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On a hot afternoon in the back room of the National Theatre in London, Cherry Jones is eating cherries. “Forgive me, but you’re now going to hear an old woman munching some salmon on toast,” says the actor, moving on from her namesake fruit to a small tinfoil package that she unwraps like a present, observing its contents with delight. “Oh, and with just a little bit of butter!”
Jones is having lunch, on a break from rehearsals for Carrie Cracknell’s new production of The Grapes of Wrath. With two Tonys and three Emmys to her name, Jones, one would think, could do an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel in her sleep. She probably could – Jones is one of the great stage actors of her generation – but today, the 67-year-old bubbles with the anticipation of a first-time performer. “Never in my 40 years working...” she exclaims, in awe at the sheer size of the play, in which she is one of 27 actors. On the first day of rehearsals, they square-danced together: another first for Jones.
It’s hard to imagine there are many firsts left for the actor, who has spent more than 40 years moving across television, film and theatre. Her credits are diverse, split between scene-stealing parts in shows such as 24, Succession and The Handmaid’s Tale and ravishing performances on stage, including her Tony-winning turns as a spinster searching for love in The Heiress and a nun in Doubt. No doubt her performance as matriarch of matriarchs Ma Joad will join the list.
Jones can always tell whether someone recognises her from stage or screen. “If it’s television, they think they know me personally like I’m their dental hygienist, but they don’t know my name,” she says. “If someone knows me from the stage, they know my name and the play. You were in the same room as that person; it’s different.” That said, she adds, “I’m so tickled however and whenever it happens.”
“Tickled” is a good way of describing Jones, not least because it captures her Tennessean roots almost as well as her Southern accent. But it also speaks to the earnestness of her enthusiasm and her larky laugh – two qualities that make her seem, at 67, like an ingénue. Popping a cherry into her mouth, she spits the pit into her palm with some force. Everything Jones does, she does with relish.
Jones won her Tonys 10 years apart: first in 1995 and then in 2005. It seems she’s due for her third next year – is that something she still desires? “Tonys?” she laughs. “No. I didn’t even want it when I first got it; I was very depressed the next day.” She likes to be the underdog. “It’s more fun that way, and more safe. As soon as you get that official stamp of approval saying you’re a fine actor, then, well, s***, now people are invested, and I can’t let them down. I would have liked to have been that almost actor.”
Awards and adulation stood in the way of that – as did a string of high-profile TV parts that picked Jones up and transmitted her to the masses. Of those, the action caper 24 stands out. She won fans with her steely performance as President Allison “I don’t negotiate with terrorists” Taylor. Jones had, though, been reluctant to say yes to the part. “I had avoided doing things with a great deal of violence,” she says. “But my parents were ill... and well, theatre, that was eight shows a week with one day off. Then this show came up where I could get home two weeks a month for the last three years of their lives. It was a miracle.”
Asked whether there are any other roles for which she morally compromised herself, Jones smirks knowingly. “I shouldn’t get into it,” she demurs. Just when I think she’ll move on, she dives in: “But I will, because that’s who I am! I put my foot in my mouth all the time.” She says it less as an apology, more as a badge of honour. Later, when our conversation pivots to politics, she winks: “I’m trying to say enough that, when I get home, I’ll be arrested the minute I get off the plane.”
As it turns out, Jones dropped out of The Handmaid’s Tale for a similar reason to 24: the series, in which she played the mother of Elisabeth Moss’s character, became too violent. She understands why the showrunners were “kind of furious with me” for exiting early. “I did feel badly about it,” she says. “What I will say, knowing it was their final season coming up, I said to them, ‘Look, I know I did this to you all. You know my issues, but if you do need me, I will be there for you – because it was not fair of me to take away such a useful character.’”
Where does her aversion to violence come from? “I live in America,” she snaps back, raising her eyebrows as if to say “Enough said.”
Jones grew up in the town of Paris, Tennessee, the daughter of an English teacher and a florist, in a house her grandfather had built in the late 1940s. “My parents were very enlightened,” she says. “Although that didn’t keep my mother from having a hard time with me being gay. I think, often, the same-sex parent has more trouble with it – men have more trouble when their sons are gay, and vice versa, because a woman is primed to share their daughter with a man, but if a mother has to share her daughter with another woman, it’s different. Suddenly your daughter has a great intimacy with another woman in a way that you know you can’t understand.”
Did her mum come around in the end? “She did!” says Jones. “She became a sort of Underground Railroad for parents of gay children, and in a small town, that was rare.” Her father, the florist, had always been open to her sexuality. “He loved women,” recalls Jones fondly. “He was very comfortable with women, maybe in part because he lived in the South, where guys were hunters and football players, and Daddy was not that way. He liked my girlfriends, and my girlfriends liked him.”
Across her career, Jones has played three queer characters – most notably Leslie Mackinaw in the critically acclaimed series Transparent, based on writer Joey Soloway’s life. In it, she played a lightly fictionalised version of the poet Eileen Myles, who becomes involved with Gaby Hoffman’s character Ali. Things get steamy. Too steamy, Jones initially thought.
