The Umbrella Academy’s Ken Hall has thrived during the pandemic. His toolkit can help us all.

I swear Toronto actor and comedian Ken Hall was built for this pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been brutal for individuals and businesses associated with the performing arts. Live theatre, comedy and concert venues remain largely shuttered. Film and television sets have lurched – carefully – back to life, with blockbuster The Batman serving as a high-profile reminder of just how difficult a sustained re-start of the industry will be. COVID-19 has placed livelihoods and careers on hold while laying waste to the health and well-being of individuals across the globe.

So imagine the surprise and delight of an afternoon conversation with Hall, an actor who is thriving by performing, teaching and counselling his way through this crazy year.

It certainly helps that he is warm and funny. In our Zoom conversation, he is an engaged conversationalist: smiling, laughing, thinking deeply and expounding energetically. The conversation is rich and playful. It also feels unexpectedly timely.

We start with his most current and well-known gig. For an actor to be visible during the past summer, they pretty much needed to appear on a streaming series. Hall plays two roles on the hit Netflix superpowered drama The Umbrella Academy, whose second season dropped on July 31.

At 4’7” tall and having suffered from scoliosis, he is by no means the prototypical actor. This made him a good candidate for his first role as Pogo, the wizened, super-smart chimpanzee surrogate father of the show’s super-powered Hargreeves siblings. Hall auditioned for the role of both the body and voice of Pogo. He felt “really good” coming out of the audition, but heard nothing for weeks, before his agent reached out to say that the show had selected a different voice. However, they wondered if Hall might want to do just the motion capture for Pogo’s body. “I’ve never done mocap stuff before,” notes Hall. He defaulted to the improviser’s “Yes, and” mantra. “So many things happen from just saying yes. And so I said yes!”

At a time when disappointment might have curtailed his effort, he applied himself with diligence to this role, in which his face and voice would never appear. His goal was to give the other actors something real to play off of, and it paid off: “It’s really lovely that they saw the work that I brought to” Pogo, and “about halfway through season one, my agent connected, and he said ‘the production wants to know if you want to do a smaller role – to play a person as part of the Commission.’” It was just a few lines in episode six of season one, but “Yes!” was again his enthusiastic response. Thus was born Hall’s second role as Herb, the diminutive and intimidated colleague and comic foil of Kate Walsh’s hyper-aggressive, scenery-chewing Handler.

“There’s so much of me that goes into Herb, and I love the awkwardness and the uncomfortableness of his relationship with the Handler,” smiles Hall. And once again, Hall poured himself into this tiny role. “Even though it was relatively small, at the same time, I felt I made an impact . . . and people really enjoyed it. So going into season two, the producers were like, ‘we’ve got some big things planned for Herb!’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, this is great. Let’s do this!’ And sure enough, Herb has a really wonderful arc” in season two.  His character, now the head of the Commission, directly influences the core plot, and is fleshed out in delightful and comic ways. There’s a lesson here about the power of always bringing your full presence and a positive attitude to your work: “It’s a lovely role to play . . . It’s so well written, and there’s so much of me that I can bring into the playfulness and the humor that’s written in the show.”

So Hall enjoyed a breakout moment mid-pandemic. And he earned it – not just on the set of The Umbrella Academy, but over the years leading up to it. In fact, his origin story begins when he first discovered improv 16 years ago. “Growing up, I felt I didn’t belong. I felt incredibly different, and I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want to get the looks. I didn’t want the comments that I got.” But the problem was that “I physically am different. Walking into the room, people know my height, my size. That my back is small.” Enter improv – and with it, a major shift in perspective. Engaging in improv felt like an enormous risk “because I wanted to basically hide from the world. I was very afraid. Very nervous. Very awkward. And very uncomfortable around people. So being the center of attention was a terrifying thing. And so was just connecting with people!”

Embracing this terror was like jumping on a bullet train. He left behind the “feeling that you don’t fit in. Feeling bullied. Feeling ostracized. Feeling that there’s no place for you.” Before Hall knew it, he “found an art form and a community that is accepting and better at looking at other qualities that you possess as well – which really allowed me to connect and realize that, wow, I’m actually a creative person! And I’m – actually – I’m funny!”  Perhaps most important of all, the experience felt really good. “It was scary, but there was the exhilaration that went along with it. Every week, it was like, ‘I’m stepping outside of my comfort zone and I’m laughing. And I’m having play – and play was something I didn’t have for a very long time in my life.”

Hall liked the experience, and he liked the people. It was fun to watch and fun to do. Saying yes to improv – to play – proved to be his first major step in becoming who he really is, instead of wishing he could be someone else.

This idea of play feels important in this deadly-serious pandemic. The idea of relaxing into a freer and truer state, of exploring with curiosity and a sense of fun – instead of trying to control and close off –  recurs in our conversation. Play has helped Hall with all of his acting roles. With the exception of the memorably off-putting doctor he played in the 2017 Netflix movie Polar, these roles tend to involve physical transformation: an exterior that makes him something unlike who he is  – whether it’s a role in Cirque de Soleil or playing Pogo the chimpanzee or alien Jeff the Grey in Earth People. The makeup and prosthetics – no different from a simple red clown nose – are “an opportunity to play pretend, and to play . . .. You have permission to be something different than you are!” 

