Felicity Jones graced the pages of Perfect Magazine Issue 8 in March 2025, showcasing her timeless elegance and style.

In March 2025, Felicity Jones was featured in a stunning photoshoot for Perfect Magazine’s Issue 8. The British actress, known for her roles in The Theory of Everything and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, captivated readers with her timeless elegance and sophisticated style. The photoshoot, captured by a renowned photographer, highlighted Felicity’s versatility and grace, as she donned a series of chic and fashionable outfits. Each look exuded a sense of classic beauty, perfectly complementing Felicity’s natural charm. The feature also included an in-depth interview, where Felicity discussed her latest projects and shared insights into her career and personal life. Fans and fashion enthusiasts were thrilled to see Felicity gracing the pages of Perfect Magazine, making this issue a standout in the fashion world.

Felicity Jones was in a mall in her native England when she learned about her second Oscar nomination.

“I was going up the escalator”, she tells PEOPLE in this week’s 2025 Oscar Portfolio, on newsstands Friday. “I was just doing some last-minute shopping, and I got the call and spoke to my publicist and agents and was kind of cheering as I was going up the escalator”.

Fellow shoppers, she adds, were “probably looking around going, ‘What is she doing?'”

Jones, 41, is a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee this year for The Brutalist, in which she plays Hungarian-Jewish immigrant Erzsébet Tóth. The Brady Corbet–directed, Adrien Brody–starring epic earned 10 nominations, including Best Picture, from the Academy on Jan. 23.

“It’s just been a fantastic celebration of the film. I mean, we never quite expected the reception that we have had”, says Jones. “You don’t get this many opportunities. So I am trying to enjoy every minute of it”.

For the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story star, The Brutalist marks a return to the Oscar stage. Her first nomination, in 2015 for Best Actress, was for the Stephen and Jane Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything opposite Eddie Redmayne.

“I feel as though I’ve been through a lot personally, some big changes”, says Jones, noting that exactly a decade has passed between nominations.

Among those changes: becoming a mother to two kids with husband Charles Guard.

“It’s consistent juggling all the time”, says the actress of her work-life balance. “It really makes your time very precious, having a family, and so [working] becomes even more meaningful. And particularly in the films that I’ve been lucky enough to do, they’re projects that I have really loved reading the scripts, and have invested wholeheartedly into because when you work on something, it really has to count”.

At the 97th Academy Awards, to be held March 2 in Los Angeles, Jones is nominated alongside Monica Barbaro, Ariana Grande, Isabella Rossellini and Zoe Saldaña.

As far as her Oscar look goes, she says she has “a very good idea” of how to follow up her gray Alexander McQueen ball gown of 2015.

“I’m very excited about it”, she teases, noting she’s currently in the process of various fittings. “Fashion has been something that I’ve always been fascinated by and enjoyed. I’m looking forward to wearing the dress that I’ve picked”.

Conan O’Brien hosts the 2025 Oscars, which will air live from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.

Source : people.com

Every time Brady Corbet makes a movie, he’s thinking, “This could be the last one”. He doesn’t want it to be the last one, but when you’re filming, say, a 3½-hour drama about the artistic struggles of a fictional architect, you never know.

“There’s a high likelihood”, Corbet says, smiling.

The Brutalist, nominated for 10 Oscars including best picture, directing, the original screenplay Corbet wrote with his partner, Mona Fastvold, and for actors Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, will not be Corbet’s last movie. The film has become an event, a must-see for movie lovers. It’s both epic and intimate, a portrait of an immigrant architect, László Tóth, that examines the relationship between patron (Pearce) and artist (Brody), and considers the purpose and lasting value of art.

Much remains unspoken in The Brutalist, allowing us to use our imaginations to fill in the gaps.

“That’s what makes the film so grown-up”, Jones says. “The audience becomes active participants”.

But that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in exploring the movie’s themes and mysteries. Corbet, Brody, Jones and Pearce, calling in from various corners of the world, were more than happy to provide some answers.

