In the spring of 2023, Marianne Jean-Baptiste was on a flight from Los Angeles to London, feeling “petrified.”
The actress was off to spend the next five months working with the veteran British director Mike Leigh. As with all of Leigh’s projects, there was no script, and Jean-Baptiste didn’t know she would be playing the lead, let alone what the film would be about. It would also be the pair’s first time working together in almost 30 years.
The last time Jean-Baptiste and Leigh had made a film, “Secrets and Lies,” it earned them both nominations at the 1997 Oscars, with Jean-Baptiste becoming the first Black British actress to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Her supporting performance as Hortense, a coolheaded young woman meeting her live wire birth mother, launched Jean-Baptiste’s film career. In 2002, she left her hometown London for Los Angeles, and since then she has worked steadily in smaller onscreen roles, including a long stint as an FBI agent on the CBS prime-time drama “Without A Trace.”
But reuniting with Leigh would give Jean-Baptiste the chance to play another complex central character. “God, I hope it goes well,” she remembered thinking on the plane. It certainly seems to have done: once again, her collaboration with Leigh is getting Oscars buzz, and on Tuesday, it won Jean-Baptiste best actress at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
The film, “Hard Truths” which opens in limited theaters on Friday, centers on Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy, a cantankerous middle-aged woman who spits venom at unsuspecting shop assistants, bald babies, her 20-something son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and her dentist, among others. What ails Pansy? “She says people,” Jean-Baptiste said in a recent interview, cackling wickedly. But Pansy is hurting, and the actress finds the vulnerability beneath her character’s caustic exterior.
When Jean-Baptiste watched the finished film, she said she didn’t recognize herself as Pansy. “I look at it and go, ‘I don’t look like that! That’s not me.’” This transformation, she said, is something she has always striven to achieve, and she credited to Leigh’s immersive method of working.
Once she arrived in London, Jean-Baptiste and Leigh began work on Pansy. She and the other “Hard Truth” actors spent months meticulously mapping every detail of their characters’ psychology, from their earliest childhood memories to the canned foods in their cupboards. “There is a whole history that has been noted and worked out: every disappointment, every heartbreak, every fear, every desire,” Jean-Baptiste said.
The actors then improvised the scenarios that would become the film in a long rehearsal process ahead of the shoot. Attending the school of Mike Leigh, she said, has “solidified my way of working.”
In person, Jean-Baptiste, 57, appeared graceful and good-natured, in smart brogues and round, black-rimmed glasses. Her character’s physicality, however, was “coiled and ready to strike at any given time.” She said she began to understand Pansy through the character’s fear — of germs, of leaving the house, of interacting with other people — and worked outward.
During production, Jean-Baptiste gave up running because “I found I was too happy,” she said, and not exercising made her move in a different, more sluggish way. The film resists the urge to give Pansy a conventional redemptive arc, and “what’s interesting is an angry woman, being badly behaved,” Jean-Baptiste said. “How often do we see that without some kind of transformation?”
Jean-Baptiste said neither she nor Leigh were concerned with the film perpetuating the trope of the angry Black woman. “If it was a fact that Black women are angry, then the film would be problematic. But it’s a stereotype,” she said. “It’s not my stereotype,” she added.
Jean-Baptiste grew up in south east London in the 1970s. The youngest of four siblings, she lived in social housing, surrounded by “loads of kids playing out,” she said, but also “young artists and students” from the nearby art school. She attended drama classes at the local community center, and later studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was single minded about pursuing an acting career: “Once I decided to do it, there was nothing else.”
“She came in like a rocket,” said one of her classmates, the theater director Rufus Norris. Still, he recalled that even back then, her confidence felt grounded. “She doesn’t shout or proclaim about herself,” he said. “She doesn’t need to,” he added.
When Jean-Baptiste received her Oscar nomination in 1997, she started to get job offers in America. “It was like another world had opened up for me,” she said. She was cast in small roles in films by Noah Baumbach, Nancy Savoca, Tarsem Singh and Tony Scott. Previously, Jean-Baptiste’s mother was prone to asking when she was going to get “a proper job,” she said. “But as soon as I did the film with Robert Redford” — the 2001 espionage thriller “Spy Game” — “she stopped asking.”
Meatier screen roles, however, proved elusive. “There was a lot of pressure from the outside: expectations that come with being nominated for an Academy Award,” she said, adding, “I did hope that I would have gotten more substantial stuff to get my teeth into.”
Asked in an interview about this stretch, Leigh emphasized Jean-Baptiste’s discernment. “She’s far too focused a person and intelligent an actor to do anything and everything that comes up just because it’s a gig,” the director said briskly.
During this time, she continued working while raising her family, and took up painting. Discovering a craft away from other people’s expectations “was so freeing,” she said. She decided that on each new acting job, she would approach it similarly, “as if I’m learning.”
This approach was part of what made Leigh want to work with Jean-Baptiste again. “What she does is so clearly, indisputably pure,” he said. Leigh first cast the actress in a stage play, 1993’s “It’s A Great Big Shame!,” where she delivered “the kind of character acting you see her doing in ‘Hard Truths,’” he said. This time, he wanted to give her even more space to shine.
When Jean-Baptiste attended the Oscars in 1997, “I didn’t know what that meant, to be nominated,” she said, but “now I do.” She was aware of the awards chatter surrounding “Hard Truths,” she said, adding that while she was trying not to have high expectations, it was, of course, flattering. “Why would you pooh-pooh people saying, ‘We think you’re really good at your job?’” she asked.
Jean-Baptiste couldn’t have made a film like “Hard Truths” with a different director, she said. When the film wrapped, Jean-Baptiste presented Leigh with a gift, which she had been working on in her rental apartment after each day of shooting. “What I didn’t know is, the whole time, she was quietly painting a portrait of me,” Leigh said. “And actually, it’s rather good,” he added.
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