Brutal honesty: Felicity Jones for Marie Claire UK « Felicity Jones Daily — www.felicity-jones.us




 

She’s the stylish British star whose striking performance in upcoming film The Brutalist has just earned her a Golden Globe nomination. But Felicity Jones remains refreshingly under the radar. Here, she tells Hannah Marriott how defiance, quiet determination and a fierce inner drive have come to define her.

In a glass-walled office within the sleek Manhattan headquarters of indie film distribution company A24, Felicity Jones is telling me that her personal style, right about now, feels “a tiny bit Wednesday Addams”. Jones knows, more than most, how clothes project character — and she does embody an elegant goth vibe today, sporting black trousers, spiked patent Celine boots and a sheer black Toteme top with space-claiming shoulder pads.

Wednesday Addams is not a reference one might traditionally associate with the British actor, whose delicate heart-shaped face and upper-crust accent often projects a certain sweetness on film. The 41-year-old frequently plays women who must battle to show the world that they are stronger than they seem — from Stephen Hawking’s heroic wife Jane in 2015’s The Theory of Everything to small-statured warrior Jyn Erso in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2018’s On the Basis of Sex.

A lot has changed in Jones’ life in the past few years. She married director Charles Guard in 2018 – a fellow Brit she met in an elevator in Los Angeles. They have two children, aged 4 and 2 (“To have a baby in an apocalyptic moment is pretty scary”, she said in 2020). Meanwhile, the new movie she is promoting, The Brutalist, is being described by some reviewers as the best performance of her career.

Creatively, she says, The Brutalist feels like “a massive shift”. She partly credits parenting, which she has described as “wonderful anarchy”, for her change in mindset. “Having had a family of my own, I feel as though I could never have done this part before that. It’s given me so much confidence. Really, I think having a family, your time becomes so precious. You hope to only commit to things that feel worth it”.

The Brutalist has been nominated for seven Golden Globes, including a nod for Jones as best supporting actress, leading to inevitable Oscar buzz. That is “very cool! I couldn’t be happier”, she says. She promises that awards are not something she craves in everyday life, but “then everyone starts talking about them and you find you start thinking about them… [it’s] madness”, she laughs.

The film centres on a fictional architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody). Jones plays his intense, traumatised wife, Erzsébet. It was a challenging role. Her research included speaking to Rabbi Steven Katz and his wife (whose relatives survived the camps), and learning to speak both Hungarian and Hungarian-accented English. She can get a bit obsessive, she says, during preparation. “I know how involved a part is by how often I’m trundling out to the summer house in our garden – we call it a shoffice”, she laughs. But, “I like to do things as well as I can. If you’re going to do it you might as well do it properly”.

A whopping three hours and 35 minutes long, The Brutalist features a 15-minute interval, which is “quite magical [and] so novel — people haven’t done that for years”, Jones says. She sees it as a necessary reaction to “non-stop short-form content. I feel like audiences are just so fatigued. They’re desperate for something that’s going to really move them, so that we don’t get completely desensitised to humanity, which I think we can from that dopamine hit of looking at your phone — and who knows where that’s taking us”.

Private and thoughtful, Jones has an old-fashioned air. She loves reading, but only “paper books”. She grew up in a particularly quaint place: Bournville, the Birmingham suburb and model village built by the Cadbury family; the smell of chocolate often wafting across the playground from the nearby factory. She has always been “pop culture obsessed”, she says, which is partly why she got into acting. Her first role was in a film called The Treasure Seekers, at the age of 12. She appreciated the “entrepreneurial” benefits of “having a bit of pocket money, being able to buy Pulp’s album and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill“. Later she appeared in The Worst Witch and BBC Radio 4’s The Archers, though she balks at the suggestion she was a child star (‘I wasn’t, sort of, Judy Garland”). Acting was occasional when she was young; something “adventurous and fiercely independent” that she enjoyed because it enabled her to “go from Birmingham to London on the train on my own”. She has a rebellious streak — “I definitely see it in my children now. I’ll say: ‘Where do they get this determination from?’ Then my husband looks at me”.