Why does Van Buren, the wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s benefactor, use the line, “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating” — twice — in their first meetings?
Pearce: Let’s call it the ridiculousness of the man. I know it gets a bigger laugh the second time, but the first time he says it in the cafe, there was nothing intellectually stimulating about that conversation. Adrien was just sitting there, like a teenager being told off in a principal’s office.

Might Van Buren have feelings for László that go beyond the intellect?
Brody: There are a lot of emotions at stake. I don’t disagree, but it’s more complex than that.
Pearce: There are indicators of his attraction, some even within the dynamic of the three of them [László, his wife, Erzsébet, played by Jones, and Van Buren]. It is a bit of a love triangle, isn’t it? When she finally turns up, I’m going, “This person has come to take my man”.

Is that why Van Buren was so keen on getting her a job in New York almost immediately? “You’ll only be gone… five days a week”.
Pearce: Yes! “Keep away from my find!”
Jones: Erzsébet’s experiences with trauma have made her so aware of how terrible human beings can be. From the moment she meets Van Buren, she knows who he is and that he’s a problem.
Brody: László possesses qualities that Van Buren doesn’t. With all his power and ability, he doesn’t have the same creative spirit. There’s something when you encounter someone who is so uniquely creative. You appreciate it. It’s something to marvel at.
Pearce: When I press my face to the marble [at the quarry, when László takes Van Buren to look at marble for the center he’s building], Brady was quite specific about wanting me to look at [László]. That in itself is one of the little tells about my attraction to him — on all sorts of levels. There’s something deliberately coy and seductive that I bring him into my experience I’m having with this marble.
Brody: It’s a love- and hate-filled dynamic. There’s antagonistic superiority and disdain amid love and appreciation and adoration for his creative spirit. There’s a very convoluted thing going on.

The eight-minute conversation at the Christmas party between László and Van Buren, the one that’s been called the “skeleton key” to understanding the movie, has Van Buren telling a long, cruel story about stiffing his grandparents, ending it by saying, “That is how much I love my mother”.
Pearce: That’s such a spiderweb, isn’t it?

Just how much does Van Buren love his mother?
Pearce: Someone said to me the other day, “We get to see what a mummy’s boy he was”.
Corbet: I thought of the mother as Rebecca at Manderley, this specter that haunts the house. It seems to be a rather unhealthy obsession. And it feeds the concept for the whole project. He has this scene where he describes to László how he knows how to read the tea leaves and the fact that the two of them came together on the eve of his mother’s death, which is what leads him to do something that’s equally mad.
Pearce: There’s this performative façade of strength to Van Buren, but on some level, he feels powerless. And he feels that the only way to actually get over that is to present himself as powerful. And in that conversation with László, you see he recognizes László’s artistry, but that’s tangled up with his own insecurities about not possessing those qualities himself.
Corbet: He’s not satisfied just to own the artist’s work. He wants to possess the artist as well.

Which we see, quite literally, later in the movie when Van Buren rapes László. Some critics have found the scene rather abrupt and tonally jarring. Why did it seem necessary?
Pearce: The main question I had for Brady was the justification and the understanding of what happens.
Corbet: For me, you should see it coming from miles away. After two hours and 45 minutes, there’s a lot of threads there.
Brody: I think it’s intended to be a big surprise to the audience. But when I read it, I did see it coming.
Jones: That scene is so pivotal. It’s so necessary. What’s so striking about the film is that it is full of hope, but the hope comes from trauma. You can’t have one without the other.
Pearce: I think Brady brilliantly keeps open about how much this has happened before, whether [Van Buren] is a repressed homosexual. But what jumped out at me is when we see Joe Alwyn [playing Van Buren’s son, Harry] running up and down those stairs [after Erzsébet confronts him about the rape], going, “Father! Father!” I looked at that and went, “Ah. Wow. I reckon I have abused him”.
Corbet: The way Joe Alwyn responds to Felicity’s accusation, especially after we’ve seen him take Zsófia [László’s orphaned teenage niece] into the woods. You see this cycle of violence in the family.
Brody: It’s not as simple as a metaphor for being literally screwed over by your benefactor. It pertains to a deeper hatred. We shot it in multiple ways, in a much more graphic way as well. It speaks to a kind of oppressive brutality of dominance, what makes individuals so cruel and insensitive and behave so despicably at times.
Corbet: The film was made in the style of a 1950s melodrama. The way that I was thinking about it was: What would Nicholas Ray do if he could get away with it today in 2025? It’s not a neorealist picture. I was thinking about Powell and Pressburger. There’s a largess and there’s a directness in the films, allegory and visual allegory. There’s interplay between graceful moments and more direct, operatic moments. That’s what gives the film, and all my films, a very specific, very jagged architecture that’s unlike a lot of other films. To be honest, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But it is an intentional thing.

