In much of her work but in particular the Scary Movie franchise, Regina Hall is comfortably the funniest woman of 21st century cinema. In those horror spoofs, she specialises in immaculately smart-stupid, stupid-smart character work, clown by way of a mad scientist. To call her loud on-screen feels disrespectful. Outrageous, even more so. Think of her prime skillset as more like a kind of avant-garde insanity, built upon line readings (“Cindy, the TV’s leaking”; “Cindy, this is a skeleton! This is bones!”) that have been made immortal by memes, TikToks and YouTube compilations. I find Hall hilarious. Does she?
“Hmm!” she exclaims, down the phone from her current base in New Jersey, where she’s been filming. “I know that my friends are funny. I have a funny family for sure.”
I sense she’s thinking of it like mathematics. Funny person plus funny person equals… you’re probably funny, too? “But humour’s subjective, right?” she counters. “Humour’s a very tricky thing.”
Hall is more of a cerebral comic, then, who approaches jokes with the same thoughtfulness as she’d approach the shedding of a tear in a far heavier drama. She deciphers the nuts and bolts of a line, and the reasons behind them. Perhaps that’s why she’s so great across the board: she brought maternal yet increasingly bruised conviction to the role of a doomed freedom-fighter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another last year, and has bracketed the frivolity of Scary Movie and the 2017 smash Girls Trip with turns in smart, downbeat indies like 2018’s Support the Girls, for which she became the first Black woman to win the Best Actress prize at the New York Film Critics Circle.
“I’ve had heartbreak and disappointments, and joy and peace and laughter,” she says. “My life has always informed my work rather than the other way around. So it’s kind of like I’m just over here surviving the human experience and trying to make my lemonade.” She giggles. “Some days it’s sweeter than others, you know?”
Paul Thomas Anderson and I always had that conversation about what happened to her. I think she’s dead. Paul thinks she’s in jail … Neither trajectory is amazing
We’re here today to talk about The Five Star Weekend, a frothy new limited series on Sky and Now about a group of disparate women linked by their individual friendships with Jennifer Garner’s Hollis. Several months after the death of her husband, Hollis gathers the women together for a weekend of fun and emotional catharsis. Chloë Sevigny’s Tatum is awaiting medical results. D’Arcy Carden’s Brooke has a dodgy husband. Gemma Chan’s mysterious Gigi has a devastating secret. Hall’s Dru-Ann is a sports agent in the middle of a PR nightmare – she publicly shamed her star client Posey after she announced a mental health break, and is weathering the consequences.
“I liked that she was outspoken in a very normally male-dominated world,” Hall says. “And that her mouth gets her into trouble. That’s always interesting to play.”
There’s an arrogance to Dru-Ann, too, Hall suggests. “She never examined the way that she is,” she says. “She looks at Posey and thinks, ‘You have an opportunity that I didn’t have, and I don’t want you to squander it.’ But she forgets that just because she’s older, it doesn’t mean she knows better.”
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I tell Hall that Dru-Ann felt very real, in how we’re typically instructed to be forthright and confident, but not too much, lest we be judged. It’s like one long internal battle. But Hall seems a little unconvinced. “Maybe,” she says. “Everyone’s internal compass is different, isn’t it? For some people it may be a battle. For others it may just be.”
There’s a point early on in the show in which Dru-Ann writes a NotesApp apology for how she’s treated Posey, which she screenshots and publishes to her Instagram. It doesn’t go well. NotesApp apologies are practically a celebrity rite of passage at this point, I tell Hall. But she’s always been entirely scandal-free, I notice. There are no dubious quotes out there. No real public dating history, either. Has it been intentional to remain vaguely enigmatic as a movie star?
“I can honestly say I’ve never thought about it,” she says. “Maybe earlier in my career I would have been more free with any thoughts I felt compelled to express. But probably no one would have wanted to hear them anyway…”
What’s interesting about Hall, though, is that she originally studied to be a journalist, which may explain why she’s so good at giving away so little to people like me.
“I did learn what ‘off-the-record’ meant,” she laughs. “I mean, that’s probably helped.” It’s meant she’s always known to say “off-the-record!” in interviews before she starts saying anything she “wouldn’t want the world to know”. “Because you can’t say it after, then it’s like… too late! And I know that all thanks to my time at NYU.”
