“Run, Forrest! Run!” That one line locked Hanna Hall into movie history before she’d even hit double digits. She was just 10 when Forrest Gump filmed in the early 1990s, playing young Jenny opposite Tom Hanks in what would become one of the biggest films of 1994. Nearly 30 years later, the $55 million drama that grossed close to $680 million and won six Oscars still plays on repeat, still beats out The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction in the Best Picture race, and still gets quoted at family braais and film school lectures alike.
And yes, people still stop her in the street.
Hall once told House of Horrors that landing the role was “very random.” Her manager, Nina Axelrod, had left Los Angeles for Colorado and hosted an open casting call when Hall was seven. “My mother didn’t want to take me. It was a Sunday afternoon and she really didn’t want to go, so I went with some friends and Nina ended up liking me.” A few taped auditions later, Hollywood came calling.
You’d think a global hit at that age would lock in a lifelong plan. Not quite. “It wasn’t a career that I was necessarily interested in at the time, but it was definitely something that I always enjoyed doing,” she told Indie Outlook. She described Forrest Gump as “a very organic experience,” adding, “When you’re that age, you don’t question the fact that it’s not you.” As she got older, that separation between actor and character became harder to maintain.
Still, she kept working. She played Cecilia Lisbon in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in 1999, stepped into horror territory as Judith Myers in 2007’s Halloween remake, and later popped up on Criminal Minds, The Purge and Masters of Sex.
In 2005, she graduated from Vancouver Film School, sticking to the education plan she’d started as a child actor. Then she shifted gears. Behind the scenes, she began directing underground, crowdfunded theatre. Her bio puts it bluntly: “She is now committed to committing professional suicide by directing underground theater. It is her way of sweetly strangling the lame commercial world that robbed her of a childhood.”
She’s nearly 40 now. The blonde curls are gone, the Alabama accent long forgotten. But that voice yelling “Run, Forrest!” still echoes. And you’ll probably never watch that scene the same way again.
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