What happens to Van Buren when he disappears after Erzsébet confronts him?
Jones: Guy always says: “Therapy”.
Pearce: I’ve gone back and forth. The power of him just being reduced to nothing, being gone, nonexistent… that enabled me to go, “Great. I don’t have to think about this anymore”. Which is pretty lazy of me.
Corbet: My partner, Mona, says that once this character has been dismantled, he is just irrelevant. So it doesn’t matter if he went on a long walk, or if he hung himself, or if he drowned himself, or froze to death out in the forest.
Brody: What happens to Van Buren? I don’t think it’s very good. I think most people come to the same conclusion. The shame, it’s pretty great to be confronted with it. It’s a deeply disruptive moment. They can’t find him, so I interpret it as something terribly final.
Jones: He’s like a sprite. He disappears into thin air.
Pearce: I mean, the obvious thing is some sort of suicide, because this is gonna be just too big for him to bear. But I wouldn’t solidify that. The beauty is that he’s just gone.

Twenty-two years pass and then we see László being feted at the First Architecture Biennale. How do you imagine his life in those intervening decades?
Corbet: I wanted the character to look, visibly, like he’d recently had a stroke and that he’d aged a lot. I was looking at a lot of images of Chet Baker who, at like 57, looked like he was 110.
Brody: It’s interesting witnessing someone you’ve spent all this time with, seeing him much later in life, quite frail, reflecting on his own journey and what he has left behind and the toll it’s taken. For László, there’s a lot of loss. He’s constantly forced to endure. It’s not an easy thing for people to overcome hardship, let alone what he experienced in the concentration camps.
Corbet: There’s a suggestion that some of his projects were realized. There’s a reason we decided to go predominantly with drawings. Even the world’s greatest architects tend to not be particularly prolific. My favorite architect is Peter Zumthor, and he’s been working on the new LACMA for so many years.
Brody: There are opportunities of creative fulfillment, and that is such a deep part of any artistic person’s yearnings. So there is fulfillment in that immersion. But I think as far as a fulfilling personal life that’s brought a great deal of happiness and closure to everything? I don’t know if that has ever come.
Corbet: It is a film about legacy, absolutely. But what you’re left with at the end of the film is that László’s legacy is not necessarily the body of work he left behind. His legacy is family and his niece. Through his accomplishments, he has paved the way for her to have some kind of life she might not have had otherwise.

Did he ever build that bowling alley he talked about when he first met Van Buren?
Brody: [Laughs] I don’t think he does. A Brutalist bowling alley. The ball is actually a cube.

Is anyone going to build The Brutalist popcorn bucket that I saw mocked up?
Corbet: I think [Brutalist co-star] Alessandro Nivola sent that to us. Alessandro wins the internet every day.
Brody: I could help design it. It could be made of paper, like an origami cube. You make it and blow into it, and then it pops open into a sphere, and then you just fold it in and fill it with popcorn. If I wasn’t so busy with my day job, I’d get to it.

Source : latimes.com

Following a career-defining performance in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), the British actor talks to Kitty Grady about Dogme 95, channeling Isabelle Huppert and the power of creative partnerships.