But Hall has learned that the magic reallyhappens when play meets preparation. Whether it’s motion capture or full acting, “it’s the same preparation. It’s just what you need to do to show up to do a good job.”  He realized a few years back that he was entering auditions “a little undercooked”: “I didn’t really know my stuff very well because I never went to theater school. What I did was to improvise in the moment.” He was successful in winning certain roles, but not others: “I’ve lost opportunities because I relied too much on my improv.” After losing one role, Hall connected with acting coach Michael Gordin Shore, who showed him “how underprepared I’d been up until that point.”

Shore’s coaching was comprehensive. It began with putting sandbags on Hall’s feet to help him control his nervous energy. They prepared seriously – with the script – in order to change the audition experience to one where, instead of winging it, Hall was fully present. His eyes sparkle as he describes what auditions now feel like: “I’m able to access play much more easily. I have so many more – and can discover so many more – options and opportunities and moments that I simply wouldn’t have access to, if I wasn’t super-prepared and knowing the themes and knowing my lines inside and out.” And he first experienced this just “a week or two after the first time that I worked with Michael, when I got the audition for . . . a pilot called ‘The Group,’ which later became TBS’ ‘People of Earth’, which was my first series regular role playing alien Jeff the Grey, among a whole stack of comedy heavyweights.”

Play and preparation feel like two great skills for the pandemic. So does helping others, which Hall does in spades. He’s a teacher – a great one, in fact, having been named the 2019 Second City Training Centre Teacher of the Year. Ten years ago, he was asked by The Second City to teach a two-hour clinic. Just like his first experience with improv, the idea created fear: “What do I know? I don’t know anything!” Nonetheless, as he had with improv, he said yes. And through the process of teaching, he learned even more about himself: “I like being able to share what works for me . . . I really love helping adults find play” – there’s that word again – “because I know how scary it can be. They see the value – and the therapeutic nature even – of using imagination and laughing and connecting with other people.” In fact, as much as Hall loves performing, “I really do love this idea of helping people. It’s like I’m helping people improve their quality of life” or to “build new things into their day-to-day life.”

And Hall teaches much more than just improv. He teaches public speaking and clown (yes, clown!) at Second City. He’s also taught a comedian on camera course at Vanguard Theatre and a variety of improv courses for The Assembly. And during the pandemic, like so many instructors, he’s said an enthusiastic “Yes!” to figuring out how to teach his classes virtually: “To be honest, it’s been a wonderful opportunity to try something new. I’ve never taught this before, but I have a lot of experience being on set, and obviously working with the community.”

This summer also saw Hall teaching an online mindfulness class: “My last five years, I’ve done  a bunch of 10-day silent meditation retreats and brought mindfulness into my life. Serendipitously, I had an opportunity to teach” this summer when the instructor was unavailable. “I love that, over time, by giving myself these experiences, I am in a position where I can share that with other people.”

Improvisation. Preparation. Teaching. Mindfulness. It sounds more and more like a pandemic survival toolkit for humans seeking balance and purpose while everything around wobbles. But, as the K-Tel ads used to say, that’s not all! Believe it or not, Hall went to school to be a career counsellor. Up until five years ago, he did employment counselling – first full-time, then part-time. So . . . “at the start of June, I put out to my social network that I wanted to help people. I wanted to do something, so I offered free or donation-only employment counseling. I’ve now been working with about 40 plus people for a good two-and-a-half months, and it’s been just lovely.”

As with every new step, doubt and fear were his initial companions: “I was building on these skills that I haven’t used in five years, wondering ‘Can I even do this like this? Do I remember how to do career counseling? Would it even be helpful?” The answer – as always – was to screw up his courage and say Yes! His discovery? “Now is the best time to do so, in a pandemic when people are scared and uncertain about what direction to go in.” Hall has been working “with a lot of creative people that are used to performing on stage. And that just simply isn’t the case anymore. So a lot of them are thinking about career transitions, and I know where they’re at right now. Taking stock of what you value, what things are important for you, is important.”

Like his work in improvisation and teaching, “it’s helping people become more of who they want to be, and become more comfortable in their own skin. It hits upon more of the direct criteria of why I got into counseling”, though because Hall knows his limits, it lacks the heaviness and the “physically real-life problems such as mental health, racism and addiction. I can listen to you, but I don’t have those bigger answers. But I love finding something that can be a direct impact on someone, where they can improve their quality of life, their well-being, their relationship with themselves, and with other people. That’s how I do all my teaching. Even when I’m teaching improv, in my mind I’m actually teaching people to become better versions of themselves, if they so choose to.”

As we transition to fall, Hall expects to continue his multi-pronged approach to life. He has taken a late-summer vacation to disconnect and recharge for the next leg of the pandemic marathon. And as the performing arts industry slowly comes back online, he has been doing “a lot of auditions”.  He will also continue teaching. And counselling, “because I really feel like people are going to be needing more career counseling. As well, that service is going to be training for new things, as things are opening up.”

In the end, the story of Ken Hall feels like the right story to tell right now. As we sit poised between a carefully re-opened economy and the spectre of the pandemic’s second wave, he seems uniquely built to thrive in this uncertainty. Staring down the unknown, we can all learn from his mindfulness and commitment to play. From his willingness to say “Yes” and take a risk. And from his passionate desire to help others become all they can be.

I marvel at this pandemic utility belt, which makes him almost a superhero for these crazy times, then Hall reminds me, “It’s taken me a very long time to come to a place where I feel comfortable in my own skin. Where I can really be playful, and people value me and want me to be me.”

As we close, he reaches in to pull forth one final inspirational tool – his gratitude: “I’m aware of what it’s taken for me to be where I’m at. I know how hard it’s been to get here, so I’m very grateful that I’m here.”

So am I.