Regina Hall Ignores An Over-Flooding Toilet To Chat About Body-Swap Comedy ‘Little’
"Wait, I think we're having a flood?... Hold On."
“Who doesn’t love to play a savage?”
Jordan, the character at the centre of new comedy Little, is very, very mean. Over the phone from Los Angeles, and, after a minor commotion where a toilet seems to start overflowing in the background (“Wait, I think we’re having a flood?… Hold on.”, and then, not to me, “There could be a block-up or something?”), Regina Hall tells me she enjoyed playing Jordan a lot.
After all, who wouldn’t go a little mad with power? That’s more or less the premise of this latest take on the Big/Suddenly 30/17 Again trope: Jordan was bullied at school, and so, she decides that to never become a punching bag again, she has to become the puncher.
By her metric, it works. As an adult, she’s an incredibly successful tech startup mogul with fearful employees, a giant apartment, a lot of power and no friends, though that last part doesn’t bother her too much. Then, one day, she wakes up as her adorkable thirteen-year-old self, with Hall giving the reigns over to Black-ish‘s Marsai Martin.
Puns aside, these are big shoes to fill. Hall has been acting since the late ’90s, and her comedic chops are well-known thanks to her role as Brenda in the Scary Movie franchise. She tells me she’s still thrown lines in the street near-daily.
“People seem to love the “outta my face” line in the movie theatre,” she says, “And for some reason people love “shit on these walls, blind Freddy”. I don’t even know how I’ve got young kids quoting that to me. People like Brenda, they like her mind.”
More recently, Hall’s also worked recently on a series of high-profile and acclaimed roles, including ensemble comedy Girls Trip, and dramatic turns in Support The Girls and The Hate U Give, two films which tackle racism in America on both the macro and micro.
Which is where Little stands separately from the Big trope: Jordan, unlike 17 Again‘s Mike or Suddenly 30‘s Jenna, is black. Her cruelty is always tied to this context, as is her success. Tech is a notoriously white, male field, and for Jordan to get to the top, she’s had to harden herself. This fact underlines Little — Hall says she tried to approach playing Jordan with empathy and understand why she acts how she does.
“You want to make an audience still have to root for her,” she says. “But I think you just have to believe it at the core, [that] there’s something better and something kinder [in Jordan].”
“I think that’s what’s so great that Marsai was able to create the room for that transition during her time as a little girl so that we can understand why Jordan is the way she is. But creating the big her, you have to also understand why she needs the lesson of going little. It’s always challenging to make a character that is mean to people be likeable.”
Much of that like-ability comes from Martin’s time on-screen, where Jordan is forced to be vulnerable and be kinder to the only one who can help her get back to being an adult, her assistant April, played by Insecure lead Issa Rae.
Marsai Martin and Issa Rae in Little.
Martin is a mini-Jordan through-and-through — her mannerisms are uncanny, and there’s never a moment where you doubt she’s actually a full-grown woman in a child’s body, petulant now she has no power. Hall only has glowing words for Martin, who she describes as a “wonderful, bright young talent”, and says the two worked through playing Jordan together.
“It was fun,” she says. “We talked about a lot of the mannerisms that we would have, that would be the same — that she could do, and I could remember… so that people, when they saw little Jordan and big Jordan they’d feel intertwined.”
Then again, Martin is used to playing big. Both her and Hall are executive producers on Little, making Martin the youngest producer in Hollywood history. Hall reflects on how it’s a testament to her talent.
“I think it’s something pretty incredible for Marsai,” she says. “I hadn’t thought of it in terms of representation. I just think it’s wonderful that she had a voice and a vision and she pursued it and hopefully it will encourage other people to do the same, you know of all ages.”
We reflect a little on the differences between Martin’s career and her own, and the power that Martin seemingly has now that Hall didn’t necessarily have as a 20something in the ’90s. She talks about taking more or less any role, and her ability to now be more selective, saying, “When you’re first starting your career you just want to work, you want to gain experience, you want to gain exposure, and you just want to work.”
Martin has less of that worry: Black-ish is a testament to roles that simply weren’t once available, and hopefully, Hall says, a sign of things to come.
“I think audiences have evolved and the industry have to continue to put out things that people want to see,” she says. “Things have to evolve, that’s the whole point of life.”
Little is in Australian cinemas from Thursday 11 April.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.