In 1997, the actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British woman to receive an Oscar nomination, for Mike Leigh’s suburban gut punch Secrets & Lies. She was heartbreaking in it, as a young Londoner searching for her birth mother (Brenda Blethyn). This week she became a Bafta nominee for the second time. For much of the Noughties, though, Jean-Baptiste solved missing person cases on US TV’s Without a Trace. She’d get a bit bored.
“It felt like a factory,” the 57-year-old remembers. “You had to get your dialogue right, hit your mark, talk a lot about blood spatter. Occasionally you’d get an acting note from a director, but it wasn’t encouraged.” The cop drama ran for seven years and 160 episodes. How many variations can an actor realistically do on lines like “Where’d they go?”
So in lieu of actual character development, Jean-Baptiste would make it up herself. She’d map out the personal life and after-school basketball schedule of her off-camera son, decide whether or not her off-camera husband would have made their off-camera dinner the night before. “I did an interrogation scene once where I just started writing down the character’s shopping list on a bit of paper,” she laughs. “Because she would be thinking about other things at work, wouldn’t she?” Jean-Baptiste did this, she says, to “stay honest”. And, well, because it’s the Mike Leigh way.
Leigh’s process has been honed over five decades in film, television and theatre, from the skin-crawling comedy of Abigail’s Party and the metropolitan misery of Naked to the gentle compassion of Happy-Go-Lucky. Typically, during extensive rehearsals for what is at first a mere suggestion of a new project, he and his actors pool ideas and observations until a plot and its inhabitants take shape. Entire universes are formed. Where characters went to school. How they got to school. Their parents. Their grandparents. What they adore or begrudge.
Now, nearly 30 years after Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste and Leigh have reunited for the brilliant Hard Truths. It is classic Mike Leigh: perceptive, painful, incredibly funny until it isn’t. And in the role of a pathological grump who’s sick of the world and the people in it, Jean-Baptiste gives the performance of the year, which has seen her nominated for a Best Actress Bafta. A second Oscar nod would only be fair.
I meet Jean-Baptiste in a publicity office in north London. Her handbag sits next to her chair, as if she’s primed to dash off. She’s not that fussed about interviews. “They’re tricky because I don’t talk a lot,” she says. “I’m a loner, a moocher and a potterer. I do like to chat, but with people I know.” She eyes me up, somewhat suspiciously. I tell her I get it – we’re about to have an artificial conversation for a brief period of time and then never see each other again. “Well I might see you again,” she says, “depending on what you write.” She throws a closed fist my way, then hoots with laughter. “I’m joking! I’m joking!”
This thing of, oh, she had to go to America. There was some truth to that, for sure, but it wasn’t the whole story
Ahh, to be around a Mike Leigh woman. The last time an interviewee threatened to deck me through lairy cackles, it was another of his most prolific female collaborators: Lesley Manville. There’s clearly something in the water. “It’s just the women he’s drawn to,” Jean-Baptiste thinks. “He loves women. I hate to use the term ‘strong women’, but we are. And just look at his films!”
Pansy, the complex curmudgeon of Hard Truths, is one of the pantheon of Mike Leigh characters in dire need of a hug but so exhausting to be around that you wouldn’t dare. Think Manville’s boozy depressive in Another Year, or the late Katrin Cartlidge as the vulnerable flatmate in Naked. Pansy, whether she’s in the supermarket checkout line or at the dentist’s office, can’t seem to avoid getting into arguments. She rants about society, her life, her ailments, her morose plumber husband, and her (as she sees it) feckless twentysomething son. At times she shuts down completely, often while around her younger sister Chantelle (a radiant Michele Austin), whose life is comparatively blissful: she has her own business, a serene flat, and two beautiful daughters making their way in the world.
Jean-Baptiste nails Pansy’s comic rage, but also her panic, lethargy, and deep, horrible sadness. The character was inspired by people she’s encountered over the years, some of whom she’s been friendly with, others who were strangers. “I don’t think you can live on this bloody planet without meeting somebody whose anger cuts right through you,” she says. She also found production difficult, with her family left behind in LA – she’s lived there since 2003, raising two daughters with her husband Evan, a former dancer – and having only Pansy for company. “It was hard to get those intrusive thoughts out of my head, her anxiety and that fear she has,” Jean-Baptiste says. “Had we shot this in Los Angeles – which would have never happened with somebody like Mike – but if we had, I’d have gone back home, been around my stuff, made dinner. But I was on my own, so she lingered a lot longer than I imagined.”