Felicity Jones is in her car, ready to go. It is early on a Friday morning and, when the actor joins our Zoom call and I see her in the front seat of a stationary 4X4 on a street in London, I initially wonder if she is hiding from someone. “It’s an unusual place for an interview”, admits Jones. “But sometimes my car doubles as an office”. Coffee in hand, the actor is wearing a khaki parka and a grey jumper. I can’t decide whether her cascade of brown curls is natural or blow-dried. The car, Jones explains, is “a diary necessity”. A fitting for the Golden Globes is next on the day’s agenda. Jones, 41, received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as Erzsébet Tóth in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, and is predicted to receive the same at the Oscars—her second Academy nomination since Best Actress in 2015 for the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (2014).

The qualifier ‘supporting’ has a particular resonance for Erzsébet. In Corbet’s three-hour, 55-minute epic about architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his mission to establish himself in America, Jones plays his wife, who, for the first half of the film (a 15-minute intermission is in-built) is still stuck in Europe. While not physically present, we hear Erzsébet in voiceover, her letters to László creating a chronic atmosphere of longing. “She is swirling around the film before we see her in person, which is akin to how she’s existing in László’s imagination”, says Jones. “It puts you in his head. So that when she does arrive, you feel the length of time they have been apart”.

Erzsébet’s arrival embodies her in a very real way. She is accompanied by her orphaned, mute niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who pushes her aunt down a train platform in a wheelchair—osteoporosis from incarceration in concentration camps has left Erzsébet unable to walk. László and Erzsébet’s reunion is now deafening with feelings of separation. “They’re having to under- stand each other again, reconnect physically, emotionally”, says Jones. When I ask her which scenes were the most challenging to shoot, she replies: “All of them” four times. Yet while the emotional scenes all ran “like clockwork” the scene that was most technically difficult to shoot was one where Erzsébet and Zsófia are walking to catch a bus and are picked up by Van Buren, the man who has commissioned her husband to create a community centre in his name. A small moment, it also reveals the Erzsébet’s bind, “negotiating their need for his patronage versus her sense that he is a problematic person”.

As an actor, Jones has been known to get a bit ‘method’. For Chalet Girl (2011), she learned how to snowboard. For the play Luise Miller, in 2011 she lived with a Catholic family and attended mass regularly. For Like Crazy (2011), she made an audition tape mirroring that of her character’s. In The Aeronauts (2019), she did her own stunts, enduring a near fatal balloon crash on her first day of shooting. For The Brutalist, Jones lost weight, learned Hungarian, and did extensive research on the Holocaust. “It was a given I had to understand what this character has been through”, says Jones, who found a “wonderful guide” in a rabbi called Steven Katz who taught her about conversion. Yet she describes Erzsébet’s hairstyle—short, we can assume for a reason that is left powerfully unspoken—as a key way into her character: “Putting on a wig helps with a certain amount of transformation”.

Erzsébet is Jones as we haven’t really seen her before, marking a pivot for the actor into arthouse, auteur-driven cinema. “Coming out of the pandemic, I felt as though you really need to make things that are distinctive. Entertainment is crowded. So I was keen to do something with strong authorship”. A Michael Haneke fan, Jones had seen Corbet in the American version of Funny Games (2007). “There was something in the role of Erzsébet that reminded me of Isabelle Huppert’s work”, says Jones, of the Haneke star. When I ask Jones more about her own identity as a film viewer she describes the New Wave cinema that she became enamoured with while at University of Oxford, her love of Sofia Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and Wes Anderson, as well as a burgeoning interest in Robert Eggers. When I ask why this professional shift towards more artistically daring work is happening now, she cites Dogme 95, the avant-garde Danish film movement defined by its strict rules of production. “As my time gets more compressed with a young family, the more I feel driven and decisive in my work. Sometimes when the world is completely open, we get overwhelmed by indecision”.

