“I mean, it was just so brilliant, resonating with nuance all over the place, like a playwright. “I’m reading this script, and I truly had trouble believing that that kid wrote this script,” Hall told the AV Club in 2012. Anderson, believing Hall hadn’t gotten his due in film, asked him to look at a script he had written for a 20-minute short film titled “Cigarettes & Coffee.”

The two would hang out, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee between scenes. Hall then encountered a production assistant in his early 20s named Paul Thomas Anderson. That changed when he was shooting a PBS program in 1992.

Hall made an impression in the smallest of roles in other films, like 1988′s “Midnight Run.” But outside of theater, Hall was mostly doing guest roles in television. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that Hall “draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor’s fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon’s feelings.” There he played Richard Nixon in the one-act play “Secret Honor,” a role he reprised in Robert Altman’s 1984 film adaptation.

While shooting bit parts in Hollywood (an episode of “Good Times” was one of his first gigs), Hall worked with the L.A. “I had an affinity for playing those roles.”īorn in Toledo, Ohio, Hall initially devoted himself more to theater in Los Angeles, after moving out in 1975, than TV and movies. “Men who are highly stressed, older men, who are at the limit of their tolerance for suffering and stress and pain,” Hall told the Washington Post in 2017.

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