“Knowing how sexual the show is, I said to Joey: ‘Will there be... will there be...’” She can’t quite seem to get the words out, dissolving into laughter whenever she tries. “Listen, I don’t know how you’re going to be able to print this, but I said to Joey: ‘Will there be finger-f***ing and p***y-licking?’” It’s now my turn to dissolve into a fit of laughter.
Soloway said yes, and so Jones pulled out. “I can kiss all day long, but I’m a 57-year-old gay woman who is happily married, and there’s so few things actors get to keep for themselves and for their partners that no one else gets.” Finger-f***ing and p***y-licking are two of those things. You’ll have to find someone else, Jones told Soloway – who eventually caved and they came to a compromise.
The role of Leslie required Jones, already a “tomboy”, to “butch up” as she calls it. She wore androgynous costumes – plenty of waistcoats with a “fantastic” pair of boots that disappeared after one season – and bound her breasts, which she found liberating. “I’ve got no time for them!” she laughs. “I wouldn’t go quite so far [as to get a mastectomy], but if I could just be flat-chested, I would love that. Clothes hang so well! And no extra weight!”
These days, it is rare to see a woman show her age either on or off screen, but Jones has aged naturally. “As you can tell, I’ve always been outdoorsy” – she gestures to her face, dappled all over with freckles. “I’ve got wrinkles galore!” Did she ever feel pressure to do any cosmetic kind of – she cuts me off. “No,” she replies, laughing. “Never. I’ve never even dyed my hair.” She tugs at the tuft of ponytail at the nape of her neck. “It’s very thin, but it’s there – a little rat tail. If I had dyed my hair, I’m not sure I’d have as much!”
There’s many viable roads to winning, really, I do believe that – but Biden has to understand, he’s not it
The legacy of Transparent, although marred by sexual assault allegations made against Jeffrey Tambor, is the fact that it was a vital crash course into transgender identities. “It was trans 101!” says Jones with pride. “The first thing I know for certain is that trans men and women have to be the bravest people in the early part of the century in terms of who they are and how the world greets them. It’s an ongoing thing – and it will continue to be so, because it’s sort of the last taboo. Most people now are comfortable knowing their friend is gay, and trans is the last thing some people can’t quite figure out and imagine.”
She points to the many, many people who have come out as transgender in recent years. “It’s unbelievable, it’s fantastic,” she says. “I know at least five people whose children have transitioned in the past years, and you think, God, how many people through the ages had to suppress that!”
Jones has been out for as long as she has been in the public eye – and long before that. Before taking the stage at the 2005 Tony Awards, Jones beamed as she kissed her then girlfriend, the actor Sarah Paulson, on camera. Now, she is married to the Swiss director and actor Sophie Huber. “Neither of us wanted to get married! Ever!” says Jones. “But it came down to a green card thing.”
Happily, it turns out, marriage has been a far more fruitful institution than either of them had thought. “Our relationship so quickly flowed into a depth we could not have imagined,” Jones swoons. She likens it to the sound a stone makes when it hits the water: “Ker-plunk! That’s what it felt like; we went deeper.”
We meet on the day of the UK general election; the last time she was here was around the time of the Brexit vote. Jones, it seems, is a harbinger of change. “Today’s also the fourth of July in America,” she reminds me, lamenting the fact that there is not a lot to celebrate. “Our costume designer wished me a happy fourth this morning, and I started to cry,” she says. “When I left America a couple of months ago, I left a country where there were no kings. Now I’ll be returning to a country where every president has the right to do whatever they want to do.”
Who that president will be is up in the air – even more so given the conversations surrounding Joe Biden’s age and health. The debate has even reached Hollywood, with George Clooney urging him to step down, but Scarlett Johansson stating that it “seems crazy” not to support Biden at a time like this.
Jones is in the Clooney camp. “I absolutely think he must step down,” she says. They aren’t going to find the perfect candidate; she knows this. “But I think almost any young, honourable... reasonably honourable... somewhat honourable,” Jones laughs. “A fraction of an honourable person would beat Donald Trump. People are desperate to have a choice they can enthusiastically go to the poll for.”
She is, though, a fan of Biden – which somehow makes this worse. “That’s the tragedy of it,” she says. “There’s many viable roads to winning, really, I do believe that – but Biden has to understand, he’s not it.”
Besides Jones’s frequent bouts of laughter, the only other thing to interrupt her placid demeanour is the rapping of knuckles on the table when she speaks about corruption, misinformation – and white privilege. “White people, to this day, do not understand their privilege,” she says, solemnly shaking her head. “I have friends who don’t, and it’s shocking to me. I just think, do you never read? Pick up a history book!”
Mid-tirade, some smoked salmon gets caught in her mouth – like a second tongue, orange and large, it lolls out as she begins to crack up. Jones has a theory about her persevering enthusiasm, her kid-like excitement. “I’ve spent my life in a profession where all you do is dress up and play,” she says. “That really is the answer.”
‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is on at the National Theatre from 19 July to 14 September