Drive is a characteristic Jones shares with Erzsébet. Despite the latter’s palpable weariness, she possesses a residual life force, particularly through her charm and intellect. “The physical frailty, but also the emotional and spiritual force of Erzsébet is consistent”, says Jones. “She is someone who has an incredible will to live”.

In preparing for the role, Jones started thinking about her own Italian grandmother who, at the turn of the 20th century, emigrated from Tuscany to England. “I’ve started to think about that journey. How do you build strong foundations in a country you’re not from? She must have had incredible drive”, says Jones. “It’s often the people with the most desire, or the most resourceful people who leave, because they’re seeking adventure, intellectual and emotional stimulation”. Erzsébet—and László’s—pursuit of the American Dream doesn’t come good. A respected foreign correspondent in Hungary, Erzsébet is reduced to writing copy for women’s magazines. When Zsófia, her “surrogate daughter” decides she is leaving for Israel, she decides to follow (Erzsébet’s condition suggests she will never have children of her own). “They just want out. They feel defeated by the system. Can you survive in a structure that doesn’t want to see you triumph?” says Jones of their decision to leave. In one of The Brutalist‘s most climactic scenes, Erzsébet, just strong enough to walk again, turns up at the Van Buren house to confront the family’s patriarch on a transgression towards her husband that will go undescribed here. “Her moment of truthfulness, you see how much it floors him, but his son comes and drags her to the floor. Triumph is twinned with indignity”, says Jones.

The Brutalist debunks stereotypes of the solitary male artist, offering instead ideas around creative partnership, interdependency, and care. On screen we see the emotional shelter Erzsébet provides László, their pain and passion mingled in an erotic scene in which the architect administers his pain-addled wife with heroin. Corbet co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Mona Fastvold and I ask if Jones sees her own marriage (with the film director Charles Guard) as a creative partnership. “We both share a deep, deep love of film. Our household is full of discussions of cinema and actors and directing”. Jones also runs a production company with her brother. “It’s such a nourishing way to work”, says the actor, recalling how, as children, they would write comedy sketches together and show their parents. “It’s hard to escape what you grew up with”.

Two years passed between Jones first receiving the script for The Brutalist and shooting. The actor has noted how, during that time, basically nothing of the script changed, even as financial and production challenges made it seem unlikely it would be made at all. “It took sheer force of determination because people don’t want to take risks. And then it’s made, and the market starts responding to it”, says Jones, referencing the early hype around the film. As comparison, I reference the popularity of Brat, Charli XCX’s non-commercial album which hit the mainstream last summer (Jones is set to star in 100 Nights of Hero, an adaptation of a graphic novel, with the singer). “I think… in cases like this it’s good to trust artists”, Jones suggests. “What is a world without originality? I mean, how dull”. Before we have a chance to say goodbye, my 40-minute Zoom conversation runs out unexpectedly. But I’m not too concerned. I know Felicity Jones has somewhere to be.

Source : a-rabbitsfoot.com

“You don’t often get films with this level of ambition”, says Jones of the epic film, directed by Brady Corbet, which has emerged as an awards season front runner.

It’s one day after the The Brutalist picked up seven Golden Globe nominations — the second-most nominated project this year — but it’s business as usual for Felicity Jones. The actress, who stars in director Brady Corbet’s epic new film, is in New York for the latest stop on the press tour, which has been go-go-go since the movie debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September.

“It’s very cool — and so cool that so many of us got nominated. That’s what made it so special”, says Jones of her nomination for best supporting actress in the film. “These things are team endeavors. We have a group WhatsApp with all the actors and Brady, and everyone’s just so very happy and excited. Because you feel something’s really good, and it’s very nice when you realize other people think it’s good”.

The film was critically lauded out of Venice — described as a career-best for lead Adrien Brody — and is primed to be a major awards season contender. The next test will be how the film performs at the box office when it’s released in theaters on Friday.