Her Hollywood break came in 2011, when Jones starred in the tear-jerking indie romance Like Crazy. Before #MeToo, she has said that the gender imbalance on set was so profound that it felt “like walking onto a building site”. Young actresses “could get easily pigeonholed. There would often be descriptions relating to appearance rather than character in scripts, but I have noticed people are more conscious of that”.

She thinks the industry feels more balanced now and the rise in intimacy coordinators has led to “more sensitivity around love scenes; people are more careful, as they should be – there’s a lot of vulnerability in those scenes”. Of course, there is more work to do in ensuring female directors “have the funds to make films. But it’s been an extraordinary shift”, she adds.

Her own power is on the ascendent too: in 2019, she set up a production company with her brother Alexander Jones. Upcoming projects include a TV show about a woman who inherits a Formula 1 team and a series called Goth Girl, based on a series of children’s books. The company’s name, Piecrust Productions, is, in part, a fashion reference. “I am rather partial to a pie-crust collar — I wore one on my wedding day. [The style] was worn by Elizabeth I and it embodies strength and defiance. If there’s anything at the root of the company, it’s this concept of defiance”, she adds. This particular point seems important to her and she chooses her words carefully as she explains why: “I think there are always expectations about how one should be and it’s about pushing back on those”.

Clearly, Jones has towering ambitions. She says the women whose careers she admires most are Julianne Moore (“the edge she has in her work”), Amy Adams and Cate Blanchett — “women who are balancing family life with, at times, quite a demanding career”.

For Jones, being away from home has always been the most challenging part of her job. “It’s very much like being in the circus, [but] I’m a homebody”, she says. As a result, she used to have “all sorts of things” to counter homesickness and “would carry around candles and throws. Now I’m a bit more utilitarian — I don’t quite have the headspace for it”. Indeed, as a parent, Jones admits that she’s “quite appreciative of the sleep” travel affords her, with solo flights in particular taking on new meaning: “[They’re] a sheer pleasure. Ten hours on a flight is a luxury”, she laughs.

These days, Jones spends her limited downtime obsessing over interior design. “My mother has the same disease: obsessed with cushions and fabrics. I love stripes — we have a stripy sofa. It’s really relaxing because it has nothing to do with work”. She has Pinterest boards and “I like moving furniture around”, she says, before agreeing that this is likely a reaction to being away so much; “definitely a nesting instinct”.

Christmas this year will be spent in the UK with her family and traditions include opening one present on Christmas Eve, “which my children are very excited about”. Indeed, having kids — hers are currently “into running around and [watching] Paw Patrol” — has changed Christmas. “Sometimes they seem quite overwhelmed by the whole experience and I’m the one who is excited. But it’s lovely buying them presents — but not too many presents! We don’t want them to be spoiled. It is a difficult balance”.

Her hopes for 2025 include “more sleep. And a happy, harmonious work/life balance would be lovely”. Of course, she may have to get through a rather packed awards season first. The last time Jones was awards-nominated was in 2015, when she got an Oscars nod for The Theory of Everything and ran herself ragged. “Eddie [Redmayne] and I just turned up to the opening of an envelope”, she smiles.

If the Golden Globes do spawn an Oscar nomination, as is expected, she will handle it differently this time, like a seasoned pro. She’ll try to enjoy the red carpet, too, which is an aspect of the job she admits to “struggling” with in the past. “It’s [something] I’ve really had to navigate; I’m not a natural extrovert”. The secret, she thinks, “is finding yourself” within the process. She loves designers like Proenza Schouler, whose work she describes as “classic, but cool” — much like Jones herself, who seems politely done with others projecting their ideas on to her. Now, she is confident about what she wants to project: two parts elegance, one part goth girl.

Source : marieclaire.co.uk

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