actor from one of the week’s cinema, blu ray or dvd releases, and discuss several of their films and performances.

I have slightly changed the format for this edition (and I’ll stick with this format from now on). In the previous format, I often found myself wanting to put the same film for Best Film and Best Performance, so from now on we’ll have the new category of Hidden Gem. You will also find that the three highlighted titles all link to that film’s LoveFilm page (Blu Ray where available), so you can easily add them to your list.

This week’s subject has been making films for only a few years (though she worked in TV both as a child and as an adult), but she has become one of the most in demand and versatile actresses working, splitting her time between mainstream and more independent work and deftly avoiding typecasting. This week her latest film; a detour into horror with ghost story The Awakening, opened in UK cinemas.

Name: Rebecca Maria Hall
Age: 29
Born: May 3rd, 1982
Family: Parents theatre and film director Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing, half siblings Edward, Lucy, Christopher and Jennifer
First Film: Starter For 10 (2006)
Next Film: Lay the Favourite (2012)

Rebecca Hall doesn’t talk much about her upbringing, but as a child with some interest in acting it must have been handy to have theatre, film and TV director Sir Peter Hall as a Father. Rebecca’s Father gave her her first role, playing the younger version of Claire Bloom’s character Sophy in his TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn. For whatever reason, she did little professional work as a child following this, instead excelling at school (she was head girl at Rodean private school) and attending Cambridge University for two years, where she acted in plays and set up a student theatre company.

Hall’s Father gave her a further break in 2002, casting her in her first professional theatre role, as Vivie in Mrs Warren’s Profession, it would be easy to level charges of nepotism, but her performance was prosed by critics, and won Hall first prize at the Ian Charleson Awards that year (she also received a special commendation the following year, for her Rosalind in her Father’s production of As You Like It.)

Hall got her first film roles in 2006, when she appeared in UK cinemas twice in the same week, in a pair of roles that advertised her versatility; as a University student in romantic comedy Starter for 10 and as Christian Bale’s tragic wife in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. From there she has gone on to a wide variety of parts, playing American with great aplomb in films as wide ranging as Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona (which she stole from under the noses of Scarlett Johannson and Penelope Cruz), Ben Affleck’s crime drama The Town and Everything Must Go (which just, somewhat unjustly, went direct to DVD in the UK). At home she has worked in film (The Awakening, flop mainstream excursion Dorian Gray), but has done more well regarded work on TV, notably opposite Rafe Spall in Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, and in the the first episode of Red Riding (which had a limited theatrical release in the US)

In the next 12 months Hall will be in Parade’s End; a World War 1 set mini series, adapted by Tom Stoppard for the BBC and HBO, and she’ll play against type in Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favourite, as a stripper involved in sports gambling.

For my money, Rebecca Hall is one of the most consistently interesting actors working. As well as being beautiful (see above and below), she exudes both intelligence and likeability, making her easy to empathise with in just about any role, however good or bad the film she’s in may be. I fell for her just about immediately on seeing Starter For 10, and on realising this was the same girl who was in The Prestige (it took me a while, which is a testament to how good she is) I began predicting big things for her. I’m pleased to be right. In small roles she leaves a big impression, without selfishly taking over the film (The Town is a great example of this) and she’s proving equally capable in leading roles, as in The Awakening, to which she brings a credibility which helps overcome much of the film’s cliché nature.

I predicted she’d go far, and I was right. Here’s another prediction. Rebecca Hall is 29, by the time she hits 40 she’ll be Academy Award Winner Rebecca Hall.

BEST FILM: The Town

Against everyone’s expectations, Ben Affleck has, with his first two films, shown himself to be an interesting and muscular filmmaker, with an arresting and immediate take on the modern crime drama. The Town, his second film, was a step up from the promising Gone Baby Gone (which collapsed in its last twenty minutes, with a plot twist that strained credulity past breaking point), and told the story of a group of bank robbers from the Charlestown area of Boston, which, apparently, regards bank and armoured car robbery as a trade to be passed down the generations. Affleck tells a lot of stories in the film, interweaving the crime story, the investigation, personal stories between the criminals and their families and a relationship that begins developing between Affleck’s Doug MacRay and Hall’s Claire Keesey. Unknown to her, when they meet MacRay is tracking her, she was the hostage in his gang’s latest bank robbery, and he needs to make sure that she can’t identify him or his friends.