“You want it all”, says Jones, asked which response metric she finds most rewarding. “That’s quite a magical intersection when you have the artistic and the commercial meeting. And quite a rare thing, but I think with this film, it feels like it’s really entertaining people as well as addressing some big themes”, she adds. “I just heard that a lot of the early screenings have sold out. There’s a real appetite”.

The movie will launch with special 70mm presentations in New York and Los Angeles that will highlight the original widescreen VistaVision format the film was shot on.

“Our worlds seemingly feel like they’re shrinking because we’re always looking at iPhones or smartphones; our world is about the size of a small screen. And so there feels like there’s this huge appetite to see something on a much bigger scale”, she says. “I think the magic of the cinema now is it’s a group activity. It’s something to get together with friends or family and go do together. Which is such a nice antidote to the isolationism of technology”.

The 41-year-old actress was drawn to the ambition of Corbet’s vision, which took him seven years to make. “We knew that it was special because of the quality of the script. It was so brilliantly written and so intelligent about human nature”, says Jones; Corbet cowrote the film with his wife wife Mona Fastvold. “It has these big, broad, ideological themes — but then at the same time it’s underpinned by some very human interaction and the subtlety of character”.

The Brutalist stars Brody as famed fictional Hungarian architect László Toth, who lands in Pennsylvania after surviving the Holocaust with very little to his name other than raw talent. The architect connects with a wealthy industrialist, who learns that Toth was a celebrated architect before the war and tasks him with building an ambitious Brutalist-style community center. Jones stars as Toth’s wife Erzsébet, who joins her husband in America midway through the film, when she first appears onscreen.

“It’s so rare that you get a film that is structurally representing what’s going on with the main protagonist. In the same way that László is waiting for her arrival, so too is the audience”, she says. “The stakes are pretty high for her arrival”.

The film’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime includes a 15-minute onscreen intermission, allowing for the audience to stretch their legs, take a bathroom break — or check their phones — midway through. “It’s so novel, that experience. It’s almost like you’re at the theater or seeing a play. And I think people are really enjoying the uniqueness of that”, says Jones, who used the intermission to change into a different look during the film’s Venice premiere.

Jones has been working with stylist Nicky Yates for her recent red carpet and press appearances. For the Venice premiere, she wore a light pink gown by Prada, and for the L.A. premiere earlier this month she wore a look by Proenza Schouler with grommet-accented fabric strips.

“We’ve been doing a very mild Brutalist theme in the outfits”, says Jones. “Looking for things that have strong lines and that are quite clean. So that’s been a fun aspect of it; it’s just so nice having these opportunities to get the film out there for as many people as possible. And obviously the red carpet is a fantastic way of doing that, and have a bit of fun with fashion whilst you’re doing it”.

Jones’ next major red carpet moment will be the Golden Globes on Jan. 5., with other major awards ceremonies due to announce their nominations throughout the month. In 2015, the British actress received her first suite of major acting nominations — including an Oscar and BAFTA nod — for her role as another wife, in the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. She went on to star in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and in 2018 took on the role of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in The Basis of Sex. Recent projects include George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky and The Aeronauts.

“The thing that I’m always looking for, particularly now, is something that’s distinctive, that knows what it is. And it doesn’t really matter to me what genre that is”, says Jones of what guides her choice of projects. “I’ve just done a Christmas ensemble comedy — but it absolutely knows what it is”, she adds. “That really is key to me; that it feels it’s gonna attract some attention in a world that’s full of noise”.

That film is Oh. What. Fun., which will be released during the next holiday season. Before that, and in the middle of awards season for The Brutalist, Jones will head to Park City for the Sundance premiere of Train Dreams with Joel Edgerton. “Interestingly, it’s got very similar themes [as The Brutalist]. A lot of it is about America and the American dream”, says Jones of the film, which is set at the start of the 20th century.

The next few months promise to be busy, but Jones is accustomed to the pace — and as the mother of two small children, she knows that there’s no such thing as a break.

“I really want to do things that feel worth one’s time in some way”, she says. “Time is really precious when you have little children. So I feel like I have to use it wisely”.

Source : wwd.com

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