Hall studied journalism with a plan to produce long-form news reports for television, only for her father to die suddenly from a stroke during her very first semester. A friend suggested she could make extra money by appearing in commercials, which landed her an agent. “It was never something planned, but many of our biggest pivots in life aren’t,” she says. “In the middle of all of this grief, I finished my journalism programme, then decided to really study acting. So it was like life happened, I started this and loved it, and now years later I’m on the phone to you.”
Work was more or less instant. She provided valuable support in Black Y2K touchstones like The Best Man (1999) and Love & Basketball (2000), then was cast in Scary Movie (2000). She reprised the role of the narcissistic, probably psychologically unwell Brenda Meeks in four of its five sequels (despite being killed in two of them), and most recently in June’s Scary Movie 6. Despite their success, the movies had notoriously chaotic productions – Marlon and Shawn Wayans, who created the franchise with their father, the filmmaker Keenan Ivory Wayans, were fired after 2001’s Scary Movie 2 by producer Harvey Weinstein, and finally took back ownership of the series with 6.
“Scary Movie was only my third movie, so there were many things I didn’t know back then,” Hall says now. “At the time I didn’t have any access to the behind-the-scenes stuff they were dealing with. I’m just very happy that they were able to reclaim what was theirs.”
I’m curious how she’s dealt with some of the spicier gags in those movies, particularly when they involve celebrities that Hall ended up working with. Scary Movie saw her parody Jada Pinkett Smith’s vaguely overblown public murder in Scream 2, and she went on to work with Pinkett Smith in Girls Trip. A memorable gag in Scary Movie 2 in which Brenda compares a dusty skeleton to the famously trim Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart came just as Hall herself joined the actual cast of Ally McBeal for its final season. Did it ever get, well, awkward?
“They were both pretty wonderful, to be honest with you,” she says. “Calista was lovely. Jada’s a real class act. I hope that everyone knows that the intention is never to be malicious with that kind of joke. And also it’s Brenda, you know? Something’s wrong with Brenda.” She cackles. “Like I’m not the person making those comments, it’s this person with a very specific way of looking at the world. Her lens is only hers, which is what I love about her.”
She says her gradual shift to drama over the years was never intentional. “There’s just been a lot of luck, some divine timing, some God in there,” she says. “And I guess that idea of always wanting to do something different each time.” One Battle came to her directly through Paul Thomas Anderson, her next-door neighbour of years, who asked her one day if she’d play Deandra for him – Hall has described her as the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure of the film, a careful observer within a group of far-left revolutionaries. I tell Hall that I saw Deandra as the film’s heart, and its biggest tragedy. She was probably the most serious and devoted of her regime, and paid the price for it. The last time we see her she is in tears, handcuffed by military troops.
“Paul and I always had that conversation about what happened to her,” she says. “I think she’s dead. Paul thinks she’s in jail. But I think they killed her because she wasn’t important to them anymore. She was the last one standing.”
That’s awfully bleak, I suggest.
“I mean, neither trajectory is amazing,” Hall laughs. She says she loved Deandra. “She had a quietness to her soul, but a strength. She was wonderful to play.”
It’s funny, I tell her, that so many outlets – from The Hollywood Reporter to Vulture – described One Battle After Another as a real career breakthrough for her. She’s had a few over the years. The New York Times previously described the one-two punch of Girls Trip and Support the Girls as “something akin to breakout stardom” in 2019. And, years before that, she’d had the Scary Movies and a raft of hits.
“I just assume that different audiences discover me at different times,” she says. “Some careers start quick, but I’ve had a slow and steady run. I don’t even know if ‘slow’ is right, honestly. More just steady. I mean, I’ve definitely never been an overnight sensation.”
Does it ever bother her?
“No! I take it as a very wonderful compliment. Not being synonymous with a particular project is one of the great joys of my career.”
It’s exactly how she likes it, I suppose. Sometimes hilarious. Sometimes tragic. Always making lemonade.
‘The Five Star Weekend’ is available on Sky Atlantic and Now