The relationship that develops between them isn’t given a huge amount of screen time (even in the extended cut on the Blu Ray, Hall’s scenes probably amount to about half an hour), but it really does impact on the film in a big way, raising the stakes of the final heist sequence and, against all better judgement, making Doug somewhat empathetic. Hall doesn’t have many huge acting challenges here, largely her job is to be a normal young woman who has just had something extreme happen to her. She convinces completely, both at a technical level in that she gets the accent right, and at a character level. Though it’s not hugely developed, she manages to give weight to the idea that Claire is drawn to both Doug and the FBI agent (Jon Hamm) handling her case, and the relationship between Claire and Doug grows in an organic way. The biggest leap is buying into the idea that she’s still attracted to Doug at some level after he tells her how he knew her, and again, Hall pulls this off, and does so in the same way she does everything else; she keeps it small. Her best scene comes as she asks Doug about his past and the heist, you can see the weight of the answers on her, feel how betrayed she feels, but she doesn’t go for the obvious histrionics that moment could invite.

It’s a great lesson in being a supporting actor in the best way; quietly giving a brilliant performance, without trying to take over the film, which doesn’t belong to her character.

HIDDEN GEM: Starter For 10

I unashamedly love Starter For 10 (wonderful, one more chink in my credibility). I know that it’s generic romantic comedy at (or at least close to) its most hackneyed, but it’s well done, smart and entertaining and engagingly acted by James McAvoy and by Hall.

McAvoy plays Brian, a working class kid off to Bristol University with a burning ambition both to learn and to appear on University Challenge. Once he arrives though, life gets complicated, as he finds himself attracted to both Challenge team mate Alice (Alice Eve) and student activist Rebecca (Hall). It is painfully obvious how the romantic plot is going to work out (and we should all have such problems as choosing between Alice Eve and Rebecca Hall as prospective girlfriends), but I never minded, because I was too busy enjoying the film’s surprisingly deft combination of dialogue and slapstick driven jokes, and warming to all the characters (or booing the appropriate ones, like Benedict Cumberbatch, hilarious as University Challenge team leader Patrick).

Hall, as Rebecca Epstein, is instantly loveable, to the point that you want to grab Brian and throttle him for pursuing the pretty, but ultimately vapid, Alice first. From what I’ve seen of the real Rebecca Hall, this is the character who seems most like her; intelligent, cultured, witty, and basically outright adorable, she’s got great chemistry with McAvoy, and that really makes you feel for Rebecca when they keep almost hooking up (along with making you want to slap Brian again, the moron).

I like that Starter For 10, though it is largely familiar, doesn’t always do what’s expected, and it lets its main character be a screw up in a believable way (rather than forcing a third act conflict the way so many rom com’s do), and also that it doesn’t suggest that after the credits Rebecca and Brian are going to live happily ever after; it’s just a well observed little rom com about university relationships, and it hits the genre beats well, making each work in a way that most genre entries don’t, largely because, almost uniquely among modern rom com couples, both Brian and Rebecca seem to actually deserve love (the bastards in The Ugly Truth, for instance, really don’t). It’s a shame this never did Four Weddings type business, and instead got lost in the shuffle, I’d recommend seeking it out.

ONE TO MISS: Please Give

Nicole Holofcener makes films that I feel I should like, and that I want to like, but which I never end up liking. It’s tough when talking about Rebecca Hall to suggest that this is a film to miss, because she’s easily the best thing about it (and in the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t seen Dorian Gray, and if I had I’m betting that would be here).

The problem is that Hall’s Rebecca (seriously, what is it with her playing characters that share her name?) is the only likeable or relateable character in the whole film, everyone else is a bundle of meanspirited self interest, obsessed with their own deeply middle class and prosaic problems. I’m afraid I can’t go into much detail here, because I haven’t seen the film since it came out, and I’ve seen close to 1000 other films since then. I find it very difficult, however much I may be impressed by other things, to warm to a film in which I don’t find the characters either fun or interesting to spend time with, and I’d move house to avoid most of the people in Please Give, which is what makes it, for me, of marginally less interest than the weak Woody Allen Hall featured in (and was also the best thing about).