Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Awards Buzz for ‘Hard Truths,’ Her Long-Awaited Reunion With Mike Leigh

That’s 28 years since Marianne Jean-Baptiste made her stunning international film debut in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies.

The young British actress was still getting her footing after drama school when a role in the 1996 comedic drama was offered to her, where she portrayed a Black middle-class professional named Hortense who was adopted and, after both her birth parent die, could choose to pursue her birth mother. Hortense finds Cynthia(Brenda Blethyn), a white, sexually bare smelling, working class woman with serious problems, an unstable family and a serious drinking problem. The main emotional stuff of the movie is combined in two characters, Blethyn’s Cynthia, who is presented as a creature full of nerves, emotionally exposed and fragile, and Jean-Baptiste, who plays the role of Hortense, that looks decent, collected, sometimes even pensive.

Secrets and Lies debuted in Cannes and, on its way to pick up five Oscar nominations — with Jean-Baptiste among the contenders for best actress. Her career was then advertised officially. In the nearly three decades that followed she would primarily appear on television, most memorably as a regular cast member of the CBS’s crime drama series Without A Trace (2002-2009), where she played Vivian Johnson, an undercover FBI agent, then as a Blindspot (2015-2016) where she portrayed Bethany Mayfair, an former talented visual artist who was recruited as an ‘assembler’ by the Liberty Summit Group

It would be almost twenty-seven years before the Jean-Baptiste was able to work with Leigh again on Hard Truths. She pulls off the character of Pansy rather well – a frustrated, angry woman who takes her frustrations at people in a rather comical way, on the streets of New York.

The film was released last month at the Toronto Film Festival, and the reviews that it received there included Quentin Tarantino stating the future Oscar winner Jean-Baptiste was sensational. The leading actress, was talking to The Hollywood Reporter before Hard Truth debuted in London Film Festival on Monday.

If this is not too ‘fanboy’, I’ve had to miss your face on the big screen again after the intervening years and then getting to see you in a Mike Leigh again. What has taken you two such a long time to team up again?

It did because after Secrets and Lies, well I moved to L.A. and it was just time for us both to call it off. We were struggling to know how we could do it and this time he asked I replied ‘yes’. I can’t really say why this time it worked out but it did.

Close characters and their story is achieved unusually, Mike Leigh amasses a script from the rehearsals and improvisation. As much as it was liberating to switch from the method of documentary found in Lewis’ earlier works and engage in field work after a decade of working in the machine of U.S. television production, it was certainly challenging to return to that method after being so distant from it.

The paper was pleasant to work through in that way once more. Terrifying and exciting. I mean, I’ve done it for so long the other way so I yearned to get my teeth into something collaborative on a level that’s just not possible within the conventional way of making films. The biggest benefice was that it was beautiful to be able to spend time to rehearse, to look for all these characters. And yeah, just being older, made it different. The first time when I collaborated with [Leigh] we were shooting it relatively rapidly after drama school so the spirit was of research and the feeling ‘let’s go and try new things’ was very present. [Hard Truths was] attempting to return to that, to return to that absolute trust in somebody in a process and knowing you’re going to be taken care of.

What movie pitch did Mike Leigh give you for this project?

Mike Leigh’s pitch is always Mike Leigh, but for actors who know about it and read about it a theme of actors you actually won’t get that experience. That is exactly what you are paying for here: three months, or six months of rehearsals which build and shape an individual from their first memory to the age they are in a specific piece. You’re buying that process. One could spend entire time doing all of them and then perhaps they are but placed in a scene or two, or worse, the character is developed to become the focus of the story.

Hausner: At some point during the script development process, you realizes your character Pansy, is the main character and you are in virtually all the scenes of the movie.

Well, I live in Los Angeles, so [Mike] had said to me: But, but, I’m not going to bring you over to London for how many months if your character is not going to be something quite solid. But I only was really clear of what the story was and how big my role was when I saw the full film for the first time. As for Mike’s system where, like, you don’t know what’s going on in any scene unless you are in that scene. Just before you start the filming process, in the final rehearsal process, which is on location, you get a kind of redacted document of your scenes: Cooking Pansy, Pansy shopping, Pansy washing the sofa. But that’s all you get. There’s no knowledge of what any of the other characters are doing.

What was that like for you, watching the film for the first time?

Looking back I’d like to say it was a lot easier but it was a bit traumatic, to be truthful. She’s doing very, sort of what we used to call triggering. I guess it just brought aback the memories of her painful story to some extent. I was watching it thinking: “Oh my God, somebody’s gonna hit her, they’re gonna hit her.” I knew that they don’t because I saw them doing it on set, I was there at the scene. But there was one feeling that I still had with her in an irrational form – fear.

The key for you was to grasp or open the character of Pansy, to what extent do you agreed with this statement?

The thing about the Mike Leigh process is you build the character from the day they were born up to the age they are going to portray. Inside of that, all of this is integrated: There are all these disappointments, there’s all these sort of misfortunes, there are all these emotions that she has, incidences that have occurred that make her who she is, and the fears that she has. Then she is put in with Michele Austin as a Chantelle, her sister, David Weber who plays Pansy’s husband Curtley & even her son [Tuwaine Barrett]. And all that comes to somebody, who is not happy! As far as you know from the film, the thing that begins to anger at her most is her visit to her mother’s grave and the feeling of lack of love, of not being a favorite one. It was just a constructed buildup of quite a few things.

After every scene, I asked them if any of the scenes were fun to do. The two most entertaining episodes are when she is screaming at other people on the street and also at the grocery store. Pansy is a master of using words; she loves using the harshest words possible on people.