It makes sense. Pansy is as alive as a fictional character could ever really be, the nexus at the centre of a whole world Jean-Baptiste helped create. I more or less see this in practice. When I ask her off-handedly about Pansy’s doctor, who is mentioned only briefly in the film, she springs into an entire yarn about their relationship. “Oh, Dr Goldberg is a doctor she’s used for many, many years, who talks to her and listens to her and reassures her,” she says. “But she’s also frustrated with him because she’d love answers to why she’s got all these conditions and he hasn’t been able to provide her with them, and she also hasn’t taken some of the pills that he’s given her, and that’s created a bit of tension between them. She still loves Dr Goldberg, though.” It’s as if I’ve flicked a thespian on-switch.
Jean-Baptiste says she is similar to how she was in the early Nineties, when she graduated from Rada and, soon after, met Leigh during an audition for Naked (he’d hire her for a play, It’s a Great Big Shame!, a year later). “I had a lot of ambition,” she says. “My whole thing was always about wanting to work with people who could really expand me – physically, emotionally, on every level. I haven’t changed.” She remembers her agent at the time asking her to write down three names of people she wanted to work with. She chose Leigh and the theatre directors Phyllida Lloyd and Peter Brook. Leigh happened first, then Lloyd (in her production of Congreve’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Way of the World at the National Theatre). “Then I was in Brazil and I got a fax,” she says. “It was very dodgy handwriting, saying ‘I absolutely loved your work in Secrets & Lies and would love to offer you a play at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris’ – it was Peter Brook.” Her agent called her soon after, letting her know that she’d need to write up a new list.
She sounds as if she’s always been laser-focused, I tell her. “I guess,” she says, sounding unconvinced. “I don’t see myself like that at all. I always think I’m so chill, but my kids have told me that I’m laser-focused, too. So bloody hell, I must be then.”
In the wake of her Oscar nomination, Jean-Baptiste found success principally in America, working with filmmaker Noah Baumbach on the indie comedy Mr Jealousy (1997), Tony Scott on the Brad Pitt/Robert Redford thriller Spy Game (2001) and alongside Jennifer Lopez in the serial killer movie The Cell (2000). Her move overseas was complicated. Yes, she had experienced racism, telling The Guardian in 1997 that she had “burst into tears” when she’d discovered she hadn’t been invited – mere months after her historic Oscar nod – to a Cannes Film Festival event thrown by British Screen in which a small army of young, white acting talent were paraded in front of the cameras, among them Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Anna Friel and Rufus Sewell. But America was also just where young British actors went back then, and continue to go.
“People were following a narrative that had been created to explain me,” she says. “This thing of, oh, she had to go to America. There was some truth to that, for sure, but it wasn’t the whole story. I went where the work was, and I did what interested me.” Much like Cartlidge, who made Naked with Leigh and then began working primarily in the US, Jean-Baptiste was attracted to independent films rather than name-above-the-title movie stardom. So why not go to the source of them? “Remember Lili Taylor? Martha Plimpton? They were actresses who I loved, who worked constantly and made work that people enjoyed and, more importantly, that they enjoyed making. I wanted to do that, too. But then, I guess, [the industry] killed independent film.”
Budgets shrank, indie distributors folded. Without a Trace – lucrative, a safety net – came after, then roles in the RoboCop remake, Peter Rabbit, and a scene-stealing turn in Peter Strickland’s experimental horror film In Fabric, playing an unlucky singleton murdered by a cursed dress. Hard Truths, though, is Jean-Baptiste’s highest-profile work in years, earning her the kind of reviews – and awards – she hasn’t experienced since Secrets & Lies. Just this month, New York magazine celebrated her performance in a piece headlined: “For the Love of God, Give This Woman an Oscar Nomination.”
She finds it all flattering, but doesn’t take good reviews too seriously. “I respect what people write, but I just don’t read them,” she says. “Because if it hurts my feelings, I’m gonna have to find that person.” She throws up another fist, cackling. “My thing is, if you believe the good, you’re gonna have to believe the bad. You can’t go, ‘That was just a s***ty review by a person who doesn’t get it’, you know what I mean?”
She thinks of a quote she once read by the American installation artist Theaster Gates. “He said that it’s important to create art in the dark, and still create it even when the recognition isn’t there, or when the spotlight isn’t on you,” she says. “What has always been most important to me is that I’m going to make art no matter what. Whether that’s in a film, or in a TV show, or at my sewing machine, or in a dish that I’m cooking.”
Jean-Baptiste sits, content, handbag at the ready.
“When you can do that,” she adds, “then you’re an artist.”
‘Hard Truths’ is in cinemas from 31 January
