

After doing more regional work, she eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she took on sporadic guest roles typical for young actresses on shows such as Melrose Place, ER, and Charmed. She was also selected among a group of about six thousand girls in a nationwide search to be in several episodes of the Santa Barbara soap opera television series. Hale's first big break in acting was in 1988 for the made-for-television movie A Father's Homecoming, which was an NBC movie of the week.

Hale with fellow Commander Shepard voice actor Mark Meer in 2011 She began working as an actress and continued doing voice-overs, commuting frequently between Birmingham and Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Birmingham–Southern College, where she found the program's style was broader than what she wanted to do, and realized that she was more interested in film acting than theater acting.

She stated, "I started doing voice-over to pay for life and a PA system and everything else, and ended up that just sort of took over, acting took over." While in high school, she did more voice-over work for commercials, and also worked as a production assistant at age 17. In 1982, she graduated from Alabama School of Fine Arts, where she was in the theater department and was interested in being in a rock band. When Hale was a teenager, she got a voice-over spot at a local radio station, being paid $35 just to talk. as a child and grew up in Alabama, mainly in Birmingham and Montgomery. Hale has a paternal half-sister, Carren Dujela, who works at the University of Victoria. She would later call for support to free her father, who had advanced cancer, after he was imprisoned for refusing to sign an injunction to stay away from Muskrat Falls in 2017. She later told Tom Bissell of The New Yorker that her biological father, James Learning, was an outdoorsman who was also a prominent NunatuKavut elder and environmental activist. Her mother was what she called "a wandering master's degree pursuer" and her stepfather was a microbiologist.