It’s a combination, isn’t it? Because I enjoy jokes and Humor. And Pansy is funny, but we always know she isn’t out to make anybody chuckle. Do you know what I mean? It’s not coming from joy. Thus, I did like those moments up to a point. It was more the shock of: I am surprised to ask, “Oh my gosh, what is coming out of this brain [of mine],” one minute and the next to realize I am reduced to the role of a passive observer or dependent listener the next depending on the stimulus that I am responding to. Some of it was all rather hilarious. For instance in the car park scene that exchange was worth gold. For sure though, when you’re doing all these things, you’re already in character that you don’t necessarily get to savor these things. It’s only when you come out of character, that you go: Wow.

I suppose getting a chance to become a whistle-crazy Pansy would come in handy – like when people suddenly decide to drive into your lane aggressively.

Honestly, in life, I’ve avoided being a Pansy as much as possible though admittedly not without effort. Do you know what I mean? Well, I wouldn’t think that more than a lot could bring me there. As much as I’m able to, I usually become a little amused with that sort of interactions. I’m always like: “Alright they said, you are in such a hurry, you get on” you know?

What kind of reactions have the people given the character after they have watched the movie as you have been previewing it?

What’s been surprising is the amount of people who either have aunts, cousins, sisters, grandmothers, mothers or mothers-in-law where they say: “I’m related to that person. I know a Pansy.” This level of compassion we have ready displayed on her, has really been overwhelming. Which I think is great.

This is as much a portrait of Pansy as it is of a specific community and one that is often ignored, perhaps suppressed, in mainstream media, if it is represented at all, certainly not in such a way as this. How did Mike Leigh enter this community, since it is not his milieu that he portray?

You mean the Caribbeans that live here in the United States right?

Yes, the British Black Caribbean community.

In other words, just a lot of reading and much attention to the actors. Perhaps it is due to [Mike Leigh’s] method of approach that indeed one of the only approaches that could get that depth. It was Black Caribbean actors that kind of authored from own experience. You’ve got all these actors who know the culture and sat down and would be like: ‘No, on Sunday this would happen.’ We’d go here. They’d do that. This is what this place would look like told my inner critic but I reminded myself that it is my artistic freedom to do the things as I naturally desire. Mike was very receptive in telling the story and in reception. He’s into characters as real live persons. This wanting of getting things right was very important in the way he told this story – his attention to detail.

I am curious how often are you getting such offers – some kind of main part in such significant movie where you portray a man of your age dealing with some significant problems?

If it was conventional, I’d be practicing it on the regular, like clockwork. So let me answer your question, yes, I would like to do films like this for an eternity.

Can’t imagine this release and you in particular without people mentioning awards, and for this film in particular. What about that whole process?

Yes it would be lovely, oh yes it would. That would be lovely. You know the idea is just to get this film out there. Because films like this, these small little films, unless you have got a machine behind you, with billboards all over the place and lots of money to spend on promotion, it is easy for films like this to die a death. So if the awards talk brings attention to the movie than good for them. To win something would just be icing on the cake. People like to be given an award for something.

About which you said that such kind of films has the problem in the market place. As seen after Secrets and Lies, something has shifted: Jill is no longer afraid to fight for herself and others she cares about; Jill now knows how to be aggressive; and Jill can actually be aggressive.

At that time there was much more of an environment of companies that focused on independent films. You had the Shooting Gallery. You had New Line, Fine Line. There ‘s not anyone who hurled themselves headlong into independent films and hundreds of actual independent film companies that were all about doing movies. Now, I’m not so sure that there are as many, and they’re competing with giants with lots of money and the films get lost in the streamer-verse and so on. I believe to some extent, it has been transformed significantly.

But that’s completely unlike Pansy; your character in Secrets and Lies is very positive and happy-go-lucky about life. In this film, the positive view is represented by Pansy’s sister. In your own perspective, what do you make of those two characters, how they relate to each other and how they both live their lives in completely separate ways?

But maybe what was most appealing is that in every family and every relationship and every situation, you can have two people that go through the same thing but have two very different perspectives on it. It all comes from the script that they tell themselves, the narrative that they formed for themselves about whatever it was that happened. In my opinion that is part of core dynamics between Chantelle and Pansy. Pansy is just sort of wedded to this script that she wasn’t loved, that she didn’t get the same things as Chantelle did. And Chantelle is a bit like: “Well, you’ve always been eccentric aren’t you?” And there is a little truth to that you know what I am saying?

Chantelle, to be able to just live, and knowing that she is absolutely loved, allows her to be patient with people’s imperfection. That kind of molded her. Nyet, ee sestra i byla formirovannaya v protivopolozhnom napravlenii. She couldn’t have fun. In as much as her sister was equally affected, Anne didn’t internalise the leaving of her father as well as her sister did. It’s an interesting thing to witness and the film touches on that but it doesn’t go into much detail, which I think is great. What you get instead is little bits of detail that occasionally rise to the surface.

What I find very compelling is we are spying on these people, and we get glimpses of their lives and don’t understand what really happened and then we are leaving.

Yeah, I think that it’s important, because you know that woman that you bump into at the grocery store that’s raging, you don’t look at her and go: “Oh, she might be depressed” Do you get the point? All you can do is get what has been sent to you. I believe the big idea of this film is that, it stops you a little bit. So the next Pansy I felt like I ran into, oh maybe I got it wrong there could be a lot of things going on in that head of hers and she deserved a chance.