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“We Discover What the Film Is When We Watch It”: Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Hard Truths
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is a study in contracts. At the center of the tale are two sisters, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle (Michele Austin), who are as dissimilar as possible. While Chantelle, a hairdresser and single mother of two adult daughters, has a cheerful outlook on life, Pansy is brash, gruff and downright mean toward everyone she encounters—from strangers in the grocery store and the local furniture shop to her detached husband Curtley (David Webber) and reclusive son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).
Over the course of 100 minutes, it’s easy to despise Pansy because of her shockingly short temper and outward cruelty toward others. But it’s through Jean-Baptiste’s deeply layered performance, which impressively lays bare Pansy’s interiority and vulnerabilities, that Leigh’s latest human drama sees the pathos in a character most of us would normally brush off if she were someone we experienced in real life.
The film marks a momentous reunion between the writer-director and Jean-Baptiste, whose first collaboration with Leigh—the 1996 Palme d’Or winner and best picture nominee Secrets & Lies—earned her a surprise Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Nearly two decades later, an Oscar nomination for Jean-Baptiste’s tour de force as Pansy might be less expected, as she’s recently scored best actress prizes at the British Independent Film Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (plus noms at the Critics Choice and Gotham Awards).
I spoke with Jean-Baptiste over Zoom to discuss Leigh’s idiosyncratic filmmaking process, shaking off Pansy at the end of each work day and how her reaction to her character has changed with each viewing of Hard Truths.
Filmmaker: I know a little bit about Mike Leigh’s process, but I also want to hear the experience in your own words. When did the project start for you? Did he have an idea in his mind of what the film would be, or was it really something you built up from the beginning?
Jean-Baptiste: You build it up from the beginning. Basically, Mike’s thing is: “I don’t know what the film’s about. I don’t know what you’ll be playing in it, but I know we’re gonna have a good time.” That’s all you know before you pack up to go to London for five months. It’s terrifying, but it’s exhilarating at the same time, because you know that you’re going to be working really hard, you’re going to really be collaborating in a way that you don’t normally get to on traditional projects. You can’t focus on the outcome because you don’t know what it is. No one knows what it is.
Filmmaker: So, where did Pansy come from?
Jean-Baptiste: Everybody starts the first day of rehearsal. We work in isolation with Mike for the initial period, but everyone starts with a list of people they know from life. You discuss all of the people on your list, then he starts to whittle it down to about three to five. You use them for the basis of the character that you’re going to build. Then he asks a number of questions. [During that process], I started to see some of the qualities that were being removed [from the character]. We were being left with this kind of sad, lost human being. So I thought to myself, “OK, this is what we’re making. This is what’s in the pot.”
Filmmaker: I wonder about how much faith you have to put into your director from the beginning. Because Pansy is a quite risky character to play.
Jean-Baptiste: You know, I had one of those come-to-the-headmaster’s-office conversations with Mike, and he’s going, “What’s going on, how are you?” And I was like, “It’s not sustainable. It’s just not sustainable.”
Filmmaker: One of my favorite questions to ask an actor is: How do you clock out at the end of a work day? Acting is a very strange job. When you say you told Mike Leigh that it wasn’t sustainable, is that what you mean? That she was hard to shake off at the end of the day?
Jean-Baptiste: When we were exploring the character, one of the things we discovered is that she talks a lot. She talks non-stop. And I don’t. That’s how I know I’m not playing myself—I’m playing another character. But to keep that rhetoric going, and going, and going and going—I mean, it’s loud and it’s aggressive. [Mike] went to me one day [and said], “Louder, more aggressive!”
Filmmaker: When I describe her as a risky character, I mean that she’s tough for an audience to sit with for nearly two hours. I can only imagine the months that you spent with her. Do you think about how others may perceive her when you’re playing her?
Jean-Baptiste: I totally blocked that out. The process is so consuming that you’re just thinking about where we are, you know? We don’t even know what the film’s about, much less any of the other scenes. As far as I knew, I could have been playing the sister of a hairdresser who just had a couple of scenes—scenes in which she goes off and is difficult, but the rest of the story could have been all about Chantelle’s world, right? You can’t even think about what the audience is going to think. The first time I saw it, I was like, “Geez, this woman.” I didn’t find it funny, I think, until the third time I saw it. I could sort of relax and enjoy the humor.
Filmmaker: Could you communicate with your castmates about their process, about what their experience with their characters were?
Jean-Baptiste: No, and you don’t want to. It’s so beneficial to not know and to just play each thing out quite naturally and organically. I was teasing Tuwaine Barrett, who plays [Pansy’s son] Moses—because us two, we love bombing each other, and we didn’t get to do it on screen. I was always asking him, “Where does Moses go on his walks?” Or, “Is he watching porn in his bedroom?” I was always teasing him. But at the end of the day, we discover what the film is when we watch it. And in a sense, you’ve all been through a war together.
Filmmaker: You’ve said you’ve seen the film multiple times now. Do you typically like watching your work?
Jean-Baptiste: Normally I don’t watch anything done unless I’m forced to go to the premiere. But with this one, the first two times I watched it, I was really anxious. I don’t know whether it was her. It was quite triggering, you know, and I was nervous for her, that somebody was going to hit her. Then I thought, “But they don’t, because you were there.”
Now, the third time I saw it was in Toronto with a real audience, and it was so emotional. I felt really sad watching it. But that’s what’s interesting when you work with Mike, because the same thing happened with Hortense [in Secrets & Lies]: When I’m watching it, I don’t see myself at all. It’s really weird. Even her body, I kind of go, “Wow, my body’s not like that. My face is not like that.”
Filmmaker: While you were in production, did you find yourself—outside of work—slipping into Pansy, reacting to how she views the world? Because there is something really refreshing about her, in how she refuses to bite her tongue.
Jean-Baptiste: The thing with Pans is that she doesn’t hold back, because she’s trying to attack you before you attack her. Her voice was quite loud once I warmed her up; I was just walking around with her chatting in my head and me going, “Shut up!” We rehearsed in Camden Town in this big rehearsal space, and there was a supermarket called Morrisons close by, and there were people out there collecting for charity. That’s where [her rant comes from]—I was just walking in there with her being like, “Why are they begging? They’re begging.” The crew members were saying to me while we were filming that they [began to feel] a bit like Pansy. Like, they’d had a couple of situations where they’d had to deal with people that were quite difficult, and they went all Pansy on them.
Filmmaker: Once the film is done, you’re going to screenings and premieres and seeing your castmates on the other side of the project, what do you talk about? Do you have a reunion to discuss the experience you had together, acting as different people?
Jean-Baptiste: We’ve had a few, but not with everybody at the same time. Michele Austin and I are very good friends. We’re always laughing about bits and pieces that took place, but we haven’t had the proper postmortem, which I was really looking forward to at the London Film Festival, but our schedules were so tight and we didn’t get a chance to do it. I still want to talk to Tuwaine Barrett and find out about Moses’s walks. Why did he have his backpack in Piccadilly Circus? Was he running away? What was he doing?
Filmmaker: I love that there are still mysteries, even for the people who made this movie.
Jean-Baptiste: It’s beautiful, isn’t it? You open the door and have a peep through for an hour and a half, and then Mike just shuts the door on you. I mean, I had somebody begging me yesterday to tell them what Pansy was going to do. Was she going to be alright? Was she going to go back to the same thing she’s been doing the last how many years? And I said: “That’s our gift to you. Depending on where you’re at in your life, that’s the answer to that question.”
