Sitting at an outdoor table near the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel in oversized sunglasses, sipping on English Breakfast Tea and nibbling on a Caesar salad with chicken, Marianne Jean-Baptiste couldn’t be any sweeter or friendlier. And frankly, that comes as a relief after seeing “Hard Truths,” the Mike Leigh film in which her character, Pansy, is the embodiment of anger and depression.
Pansy wakes up every morning with a gasp and a muffled scream, can’t have a civil conversation with her son or her husband and turns a trip to the grocery store into a vicious verbal assault on just about everyone who gets in her way. She is exhausting to watch, exhausting to play and exhausting to be — and a poolside lunch with Pansy would be no picnic.
“The first time I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, people are not going to want to be ranted at like this,’” she said with a grin. “I sat in the cast and crew screening cringing, with a friend of mine holding my hand. And I was like, ‘Someone’s gonna hit her.’”
She laughed. “And obviously, I knew that nobody does hit her, but I just felt like I was gonna hit this woman.”
But because “Hard Truths” is a Mike Leigh movie, Jean-Baptiste helped create the character from the ground up. Leigh’s singular process, which helped land the actress an Oscar nomination in 1995 for “Secrets & Lies,” has the cast members create their characters beginning with a list of five real people; Leigh helps them choose attributes of those people, and then they take weeks to invent a life story beginning with the character’s earliest memories.
Leigh himself steers the process to a certain degree: “You might decide that your character is going to take an exam, but he decides whether you pass it or not,” Jean-Baptiste said. “The disappointments and unfulfilled expectations start happening, and then you go, ‘OK, this is somebody that stuff doesn’t go quite right for.’”
That was certainly the case for Pansy, whose flowery name plays as a kind of cruel joke on a woman whose life is a simmering mixture of fear, rage and hurt. “When we were working together, I told him, ‘I don’t know if this is sustainable, man,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah. Be more aggressive, louder.’” Another laugh. “Oh, my God.”
Jean-Baptiste found herself cooking a lot when she left the set, embracing an activity that Pansy hates but Marianne loves. But she also found that she had to abandon another favorite pastime: “I like running, so when I was rehearsing, I would have a really good run and feel great. But when I did that, I just couldn’t get into Pansy. I thought, ‘What the hell?’ And then I realized it was the endorphins making me feel good. And I thought, Oh, God, I’m not gonna be able to run.”
It wasn’t until she saw the film with an audience in Toronto that Jean-Baptiste understood that people would laugh at Pansy’s excesses and would also feel compassion for the character. “I have a great sense of humor, but she doesn’t, so it was only when I saw it with that Canadian audience that I realized, Oh, it’s funny,” she said. “I couldn’t allow myself to see the humor because I felt so much compassion for her, and I knew the source of her pain.”
Despite the grueling nature of the work, Jean-Baptiste embraced her return to the Mike Leigh fold for the first time in almost 30 years. In the interim, she’d lived mostly in Los Angeles and worked largely in television, spending her time on projects that didn’t challenge her the way Leigh’s movies did.
“It was an adjustment to do traditional work because you’re not using everything, you know?” she said. “I remember I did a play straight after working on ‘Secrets & Lies,’ and I think I was half asleep for the first part of the rehearsal period.
“And then there were a few battles with costume people on TV when you’re playing an FBI agent or something, and they want to dress you in Fendi or Gucci. And I was like, ‘Surely she’d be shopping at Banana Republic or the Gap!’”
In other words, she was delighted to put up with the exhaustion that came with playing Pansy and the way that changed her daily life. “I just didn’t feel like going out and hanging out on the weekends, for fear that Pansy might emerge,” she said, laughing. “So I’d have very quiet lunches with my sister, and she’d say, ‘Are you all right?’”
A shrug. “But the work is so rewarding that you like all that stuff. And you totally have to trust Mike. He knows what he’s doing, man. The man can tell a story like no other.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
